If you happened to be driving in Sarasota shortly before 5 p.m. on Friday, May 22, 1998, and you tuned your car radio to 98.7 FM, you would have been comforted by the gentle tones of Billy Joel’s soft-rock hit “Just the Way You Are.” Then, after the song faded, a new era in local radio began. It started with hip hop drum rolls, breathy vocals, stabs of electric guitar and vocals from rapper Tone-Lōc: “Working all week 9 to 5 for my money / So when the weekend comes I go get live with the honeys.”

The song was “Wild Thing,” and after it was over, if you kept your radio set to 98.7, you heard it again, and again, and again, intercut with the stoned musings of “Josh” and “Brian,” two alleged DJs who claimed they were illegally blasting the song onto the radio from a boat they had stolen and parked in the Gulf of Mexico.

I was a senior in high school at the time, and my friends and I were dumbfounded and delighted by the ceaseless presence of “Wild Thing” on the airwaves. You might think we’d grow tired of hearing the same song hundreds of times in a row, but you’d be wrong. Every time it ended, we’d lean in closer to the speaker. Were they really going to play it again? Then the drums would thunder back in, and we’d nudge the volume knob up a little higher and rap along with every line.

But why Tone-Lōc? Why that weekend? And who were “Josh” and “Brian”? For decades, I’ve wanted answers to those questions. Finally, here it is: the story of the birth of WiLD 98.7.

The first thing you need to know about the “Wild Thing” takeover was that it wasn’t the first time it had happened. In fact, the promoters behind the prank, Jerry Clifton and Paige Nienaber, had pulled the same stunt on a station in San Francisco in 1992 as a way to grab listeners’ attention in a saturated market.

The strategy worked so well that, six years later, a radio promoter in Southwest Florida named Mark Gullett reached out to Clifton and Nienaber to see if they would recreate it here. At the time, Gullett was working for a man named Steve Godofsky, who managed a handful of stations in the area, including a small outpost in Holmes Beach with a weak signal. The idea was to use that station to challenge WFLZ, which dominated the Tampa Bay market with its pop format.

“Steve was very conservative, but he bought into the idea of doing something radical,” says Gullett. “We were at a signal disadvantage, so we decided, ‘Let’s do something crazy to win the ratings war.’” Gullett paged Nienaber to discuss the idea, and Nienaber hopped on a plane to Tampa the next day.

“WFLZ was sitting fat and happy and maybe needed some competition,” says Nienaber. “It was a really good sounding radio station.” Meeting in hotel rooms under fake names to avoid tipping off WFLZ, the team chose May 22, the Friday before the long Memorial Day weekend, as the day they would switch the station’s format to WiLD, with no advance notice or promotion—a surprise attack.

In addition to bombarding listeners with “Wild Thing,” the team also wanted to create a storyline to hook the public. Nienaber borrowed an idea from another station. “I said, ‘What if we had the radio station pirated by a couple of high school kids, ‘Josh’ and ‘Brian’?’” he recalls. “‘What if they’re out on their boat, messing around with the marine band radio, and they discover that if they cross this red wire with this black wire they could crash this radio station and start taking it over?’” The idea was that the characters thought local radio was lame and that WiLD 98.7 would be “the station that doesn’t suck.”

To portray Josh and Brian, the team contacted Jason “Budman” Paige and Jeremiah “Booger” Morse, who were doing a radio show in Honolulu at the time. Paige and Morse met while working in Arizona and developed a popular stoner-buddy rapport. “We just acted like idiots,” says Paige. “We were like the real life version of Beavis and Butt-Head, and it was not far from the truth.”

Morse says the duo’s chemistry came from their contrasting personalities. “He’s an introvert and I’m an outro-vert,” he says. “I got him to go skydiving and get a tattoo. His mom hates me because she knows I’m an influence on him.”

Paige and Morse began recording short segments that explained the alleged backstory behind the takeover—that they had stolen a boat and were broadcasting into the Tampa Bay market with the only record they had: “Wild Thing.” Those short clips were then cut into the broadcast between spins of the song.

Taking advantage of the Memorial Day weekend debut, the station’s team bought Jeeps and a van, emblazoned them with a WiLD 98.7 logo and took them to the beach to hand out swag and chat up partiers. Nienaber says he knew the “Wild Thing” strategy was a hit because kids already knew who Josh and Brian were. “People were coming up and saying, ‘Hey, you’re the station that doesn’t suck,’” he says. He remembers thinking, “It’s over. We’ve already won.” He started faxing more ideas to Paige and Morse to work into their breaks. “It really did sound like these guys were floating around on their boat,” says Nienaber. “When a thunderstorm knocked the station off the air for 60 seconds, the phones blew up with people thinking the boat sank.”

Eventually, after 54 straight hours of Tone Lōc, the station broadened its offerings, with a cover story that fans had delivered new records to Josh and Brian on their boat. While “Wild Thing” was a decade old when WiLD debuted, the station began to play contemporary rap hits like Master P’s “Make Em’ Say Uhh!” and Ma$e’s “Feel so Good.” As Nienaber puts it, “We had to become a real radio station.” That meant hiring additional staff and bidding farewell to Josh and Brian, who told listeners they were heading to Colombia to liven up the radio
scene there.

Orlando Davis started as the station’s music director in 1998 shortly after the launch. Hip hop was already a massive cultural force by then, but Davis says it was underrepresented in the Tampa Bay area. After WiLD debuted, the station became inundated with records by up and coming artists like Eminem and earned a reputation for rewriting the rules of local radio. “It’s like everyone in the class is taking karate and someone walks in who studied MMA,” Davis says. “You’re like, ‘Wait, why is this guy punching and kicking? What is this grappling?’ They don’t see it in their playbook.”

“The strategy was highly successful,” says Gullett. “The teens in the car
control the radio, and when the teens were in the car they were putting on WiLD 98.7, and the parents started liking it. As much as it seemed random and chaotic, there was some science behind the madness.”

After the Tampa Bay takeover, the WiLD team tried the same format in several markets, including Knoxville, Buffalo, Reno, Spokane and San Antonio, to varying degrees of success. The local WiLD still plays rap, pop and R&B, although its location on the dial shifted to 94.1 FM in 2009. All of those involved in the “Wild Thing” promotion remember it fondly, while also acknowledging how juvenile it was.

Paige still goes by “Budman,” but now he works for a station in the Fort Myers area with Morse, aka “Booger,” as part of a crew called the Wild Bunch. “It was never a job,” says Morse. “It was always an adventure. What was cool was that our listeners were really into it, so it made us really into it.”

“We were such idiots,” says Paige. “What you heard on the radio? We were that dumb.”