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Straight From The Mouth
The Morning Mouth's February Interview with Preston & Steve
(Reprinted by permission; Copyright © 2006 Talentmasters Inc.)

How did you meet?

Preston Elliott: Steve and I met at WDRE in Philly. I had been in St. Louis and got to know Jim McGuinn who once programmed there. When he took over the reigns at WDRE, he offered me an afternoon. Steve had been doing production for the station. And he had done such good stuff that one of the clients, The River Cafe, had him come down on a Friday, as a personality and do appearances and live shots on the air. I was on in the afternoons when Steve was doing his shots from there and we just hit it off really well.

Where did you go from there?

PE: I eventually went to WPLY (Y100) and Steve went to New York.

Steve Morrison: I went to New York and did a stint at Q104/New York as co-host, comedy news. Technically, that was my first morning gig.

PE: Then back at Y100, they wanted to make a change in morning, so they

came to me and asked if I was interested. Initially, I had no interest, but was offered a nice jump in pay, so I gave it a try. I went on with Marilyn Russell who I worked with at WDRE. We were on a month or so and realized we were (not) very funny. It was about that time that Steve had called Jim McGuinn.

SM: I was calling about another gig, but Jim told me about Preston, he recalled we used to have a good rapport, then wanted me to tryout. So we completed the deal and started Preston, Marilyn and Steve.

PE: A few years later Marilyn left and we changed the name to Preston and Steve. There were a few personnel changes after that, but our producer Casey Foster has been with us since day one. Kathy Romano joined us a couple of years later. We also have since added an associate producer, Nick McIlwain. Then about a year ago we moved to WMMR. So I guess, total, we've been together about 8 years.

How did Stern parallel the whole Preston and Steve ascent?

PE: Remember this (was) one of Stern's biggest market. So much so, that initially, trying to take over the number one spot didn't fit it into our rating's quest. We pretty much saw it as an unreachable goal... We didn't go after his listeners, but catered to everyone else. But over the years, especially in the last 3 or 4 years, we noticed a gradual chipping away at his audience. Then we went started to realize maybe this wasn't such a lofty goal afterall.

Having made those gains, was his announcement of going to satellite a touch bittersweet?

PE: Yes, because of the gains we were achieving at (WMMR). We wanted to beat him straight up, and actually did in the Fall book, in 18-34 persons we had a 15 share, and he had an 11.8. We were happy about that.

How do you suppose he'll do on satellite?

PE: I think Howard is a smart guy. He wouldn't have entered into it without knowing where he was going. I think it's interesting now that there's talk of guidelines of what he will or won't be allowed to do. But Howard didn't get where he was by chance. He'll benefit Sirius a great deal. But the whole satellite this is still so untested. And, if they sell advertising, advertisers won't care if you're allowed a little more language freedom. McDonalds wouldn't want one of their spots to be followed a vulgar bit.

SM: Plus, I doubt Wendy's will want to sponsor fisting Fridays.

Let's talk about the show. What are some of your most popular features?

PE: We have a couple of benchmarks that we've been doing since day one like the Bizarre File - knuckle heads in the news, weirdos, etc. We have Hollywood Trash, which Steve does. The real meat of the show is just discussing things in the news.

SM: We're heavy into pop-culture. We make fun of it aggressively... things that are sort of sensitive, but out there. We're fans of taking things to the extreme.

PE: For Halloween, we did the Haunted Whore Ride. Basically, it was a rip on a live read a guy was doing for a place called the Haunted Horror Ride, but it sounded like he was saying Haunted Whore Ride. So Steve blurted "Haunted Whore Ride?" I said, no man, it's "Horror" ride. And that ad came up numerous times and everytime it did, Steve would ask loudly "Whore ride?" So it turned into a bit. We got a bunch of strippers with hay bales, put it out on our parking lot and got guys to come out for lap dances.

