Kevheads rejoice: Matthews plugs into Dahl’s playhouse

Kevin Matthews

Steve Dahl calls it a “game changing deal” for his four-month-old subscription podcast venture. Listeners will call it a marriage made in radio heaven.

Onetime Chicago radio superstar Kevin Matthews, who enjoyed a spectacular 18-year run on the air here, has just returned to become the first personality to join Dahl’s fledgling podcast network. Beginning Friday, Matthews will host his own weekly show — uncensored and commercial-free — available exclusively to subscribers of Dahl’s daily podcast.

“My vision is to provide unique content, my personality,” said Matthews, 55, who's been out of the market for six years. “What is so exciting about this adventure is no rules. A podcast may last 45 minutes, maybe two or three hours. Content is key. I know when to exit a program.”

Matthews said he’ll tape each show from his home studio in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and incorporate vintage audio he recently found from his early days in Chicago. Terms of his arrangement were not disclosed, but Matthews confirmed that Dahl is paying him.

“I have been watching Steve and this adventure from the sidelines, and wish Steve only the best,” he told me. “I love radio. I love entertaining such a loyal audience. It’s rewarding to meet younger, second generation Kevheads.”

Starting in 1987 at WLUP, Matthews proved himself an improvisational comedic genius with a cast of real and imaginary characters, including his addle-brained alter ego, Jim Shorts. His ability to channel a variety of personalities in his head was truly breathtaking. “I don’t know how I develop my characters,” he once said. “It’s just a surge of voices coming out.”

Since he left Chicago in 2005, Matthews had been hosting mornings at WLAV-FM, the Citadel Broadcasting classic rock station where he’d begun his career straight out of Grand Valley State University in 1978. For most of that time, he doubled as director of program development for the southwestern Michigan station cluster. But with the recent takeover of the company by Cumulus Media, Matthews found himself — like a lot of his Citadel colleagues — suddenly out of a job.

Dahl, 57, who’d worked with Matthews for years at both AM 1000 and the former WCKG, immediately reached out. “I said, ‘Bro, let’s get you into the world of podcasting because it’s perfect for you,’ ” Dahl recalled. “There’s nowhere for guys like Kevin to go. Or guys like me, really, where we can do what we do best anymore.” After an initial phone conversation from the golf course, Dahl drove up to Grand Rapids to finalize the deal last weekend.

Calling it “a nice bonus for our charter subscribers,” Dahl said Matthews’ show will be included in the $9.95 monthly fee listeners already pay for unlimited access to the daily DahlCast and its archives. (In a deal that expires tonight, new monthly subscribers get the first month free.) And if Dahl has his way, they’ll soon be hearing a lot more of Matthews.

“I’m hoping that after we post his first show and he sees the response, he’ll start thinking about making it a daily show,” Dahl said. “We are set up to do that technically. Not sure how it would affect pricing, but we’ll jump off that bridge when we come to it. This is the future of personality radio, and anybody who is delivering good content will sooner or later be charging for it. Podcast listeners don’t want to hear commercials. I think this is an exciting new addition to what we are doing, and believe it is a tipping point of sorts.”

For his part, Matthews seems open to the idea of a daily podcast, but prefers to take things a bit more slowly, having reassessed his life after he was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 2008. “It is great to work again with Steve . . . and we both have come a long way,” he said. “I have learned a great deal since returning to Michigan. I have stayed close with Chicago and the entire Midwest. I now take it a day at a time and enjoy each day as it comes.”

Back in the early ’90s when Matthews was in his 30s and a huge star at AM 1000, I asked him to explain his widespread appeal. “I’m not breaking the law,” he told me. “I’m not spitting in the FCC’s face. I’m not doing anything mean. I’m just having a tremendous amount of fun in a medium that’s [otherwise] so boring, it’s killing itself.”

Then I asked him to predict his future. He laughed. “Can I see myself doing this when I’m 60? Maybe. It would be pretty funny to hear some senile guy on the radio who thinks he’s funny, and he’s really just a pathetic old bastard.”