Rick Dees

Rigdon Osmond Dees III (born March 14, 1950), best known as Rick Dees, is an American radio personality, best known for his internationally syndicated radio show The Rick Dees Weekly Top 40 Countdown and for the 1976 satirical novelty song "Disco Duck". He is also known as the source of the audio in the 2002 "You Are An Idiot" trojan, which originated from a comedy sketch on his 1984 album Put It Where the Moon Don’t Shine. Dees is a People's Choice Award recipient, a Grammy-nominated performing artist, and Broadcast Hall of Fame inductee. He performed the title song for the film Meatballs. He co-founded the E. W. Scripps television network Fine Living, now the Cooking Channel, and has hosted Rick Dees in the Morning at KIIS-FM and KHHT in Los Angeles. Today he continues his own syndicated daily radio show, Daily Dees and the syndicated Rick Dees Weekly Top 40 Countdown. He is also the voice announcer on the network Rewind TV.

Dees was born Rigdon Osmond Dees III in Jacksonville, Florida, on March 14, 1950. He was raised in Greensboro, North Carolina. Dees graduated from Greensboro's Grimsley High School and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill with a bachelor's degree in motion pictures, TV, and radio.

Dees began his radio career at a Greensboro radio station called WGBG while still in high school. He worked for various radio stations throughout the southeastern United States, including WCAR (now known as WXYC) in Chapel Hill, North Carolina; WSGN in Birmingham, Alabama; and WKIX in Raleigh, North Carolina.

His introduction to the international entertainment arena began while working at WMPS AM 680 ("The Great 68") in Memphis, Tennessee, during the disco craze of the mid-to-late-1970s. He wrote and recorded "Disco Duck" in 1976; it sold more than six million copies. The song can be heard in Saturday Night Fever in a brief scene in which a group of older people were learning to "move their feet to the disco beat". While this platinum recording earned him a People's Choice Award for Favorite New Song, and the BMI Award for record sales in one year, Dees was expressly forbidden from playing the song on the air by station management (rival stations refused to play it for fear of promoting their competition). Dees was fired from WMPS when he mentioned that his song, "Disco Duck", was almost number 1, and his own radio station would not let him play it. The station manager said it was a conflict of interest. Dees did not perform the actual duck vocals on the song since he could not "talk like a duck". The duck vocals were recorded at Shoestring Productions in Memphis, Tennessee by Ken Pruitt, who moved away before the song became popular, and the vocals for the duck were done by Michael Chesney of Memphis for the concert tour. Chesney had done some comedic voices for Dees prior to Disco Duck. The tour went from Disney World to New York City, billed as Rick Dees and The Cast of Idiots. After a 45-day non-compete clause in his contract was satisfied, Dees was hired by RKO Radio to do the morning show at WHBQ AM 560 in Memphis.

The success of Dees at their Memphis radio station, combined with his TV appearances and hit music, motivated station owner RKO General to offer Rick the morning radio show in Los Angeles at KHJ (AM). Dees helped their ratings, but AM music radio was rapidly losing ground to FM. When KHJ switched to country music, Dees left KHJ, taking a morning position at KIIS-FM in July 1981. In a short time, he turned KIIS-FM into the #1 revenue-generating radio station in America, with an asset value approaching half a billion dollars.

Biography summary from English Wikipedia, photograph via Wikimedia Commons.