Tim Tuttle, morning co-host on 93Q Houston KKBQ's The Q Morning Zoo for 17 years, announced on Facebook he has left the Cox Media Group owned station.
UPDATE FEBRUARY 2024
Tuttle and Kline reunite on new podcast
UPDATE DECEMBER 2022
Andy “Riggs” Riggle joins 93Q Morning Show Houston
"I just got word that 93Q will not be renewing my contract and that today was my last show.
I want to thank each and everyone of you that has listened to me do morning radio over the past 26 years in the great cities of Nashville, Daytona Beach, Knoxville, Tallahassee, Birmingham and Houston.
If I made you laugh even one time, you have given me the opportunity to live a dream life all while providing food, clothing and shelter for me and my family. I can never repay you for that.
Thank you to all the fantastic coworkers that I’ve had the great pleasure of working with since 1996. We have had some moments that will never be duplicated and that I will never forget.
God bless each and every one of you and God bless your families."
Tuttle arrived with co-host Kevin Kline in April 2005 from "The X at 100.5" WRAX Birmingham, AL which was an alternative formatted station at the time. They also worked together at X101.5 WXSR Tallahassee, Florida.
“We were an experiment; I noticed a big change in radio when we switched over from rock to country,” Kline told InsideRadio in April 2021. “The accessibility of artists in country music is not anything I had ever experienced before. In rock, especially in active rock like what Tim and I were before we got here, it was always somewhat a badge of honor for artists to be anti-establishment and not need radio interviews. Here, we get a phone call from Garth Brooks every other week [and] Kenny Chesney, Tim McGraw, George Strait. We interviewed Taylor Swift even after she became really, really huge. That was something that I found very refreshing and very, very different from where we had been.”
In 2021, Kline retired and Katelyn Maida joined the 93Q morning show from New Country 96.3 KSCS's “Hawkeye in the Morning.”
In 2016, Tuttle and co-host Erica Rico announced they had been secretly married for years. In 2018, they announced they were no longer together, but continued working together.
"Here’s to an amazing 17 years of you being on air in Houston," Rico posted to Facebook "First Kev, now you, you will be missed by our listeners and all of us at 93Q. Hope you’ll do amazing thing."
It appears at this time, Tuttle is the only morning personality leaving the 93Q morning show.
Just yesterday, CMG announced a new format leader for its country stations. Former Houston cluster Operations Director Johnny Chiang, who previously held the country format leader role, left the company in January.
I should note that it appears KKBQ has dropped "The New 93Q" slogan. That was always a point of derision with readers when I posted about the Houston country station. The comments would be "why is 'new' in the title when the station has been around since the 1990s?" or something to that effect. I do not know the answer. I can guess was that it is a slogan radio stations use to appear fresh and on the cutting edge of the music format they play. Beyond that, I would argue it might have been to differentiate this country version of 93Q away from the top 40 format of the 1980s.
