"I can't begin to tell you how happy we are," the shock jock says.
On Monday morning, Rover announced on his show that he was done with the Windy City and would soon be broadcasting from his home base in Cleveland.
Since the announcement, the radio station phones have been ringing nonstop from Clevelanders excited to have him back. But no one's more excited than Rover, he says.
In November, CBS executives asked Rover to help fill the shoes of Howard Stern, who was moving to Sirius Satellite Radio. The promotion also meant that Rover would be moving his show to Chicago.
From the beginning, it was a disaster.
Rover's frat-boy humor is tailor-made for the 18-35 rock-and-roll crowd, but in Chicago, Rover was on a station geared toward older audiences. He ranked a pitiful 33rd with the 18-34 morning radio audience.
Rover claims that the suits in Chicago told him to tone down his antics and reconfigure his show toward an older audience.
"That's not what we agreed to do when we came out here," Rover says. "I told my agent that we've gotta get out of here. These guys are driving me crazy."
A compromise was finally reached a few weeks ago. At the end of August, Rover will be back broadcasting live from the 92.3 K-Rock studio in Cleveland. He'll retain all the markets in which he was syndicated, except Chicago.
"I'm looking forward to partying with Cleveland," he says.
