Photo by Enrico Hänel
As the original social media, Radio has always been about storytelling and not just on the air, but at conferences, in bars and of course, on social media. War stories of amazing promotions, crazy coworkers, epic battles and the artists who we’ve met.
I don’t think anyone has ever sat around the bar at The Conclave or the World Wide Radio Summit and bragged about the time that a label brought them the new Tom Cochran release and they spiked it in at night. Though…if you worked at KDWB in 1987, you would most certainly talk about the time that a kid returned to the Twin Cities after a semester studying abroad in Sweden and walked in and wanted to meet Brian Philips and give him a cassette of this band called “Roxette” and he HAD to listen to it. And he did and he spiked it in at night and now you know the story about how Roxette invaded America.
Nope. It’s the fun stuff. The stuff that drew us to Radio as opposed to a career in Law or Cosmetology. Me? I came for the Fun.
A couple of months ago someone on Facebook reminisced about doing a competitor dirty at an event. It was kind of funny. And someone else added their story. So I jumped in and started typing…and typing…and typing.
It ended up looking like G. Gordon Liddy’s rap sheet.
Most people thought it was funny. There were two people who said they would have fired me for any of these transgressions which told me that really, we would not have been a good fit.
And a couple of people posted that, “I choose to win by having a superior product.” Cool. You can’t win without a superior product. That’s kind of important.
No, I did these for three reasons:
- To get the competitor to take their eye off the ball. Mr. Philips did that with us in Minneapolis and got us going so sideways that we didn’t focus on what had made us #1, and they cleaned our clock.
- I generally only responded after being provoked. If your morning talent’s bodyguard (?) laid his hands on a station researcher at a gym, well, then I’m going to cancel the alcohol at your company Christmas party. If you (an act that is literally so disgusting that it still triggers my gag reflex) the weekend board opp, then I’m going to batlight the stage at your Low Dough Show from a pickup truck parked in an alley across the street.
- And to amuse myself. Radio is a hard, arduous job with insane hours and if you’re not having fun, then go find another career. It’s just not worth it. With United Broadcasting in San Francisco, possibly one of the most fucked up companies that ever existed, I would find myself sitting in the fog, on a sand dune at Ocean Beach, drinking and dreaming of maybe just swimming to Japan. So I needed something to make Radio Life worth Radio Living.
First, never ruin the listening or event experience for their listeners.
Second, listeners don’t care about Radio Wars.
Third, never, ever talk about the competition on the air. Hopefully, what you’re doing under the radar riles them up so much that they talk about you. That’s when you know that you’ve done has worked.
And fourth, there’s a fine line between being funny and being a dick. Never, ever, damage their property.
So…let’s take a walk down memory lane….
Someone scratched “KQ” with a rock into the station van, right down to the primer…but…we found out it was a weekend guy at another station. So with some people from the Research staff I went and poured buckets of water over their tires at midnight. In January. In Minneapolis. Before a Saturday of events they were scheduled to be at. Dynamite would not have moved those vehicles.
The morning guy across the street (with whom I’m now a friend) left his snazzy satin jock jacket in the DJ booth at a club called Waterworks. I took it, dabbed some white powder under my nose and went into several 7-11’s at 1 am appearing out-of-it, and buying Penthouses and jars of Vaseline. The jacket was returned to the club and then to him. Oh, and it had his name CLEARLY embroidered on it.
I fired the morning show at KMEL with a piece of letterhead stationary that I’d rescued from their garbage. I typed up a very very authentic looking memo from the PD to the GM regarding the search for the new morning show. I had an intern named Sunshine hand deliver a press release from the Leukemia Society and then ask to use the ladies room where she dropped the memo on the floor in one of the stalls. 72 hours later we started hearing rumblings from the labels about how they were planning to pop the Zoo.
Oh, and we also found a schedule for the shooting of their new TV spot at locations all over the Bay Area, ie: “6 am Lake Merritt, joggers, sun rising over Oakland Hills.” We got to every location first and bannered.
Cat Thomas and I dummied up a fake logo for a smooth jazz format and faxed it from a Kinkos to the studio fax of the competition at 10 pm on a Friday night. It came with a note to the GM, apologizing for it coming in after work hours and that “I’ll” call on Monday to discuss PMS colors. It laid there and was seen by all the weekend talent.
With their hotline number, I called the guy on the air on Saturday night and asked for the PD. I was told her wasn’t there. “Huh, no problem. (guy) was supposed to pick me up at the airport. No biggy. My name’s Skip, I’m the new morning guy. I guess I’ll meet you at the staff meeting on Monday!”
