Tony Pigg, a silky-voiced disc jockey who rode high during FM radio’s golden era — first supplying extended jams to the psychedelic underground on the seminal San Francisco radio station KSAN in the 1960s and later at the powerhouse rock station WPLJ in New York — died on April 26 at his home in Manhattan. He was 85.
His death was announced by his wife, Lucinda Scala Quinn.
Howard Stern recently said on his SiriusXM satellite radio show that he was enamored with Mr. Pigg’s work when he was growing up on Long Island.
“He was one of those guys I was really jealous of,” Mr. Stern said. “When I was growing up I was like, ‘I want to be on the radio, but I don’t have a voice like Tony Pigg.’”
Jim Kerr, another mainstay of the once-dominant WPLJ, said in a statement: “The warmth and wit of Tony Pigg entertained an entire generation of New York radio listeners. His talent was a major reason why in the 1970s, WPLJ became the most-listened-to FM station in America and is so fondly remembered today.”
Mr. Pigg’s deep, sonorous voice was also a staple of television. For three decades he was the announcer for the long-running New York-based live morning show originally co-hosted by Regis Philbin, which has evolved into “Live With Kelly and Mark,” now starring Kelly Ripa and Mark Consuelos.
Tony Pigg was born Richard Joseph Quinn on April 11, 1939, in Sacramento to Philomena (Cantisano) Quinn, a court stenographer, and Joseph Quinn, a corrections officer and milkman. He studied art under the painter Wayne Thiebaud at California State University, Sacramento, and served a stint in the Army before deciding to pursue a career in radio.
He dropped out of college to get his radio license and, after honing his craft at stations in Winslow, Ariz., and his hometown, landed at KSAN, a soundtrack of San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury scene. It was there that his original “nom de disc,” as he called it — Tony (after a favorite uncle) Bigg (because he was 6-foot-4) — morphed into “Tony Pigg” after a colleague garbled “Bigg” during a meeting.
“It was funny, so I kept it,” he said in a 1983 interview with The Daily Item of Port Chester N.Y. “Even though it was funny for about a week.”
The station was not a place where people got hung up on particulars. “We were a bunch of hippies — longhaired freaks,” he told The Daily News of New York in 1989.
Eschewing Top 40 playlists and breathless D.J. banter for deep album cuts and anti-establishment satire, KSAN served as a cradle for local bands like Jefferson Airplane, Santana and the Grateful Dead.
Mr. Pigg was particularly close to the Dead, whom he knew through his friend Owsley Stanley, who helped finance the band as well as warp their perceptions, thanks to the fabled LSD he produced.
In 1970, Mr. Pigg moved to New York to join WABC-FM, which soon became WPLJ. A staple of the metropolitan airwaves, it helped pioneer the album-oriented rock format, which focused on popular tracks from heavyweights like the Beatles, Led Zeppelin, the Rolling Stones and David Bowie — basically classic rock before it was “classic.”
He spent more than a decade at the station, which now has a Christian contemporary format. He later manned the microphones at the New York stations WXRK (known as K-Rock) and WNEW-FM.
In addition to his wife, he is survived by two children from a previous marriage, Mark and Lisa Quinn; three other sons, Calder, Miles and Luca Quinn; and a granddaughter.
Listeners over the years hailed Mr. Pigg for his unflappable on-air persona, a manner both warm and cool. In the words of The Daily News, he could “convincingly juggle ‘Mr. Wild, Crazy and Irreverent’ with ‘Mr. Committed Citizen.’”
He had plenty to say, but he measured out his on-air commentary in carefully calibrated doses.
“My own personal theory is just shut up and play the music,” he told The Daily Item. “If I can enhance the music by succinct phrases or inflections, that is really the ultimate craft in jockdom.”
