Some DJs Would Rather Churn Up Mayhem Than Spin Discs

When Willie B. is on the air, you don’t dare touch that dial.

You might miss a chicken being dropped out a Denver radio studio’s window (more on that later). Or you might miss hearing Willie B. and his cronies on “The Locker Room” morning show discussing personal plans to take their trucks up near Boulder and let the mud fly.

They called it Mudfest, but it was more of a mud farce.

Lured by what they heard on the radio, 200 trucks, Jeeps and even National Guard Humvees churned up 25 acres of fragile wetlands in September, making slop of the home of the rare boreal toad and 15 uncommon bird species.

Two DJs were fined $50 each for failure to get a permit; there’s talk of criminal charges.

“Had I known that it was going to destroy a sensitive area or it was private property or anything like that, believe me, we wouldn’t have gone,” said Stephen Meade, known as Willie B. on KBPI-FM. “That’s the last thing we wanted to do, man.”

Well, man, the last thing anyone wants to happen seems likely to happen when a disc jockey is involved. The litany of DJ-driven disasters includes hoaxes, stunts gone horribly awry and on-air musings that provoke full-fledged catastrophes.

DJs used to spin records. Now they spin out of control.

Not all of them, of course. Just the ones who follow in the footsteps of such shock jocks as Howard Stern. (One of his disciples called CNN during its coverage of the 1994 Northridge earthquake and got on the air by posing as a spokesperson for the San Fernando Fire Department. Stay indoors, the “official” warned--before providing the toll-free number to order a Howard Stern video. “Not funny,” said CNN anchor Bernard Shaw.)

Or Matthew “Mancow” Muller. In 1993, the Mancow--then at KSOL in San Francisco, now a nationally broadcast DJ based in Chicago--used vans to block the Bay Bridge to morning commuters while a station employee had his hair cut at mid-span.

The idea was to spoof the haircut President Clinton got that spring as his plane sat on the tarmac at Los Angeles International Airport. The result was traffic paralysis; the station had to pay a $1.5-million settlement of a lawsuit filed by drivers, one-third of which provided commuters with a toll-free day on the bridge.

“You have to be stupid these days” to get attention, said Bruce Morrow, the legendary “Cousin Brucie” who gained fame as one of the 1960s’ WABC “Good Guys” in New York. “You have to be completely outrageous.”

Which brings us to A.M. Pantoja, who announced on the air in 1994 that his station--KYNG in Fort Worth, Texas--had hidden $100 inside books in the Fort Worth public library.

The idea was to encourage reading. Instead, it encouraged mayhem; 800 people marauded through the stacks, tearing out pages and leaving 3,000 books on the floor.

“It was never my intent to destroy a library,” Pantoja said.

They never intend for things to end badly. But somehow they often do.

Last year, Naughty Boy Dave, a DJ at KZZP-FM in Mesa, Ariz., promised listeners backstage passes to a Goo Goo Dolls rock concert if they came out to skinny-dip in Tempe Town Lake.

Seven did. Problem is, swimming is prohibited at the lake. All were charged with trespassing.

“What he did is say, ‘Let’s go down to the lake, and let’s trespass,’ ” said Sgt. Dave Lind. “Now, he may not have known that, but what he asked them to do is a crime.”

Dave is joined in the annals of DJ miscreants by Paul Thomas Butterfield--known as Tom Steele on WFBC-FM in Greenville, S.C.--who drove a company van along Interstate 385 in 1997.

He was blindfolded at the time.

Butterfield testified he had heard that Ray Charles had driven a car, and he wanted to try it as a kind of tribute to the blind singer. Convicted of reckless driving and sentenced to 240 hours of community service, Butterfield said he felt it was all a little harsh.

Then there were Joseph “Big Joe” Lopez and Graham Herbert--members of “The Doghouse,” the morning crew at KYLD in San Francisco. They were arrested in August when, dressed in orange jumpsuits with “County Jail” printed on their backs, they went door to door in suburban Millbrae and asked residents to cut off their handcuffs.

