AVILA BEACH, CALIF. — For generations of Southern Californians, he’s known as the brainchild behind the “Los Angeles Radio People” website, which kept an ongoing log of nearly every individual who worked at an AM or FM in the nation’s No. 2 market by size between 1957 and 1997. He launched KIQQ-FM 100.3 in Los Angeles in the 1970s.
Today, the name Don Barrett is one thousands of individuals in the Golden State know, thanks to those efforts. And, many are now mourning the passing of Barrett, who was 81 years of age.
According to radio and music industry blog RAMP, Barrett died of liver cancer; he was to have celebrated his 82nd birthday on Friday (9/15).
Barrett in August disclosed that he was suffering from cancer and undergoing treatment in nearby San Luis Obispo. It led him to cease operations of his LARadio.com website. Today, the website bears only two photos, of Barrett and his wife, Cheri.
While Barrett’s final days were in a cozy beach town between Pismo Beach and San Luis Obispo, his formative years were spent in Santa Monica, and on a surf board in Malibu. In March 1965, he took a radio job at KNEZ-AM 960 in Lompoc, Calif. In an April 2021 interview with Avila Beach Life, Barrett recalled pulling into the station’s parking lot at precisely 1pm and said to Cal Cannon, the owner and general manager of KNEZ, “I want to be a rock ‘n roll DJ.” Cal replied, “I just fired the program director an hour ago and have no one to go on the air at 3,” and he raised his arm and said, “I’m ready.”
His began a journey that took Barrett to Dallas, where he joined Top 40 radio pioneer Gordon McLendon as a behind-the-scenes assistant on regulatory affairs. He would later serve as Program Director of KABL/San Francisco, as a National PD for McClendon, as a sales executive for XTRA-AM & FM in Tijuana-San Diego, and eventually General Manager for WWWW (W4) and WDRQ in Detroit. He accomplished all of this before the age of 30.
Barrett then ended up back in Los Angeles, where a plan to shift listening from famed RKO Radio Top 40 “93 KHJ” to the FM dial led him to lead KIQQ, then-branded as “K100.” Listeners didn’t respond as management thought they would, and the station was sold.
For Barrett, this ushered in a career in marketing for Columbia Pictures, and for Universal Pictures, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and United Artists, too.
He was part of the marketing efforts on Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Out of Africa, E.T., Rocky movies, Thelma & Louise, Back to the Future, and James Bond films.
Avila Beach Life perhaps best-describes how Barrett ended up starting LARadio.com.
Following a series of management changes at MGM/UA, he entered his second phase of his radio love affair. After tracking down the original “seven swingin’ gentlemen” at KFWB/Color Radio Channel 98, he was encouraged to write a book. The Los Angeles Radio People was published in 1994, and it chronicled where the DJs came from, where and when they were on the air, and where and when they went. It was a big enough hit to spawn a larger, more complete book that not only updated the DJs but also added news and sportspeople, talk show hosts, program directors, and general managers. It ended up being 400 pages profiling over 3,000 personalities, and boasted 500 photos.
Barrett married and moved to the Central Coast of California in 2011.