SM: Then, of course, there was our "Spanksgiving" day parade where we went through one of the main intersections of town with guys in bondage, a marching string band, dominatrix beating one another, all while going down the street.

Another tradition here we do is "Science Days." Basically, we try to blow things up. We blew up a car tire by putting in too much air. We had a ketchup bomb. We've put I don't how many things in the microwave. Tomorrow we're doing liquid nitrogen to freeze everything possible.

Has one ever gotten carried away?

PE: We detonated a dry ice bomb in one of the storage rooms here and that was just awesome -- got a lot of good audio from that one. We heard that if you drop a large ball of Silly Puddy from a high altitude that it would bounce high a blow into chards. So we put a hundred pound ball together and dropped out of a fire truck bucket. Not a damned thing happened. If we can blow it up, people love it.

Do both of you use a show outline to work from?

PE: We have a group conference call the night before where we put together a laundry list of things for the next day. You know, Kathy is getting her allergy test done tomorrow, etc. By the time we get on the air at six, we then look at our list and decide where to position these.

Is the conference just you and Steve?

PE: No, it's all five of us. We all push-to-talk phones and it works great.

Do you spend much time on the Internet?

PE: Loads

SM: Oh yeah, loads and loads.

SM: After you get a sizable following you then get people to contribute. We did a thing as a punishment for our intern Joe called fire in the hole. Here, we shot hot sauce into his butt with a super-soaker. This came as a suggestion from a listener.

How's Joe doing?

PE: He had to go to the hospital, found out he was allergic to something in the sauce. And when he walked into E.R. he told the person at the front desk "I know you don't believe me, but just had hot sauce shot into my rear," and the person at the desk said "You must be Joe."

It's little things like that let us know it's working.

SM: The web component of what we do is tremendous. Last December we had over 54 million hits on our website (prestonandsteve.com).

Here's a question I like asking. If you could pick anyone to critique your show, who would it be?

PE: Conan O'Brien. Cause I think we go after the same audience both male and female.

Including women?

SM: Yes. You know what, there's a misconception that if you do something a little bit scatological, a little bit of ass humor, if you push the boundaries, that women are going to wilt like flowers. That's not true. Some of our best stories come from women.

For example...

SM: One that comes to mind is micro-phallus--guys with small penis'. This girl, rather than let the guy know she couldn't feel a thing, she pretended to bang her head on the wall in front of her and knock herself out.

PE: Here's one of my favorites. Kathy relayed a story of a guy in a yellow Neon that had pulled up to her while driving, tried to get her attention and that's when she noticed he was masturbating. Well, she tells the story and then we start getting calls from women who had seen the same guy, in a yellow Neon do the same thing. Anyway, the next day, we're talking about something entirely different when we look up on the screen, there's a woman on the phone who's driving next to this guy. We go to her live on the air, she's giving us a play-by-play. Meanwhile, we get 2 or 3 other calls from people in the same vicinity all describing the same thing. It was magic live radio. We had the cops calling us, we had license plate info, we had the whole deal. We think he eventually caught on to it and sold the car. We ended up calling him the "mad wacker."

I would imagine trade-ins on yellow Neons were big that week. Let's go to favorites: What your show's favorite magazine of choice?

PE: Maxim.

Favorite TV Show?

P & SM: "Lost"!

PE: We latched on to that show from episode one. We talked about it the next week, then the following week. Then something strange began to happen: people that had never listened to our show before began sending us emails. They found out we were doing this Lost feature on Thursday, and now couldn't stop listening. I really believe we got a lot of cume simply by talking about that TV show. We start picking up calls and emails from "C" listeners, jazz, oldies listeners -- it was incredible.

What bit would anyone reading this be foolish not to try following this interview?

SM: Science Day is one. If you're a rock show, do the "Hottest Contest." It's an ongoing web-component where you have women submit their pictures.

What's your hope for the radio business? PE: To embrace the technology and the development of HD Radio.

SM: And more whore rides!

Read previous Morning Mouth interviews.

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