Frightened neighbors--one 89-year-old woman was said to be shaking visibly--called police, who arrived with sirens screaming and ordered the DJs to the ground at gunpoint.

“We didn’t expect . . . such a major disturbance,” said station manager Joe Cunningham.

Not all stunts end in SWAT team intervention. In 1998, on KSLZ-FM in St. Louis, Rick Stevens announced that old $20 and $50 bills would be worthless after midnight and had to be exchanged for new ones. One bank alone got 15 calls from concerned depositors; the Federal Reserve was not amused.

In June, radio stations perpetrated not one but two Britney Spears hoaxes.

When Bill Fox of WBHT-FM in Wilkes-Barre, Pa., announced that the teen pop queen would make an appearance, 400 kids and parents camped out in the station parking lot. A limo pulled up, and a tuxedo-clad man climbed out carrying a Britney doll in a box.

Children cried. Parents steamed. They all needed to get a sense of humor, Fox said.

Announcement of a Britney appearance by WMRV-FM in Endwell, N.Y., ended tragically. Susan Santodonato, 37, her 11-year-old daughter and about 100 others turned out to see what proved to be a Britney look-alike. Any humor was fleeting; Santodonato fell in the parking lot, hit her head and died.

“I don’t think there is more of this kind of thing these days,” insisted Ron Rodrigues, editor in chief of R&R;, a radio industry magazine.

He said stunts have always been part of promotions; he recalled that the Disco Demolition Night fiasco of 1979--the Chicago White Sox had to forfeit a game after phonograph records were exploded on the field and a riot ensued--was a radio station’s idea.

Bruce Morrow remembers a WABC principal-of-the-year promotion in the early 1960s. Unprepared for the deluge of ballots--”we must have gotten 150 million votes”--management hired some college kids to tabulate them. When that wasn’t enough help, they hired bums from the Bowery to help out, but the college kids and the derelicts brawled, and the whole thing ended in chaos.

But that wasn’t the worst WABC debacle. The worst was the Mona Lisa contest.

Listeners were challenged to create their own versions of the Mona Lisa, with prizes for the largest, smallest, most original and so on. The response was staggering, forcing WABC to rent the Polo Grounds to display them for judging by the flamboyant surrealist painter Salvador Dali.

But then the wind kicked up, sending Mona Lisas flying all over the old ballpark, which was torn down in 1964. Station executives desperately searched for something heavy enough to hold the artwork down. A nearby distributor offered the quickest solution-- boxes of soap powder, Morrow recalled.

Then the rains came.

Nearly 40 years later, Cousin Brucie laughed when remembering the suds. It all seems so quaint. The world and radio are so much coarser now; there are leagues of difference between the Good Guys and the Mancow. Today, competition pushes DJs to press the edge of the envelope, and sometimes the envelope rips, Morrow said.

Which brings us back to Stephen Meade, a.k.a. Willie B.

Last February, Meade got to wondering whether animals other than the groundhog could predict the remaining weeks of winter. He encouraged listeners to produce small animals that would be let loose on Interstate 25. If they survived, it would mean an early spring.

Somebody brought a live chicken to the studio. According to a complaint, Meade told an intern to throw the chicken out a second-story window, while he broadcast the results.

The chicken lived.

Hmm, thought Meade. Let’s try it again, from the third floor.

The chicken survived again-- though not without injury.

A member of the Denver Dumb Friends League raced to the scene to rescue the unlucky bird; the group filed a complaint, and Meade awaits trial on charges of cruelty to animals. He could face six to 18 months in jail.

In the meantime, you can catch him on KBPI each morning, 5:30 to 10 a.m., and evenings 7 to 10 p.m. And if you’re an admirer of Mr. Mudfest, you’ll be happy to know that he hasn’t garaged his truck--known as “The Defecator” --for good.