Tony Pigg, the popular DJ and on-air personality at WPLJ-FM and two other New York rock radio stations for more than three decades, has died. He was 85.
Pigg died Friday of natural causes at his home in New York City, his wife of 37 years, Lucinda Scala Quinn, told The Hollywood Reporter.
Pigg also served as the staff announcer of the New York-based live morning show co-hosted by Regis Philbin and, after his retirement, Kelly Ripa. Pigg held that job for 30-plus years through 2019.
Richard Quinn was born in Sacramento on April 11, 1939. He studied art with painter Wayne Thiebaud at Sacramento State and served with the U.S. Army before beginning his radio career at an AM station in Winslow, Arizona, and then at KROY-AM in his hometown.
He called himself Tony Bigg, named for a favorite uncle and the fact that he was 6-foot-4. But when someone mispronounced “Bigg” as “Pig,” he switched to a different spelling of that after arriving at San Francisco’s KSAN-FM circa 1966.
“We were a bunch of hippies — long-haired freaks — who started the radio station KSAN and a free-form, underground progressive sound, which eventually evolved into what you hear today,” he told the New York Daily News in 1989.
Pigg came to prominence during the Haight-Ashbury scene, and as KSAN music director and a good friend of the Grateful Dead’s first manager, Owsley “Bear” Stanley, he is thought to have been the first jock to put that band on the FM airwaves.
Pigg joined WABC-FM in New York in 1970, with the station becoming WPLJ with a format change in 1971, and he worked there for more than a decade, followed by stints at WXRK-FM (known as K-Rock) and WNEW-FM. (Howard Stern, Pigg’s onetime colleague at K-Rock, recently said on his SiriusXM show that Pigg helped inspire his radio career.)
“The warmth and wit of Tony Pigg entertained an entire generation of New York radio listeners,” Jim Kerr, another famed DJ at WPLJ, said in a statement. “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. Tony loved his audience. At the end of each show he delivered his signature line, ‘Nothing but thanks’ and he meant it.”
Philbin cold-called Pigg when launching his Live! morning show in New York after hearing him on the radio, his wife said. He also voiced commercials during his career.
Survivors also include his sons, Mark, Calder, Miles and Luca; daughter Lisa; granddaughter Angela; and siblings David and Susan.