We once flyered the parking lot of the new night guy’s first club gig with copies of his arrest record from his last market. His next gig was flyered with topless photos of his wife with Ron Jeremy.
Okay. That might have been a Dick Move.
It’s always fun to call the new, from out-of-the-market talent, and get them to say stuff that they probably wouldn’t know. Like getting them to send a shout out to “East Stillwater High School.” (There is no East Still Water High. Or getting them to mispronounce communities like “WAY ZAH TUH.” In Las Vegas, we got the night guy across the street to send out shouts to non-existent high schools and “Sam Rothstein and the 3rd shift housekeeping team at the Tangiers Hotel.” In San Antonio, the listeners figured out what was going on and started calling in from their non-existent schools or their jobs at places that were out of business.
He was quickly banned from airing these calls unless he had someone in the studio with him.
The Promotion Director at KSFM was fired and I went out there for a few weeks to hold things together during their hunt for a new one. And it coincided with the start of the California State Fair, right down the street. And the station was scheduled to be there for 7 days. Cool! I love State Fairs. So I went and bannered the crap out of it.
My counterpart at Y-92 tore them all down and delivered them in a ball to the KSFM booth and chewed me out demand that I “follow the rules”.
Rules? I didn’t know there were rules.
On the way back to my hotel I stopped at an adult book store called Goldies and bought one of their sleazier mags and every night I answered one of their ads in the back: “50 videos for $2!”. Under his name and with the station address.
You don’t get 50 videos for $2 but you do get your info sold to other purveyors of fine adult contest who would send you mailers. With big flashy “Warning! Contains adult content! Do not open if under 18 or easily offended” messages on them. My understanding is that he got the stuff for years.
He should have been nice.
Conversely I was at Cox in Richmond and we went to work a Chris Brown show. Radio One was there. We set up next to them. They were nice. We chatted. Everything was cool. Just a bunch of harried radio people toiling in 1000 degree heat.
And then Clear Channel showed up late and yelled at us for not setting up where they thought we should be set up.
I found this…”disappointing.” So I walked to a grocery store and bought two pounds of the cheapest fish in the seafood section. I then returned and not in station gear, sprinkled it liberally in the bushes around their broadcast site. And in the garbage can. And tossed on the roof of their van. And even a little chunk in the grill of their SUV.
By show time you couldn’t walk past their set-up without getting nauseous.
Before things got out-of-control nasty in Tampa, we may have possibly injected deer urine into the rubber door window seal of their van, where it sat inside the door and slowly “evolved.” There was also the time that we stole the biggest event of the year from them. An event that they’d paid to be sponsors of.
Early in the day Orlando Davis and I had gone up to one of the upper decks of the parking garage that overlooked the park and stage where there was going to be a free concert to close out the day of parades and parties. He backed his SUV with the bat light and the generator up against the edge so all we had to do was lower the tailgate, pull the batlight forward, crank the generator, and boom, hit their stage with our logo. Lee Harvey would have been proud.
We then headed off, effed up their parade, got one of our street teamers who was maybe 4’ 10”, to hit the ground like a punter after one of their team ripped a sign out of her hands. Rolling on the pavement she wailed “The big man hit me!” which is when people started booing.
We returned to the parking deck, waited for the other DJ’s to introduce Amber and backlit them with a 25 x 50 foot logo. Their people started screaming and pointing ala Dealy Plaza and rushing towards the deck. We heard them pounding up the stairwell as we calmly flipped off the light, pulled it back in, closed up and drove out of the ramp.
Meanwhile…Beata and some people in WiLD shirts had walked into the crowd at the show and started bouncing beachballs back and forth. Smiling. Again their team jumped off the stage and in front 1000 people started screaming profanities at our people who seemingly were there for the music and never stopped smiling.
The evening ended poorly for their Production Director when he did the umpire chest bump…with a cop.
Our evening ended better than that. Orlando took everyone to a bar and put $1100 in drinks on his personal credit card. I called my employer in Hawaii and told him, “I’ll never be in the locker room after winning a Super Bowl…but I gotta tella ya, I bet it feels like this.”
Am I a dick? That’s arguable. But I am competitive. And I like to have fun. And everyone has their own version of Fun. If you can have fun while getting the competition to lose focus for a day and spend hours in meetings screaming at each other, that’s a bonus. Or if you can a couple of thousand people on a street corner booing a guy because it appeared that he’d injured an elfin young woman, even better.
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