DJs Take Their Show on the Road : Radio: KROQ-FM’s Kevin Ryder and Gene (Bean) Baxter will trek east on their ‘summer vacation.’ Destination: New York City.

KROQ-FM (106.7) morning deejays Kevin Ryder and Gene (Bean) Baxter have rather unorthodox summer travel plans. “We’ve got to see the world’s largest ball of twine,” Baxter said.

Ryder, 28, and Baxter, 29, started their “vacation” Monday in South Dakota and are heading east toward Friday’s destination: New York.

Their trek is to be filled with kitschy and obscure roadside stops, which in turn will be locations for remote broadcast stunts that will be aired on their 6-10 a.m. show this week.

The road show, costing the Burbank-based modern rock station $5,000 in airfare, car rentals and accommodations, will be carried live wherever the station can get satellite access, with the remainder broadcast through pre-recorded segments.

The stops include a South Dakota shrine to “The Flintstones,” known as Bedrock City; Tommy Bartlett’s Robot World and the World’s Largest Collection of Cathedral Organs in Wisconsin Dells, Wis.; a visit with the family of “Michael the Maintenance Man” Burton, the building janitor who does a daily weather rap on the show, and an attempted meeting with NBC late-night personality David Letterman.

The “Kevin and Bean” blend of obscure sight-seeing, outrageous stunts and obnoxious humor is similar to the comedy of the top-rated KLOS-FM (95.5) morning deejay team of Mark Thompson and Brian Phelps--something that many KROQ listeners, who were used to music-intensive mornings, distastefully pointed out when the duo premiered Jan. 2.

“(The station) had never done a show specifically designed to compete with the other stations in town,” Ryder said. “A lot of people thought KROQ was selling out by doing that.”

“We had to throw out a lot of good ideas for shows at first because people would confuse them with Mark and Brian,” Baxter added. “But we’ve developed our own style enough where we don’t have to worry too much anymore.”

In their eight months at KROQ, the deejays have broadcast from a number of outlandish locations, including underwater off Catalina Island’s Casino Point; while working as sanitation engineers during a “tribute to trash;” from Camp Pendleton, where they fired M-16s and trained with the Marine Corps; from Universal Studios, where they acted as tour guides; and from Las Vegas on St. Patrick’s Day, where they tried the “luck o’ the Irish” for several KROQ audience members.

The deejays also use the telephone to raise havoc. Over the last few months, this included a call to a Las Vegas bookie the day after Pete Rose was convicted to “see if we could get odds on whether he would serve all five months or not,” and Baxter’s repeated calls to the United States Supreme Court in an attempt to get Ryder nominated to the seat vacated by Justice William Brennan.

Ryder and Baxter met at KZZP-FM in Phoenix, where Baxter worked an afternoon show and Ryder worked a night show. The two kept in touch after Baxter became music director at San Francisco’s KXXX-FM in 1988.

“We thought it would be fun to do a morning show,” Baxter said, “never having done one.” Baxter persuaded the station’s program director to let the pair get together for a Sunday 3-7 a.m. shift, and the subsequent aircheck tape led them to KROQ program director Andy Schuon, who hired them shortly after.