Ok, time to 'fess up. Now that the statute of limititions has been satisfied. What is the best dirty trick you and/or your staff ever pulled on a competitor?

A shaving cream pie attack on the host during a remote...........

lame, but fun. then we passed out stickers from a third station to the small crowd. And the first station naturally blamed the third one....

We came off clean.... Was more fun but less effective than setting up our station outside their remote.......

We cut their revenue in half by outperforming them. Oh, and another good one: in another market, I was part of a team that beat the competition so badly that they flipped smooth jazz.

Dirty tricks feel fun, but the best trick of all is a win, fair and square. It's even better when you beat a dirty-tricks station fair and square.

Man oh man do I love that.

I was told once of a PD who would pull a pretty smart stunt on a competing Top 40 station with a street front studio window. He would have an attractive "fan" put a sign on the outside of the window facing the jock with the words "You're the best" or something flattering like that. But on the other side it said "(Station name) sucks". The effect, of course, was the station had a sign that declared it's "suckyness" on it's front window.

I know The Playhouse once took donuts and rubbed them on their bare butts. They then had an intern take those same donuts over to Z100's morning show as a gift from a fan of the show.

Golly gee, Reason, you are so special.

I didn't mean to come off cocky, it's just that the dirty tricks PDs I've worked for were always guys who did that stuff instead of putting an effort into creating killer programming. It's the on air stuff that wins or loses.

Maybe the thread should be: the practical jokes you pulled on your own air staff while they were live on the air to see if they could keep it together.

Good idea Chris!...

Back in the old days at KYTE (Not Newport) Corky Coreson and I played a trick on Ron Leonard that still makes me laugh. Ok, here's the background info. The jocks would record their request line bits through the audition channel of the Gates board to an Ampex 440 located just outside the control room. Corky could do a dead-on Jerry Lewis impersonation, so we used the request line tape to get Ron's voice, and used that to put together a short conversation between Ron and Jerry Lewis. The conversation went something like this...

Ron: "KYTE, who's this?"
Corky: "This is Jerry Lewis."
Ron: "What d'ya wanna hear man?"
Corky: "I wanted to hear myself on the radio ya shmuck!"

So once the phoney conversation was produced, I waited for Ron to record a phone bit and cue it up for air. Then I patched the production room output to the 440's input. Then I snuck over to the 440 and put it in "source." As soon as Ron rolled the 440, I rolled the phoney conversation. The look on poor Ron's face was priceless!

I believe this story is true, but the names have been left out to protect the innocent. (Well, maybe most of the names!)

When I was working in Seattle at one of four top40's in the market at the time, big-time PD Steve Weed was the newcomer at at station called KHIT. (BTW, not a bad sounding station with Howard Hoffman, NY fame, on for awhile in AM drive.)

My station's PD happened to be dining at the same resturant as Steve. On the way out to the parking area, my PD noticed that Steve's car was still there. It had a Washington personalized license plate that read, "10 share".

OK, so this was the days of green and white Washington plates. My PD, for some reason, just happened to have some green sticker dots with him (the days of labeling carts with colored stickers), and proceeded to put a green colored dot between the 1 and 0 in "10 share", so it read 1.0 share. Genius!

Not sure how long Weed drove with his new personalized plate, and not sure how much this story has been embelished over the years, but I swear this was told to me as the god's honest truth. Hilarious.

BTW, not sure KHIT ever did much more than that 1.0 share!

Well my jokes were never that elaborate. The simple prat fall at the right time always worked. Or the day I put on rabbit ears and slowly peered over a window into the on air booth at KCNR FM where Glynn Shannon did all he could not to lose it. The PD let me know it was not all that funny. Although Glynn and I got a good laugh later.

Or when I used to give traffic updates to Georgene Rice on KPDQ knowing she never pre-read what I had written. In this one report I had the usual slowing stuff but added that on 84- eastbound my jock itch had gotten pretty bad. She stumbled through the segment and got some good cover from her co-host Lew Davies.

Gee Chris, that was quite a death wish you had wasn't it?

Well it took a couple of years to fire me so I guess it was one of many infractions along the way.

I hate to throw water on this but can you have 7 digits on a Washington plate?

Don't know the legal answer there, Sem.

But it could have been abbreviated I suppose.

Is timewarping quarter hours a dirty trick?

Yes, you can have 7 digits, but it's gotta be a vanity plate.

As long as we're on the subject, when did Oregon switch from letters first to numbers first? I'll bet not only that someone has the exact date and time but that it will be forthcoming in a few hours at most!

Once, in the "glory" days of KARadiO 1480, when the studios were still out in Orchards, Steve Ford was on the air, doing traffic reports. He sat at a desk, with a phone alligator-clipped into a mic mixer, trying to make it sound like he was out in traffic. I was right outside the window he was sitting in front of, painting the station's cheesy remote booth. During one of his reports, I stood right in front of him and started licking the window. Ford lost it, never got it back.

A couple of years after that, at KOHI, the news guy, Mark Raney, dropped his pants while I was on the air. We actually got calls wanting to know why I was laughing so hard.

Scott,

This is a good thread to revisit the KYTE legal I'D belch story & air check.

http://www.pdxradiospots.com/archives/2005_01_01_archive.html

Ah, what the heck. I'll chime in with a pretty dirty trick.

This one comes from a major market CHR and County station in the late 90s when Shania Twain had a few top 40 hits.

The CHR was a huge force in the market, and its PD once told me that, every now and then, he knew he could "swing his cume around like a bat." His term. I thought that was an odd thing to say, but we never got to finish the conversation. A few days later, I knew what he meant.

His morning show (the CHR) called the country station live on the air.

The country station was having a charity fundraiser and attaching Shania Twain to it. I think they called it "The Shania Twain Truck" and they wanted listeners to drop by with non-perishable food to fill it up for the needy. Shania was in town for a concert that night. Maybe she was going to drop by the event? I don't recall.

So, the CHR morning show called the country morning show live on the air, and for a brief period, both were on both stations.

CHR Guy: "Hey - we hear you're doing a charity event to fill a truck full of food for the needy."

Country Guy: "Yeah we are... the Shania Twain Truck."

CHR Guy: "Great! We want to help you out."

Country Guy: "You want to donate food...?"

CHR: "Well, you have a truck, and we have a million listeners. I say, let's put 'em together and fill that truck full of food for the needy. What do you say? Can we help you out?"

OK, the 'million' listeners remark was an exaggeration, but still... at that point, the country station lost its promotion. They couldn't exactly say no when help was offered for charity, and the CHR morning show easily had three times the audience the country show had. As soon as the country show said yes to the offer for 'help', the CHR guy said something like "OK guys, you heard the man. It's time to pitch in. Give them all the help you can and let's get as much food as we can for the needy."

Less than a minute later, three of the CHRs station vehicles filled with staff drove around the corner and pulled up to the country station's fundraiser, which was really just a truck with an intern. The CHR bannered the hell out of the place and broadcast live.

It instantly became the CHR's event, and there was nothing the country station could do.

Ugly. But I have to admit it worked.

A few years ago, radio station "dirty tricks" were so popular that an article was written about them (thinly disguised as "Dirty Tricks to Watch Out for" by Neill Borowski in a back issue of Radio Only. He outlines 12 different dirty radio station tricks and how to deal with them.(or how to execute them). Funny stuff. Good competitive guerilla warfare. In the last few years, radio has become stiff under the guise of being more "professional"...the suits have taken the fun, yes I said "fun" out of the biz and that is largely why radio stations are, in general, dull. When stations compete fiercly, everybody wins. It raises the bar, everybody has to be great, it promotes staff morale, and most importantly, gets listeners back to paying attention to what we are doing. Oh, one major drawback, it takes live jocks.

Anybody wanna hear a Barney Keep story from a million years ago? I don't know if this is true, but here's what I heard.

Ol' Barn used to broadcast live from the Portland Open. The course was under the runway of PDX, ya know. 707's were noisy. A couple of the station's production punks found an SFX record of a 707 taking off. Hijinks ensued.

Just as a golfer approached his ball to putt, the punks rolled the turntable with the SFX record on it. Just finding the cut and cueing the monster had taken them a couple of minutes on the cue channel in those comfy black bakelite earphones. The job was harder than it had to be because both of them were probably sucking on cigarettes hanging out of the corners of their mouths.

Ala Garrison Keillor: "Well sir, when that 707 commenced to take off -- in his headphones -- Ol Barn commenced talkin' louder and louder so as to commensurate for the loudness of that Boeing 707, a rippin' off the runway at PDX, don't cha know."

Course, there was one small problem. As Barney uttered the last phrase of his live broadcast of the Portland Open...AT THE TOP OF HIS LUNGS...he gazed out into the gallery and noticed the hundreds of dropped jaws staring back at him. Very quietly staring back at him.

I never heard what Barney said, or what he did to the two guys. Anybody know?

Back in the late 70's, take a couple thousand bumper stickers from the Yuba City station and cover the doors and windows of the Livermore station. I wasn't involved (no really!) but know the co-conspirators. Let's see if at least one of them fesses up.