Here’s what Dick wrote in his best-selling book, Rock, Roll and Remember:

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One piece of mail I’ll always remember was a medium-sized rectangular box wrapped in brown paper and tied securely with a brown cord. It had a Los Angeles postmark.

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The moment it arrived in the office, Marlene brought it to me. “You better look at this, it smells godawful,” she said as she placed it on my desk.

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Tony, Marlene and I gathered around the desk. Carefully I opened the package; the more brown paper that came off, the worse the smell got. By the time I had all the wrapping off the odor had filled the office.

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Lifting the lid off the box, I found a very dead fish. There was also a note: “To our good friend, Dick Clark. This souvenir caught in the beautiful blue waters of Southern California. From your friends, The Four Preps.”

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It took us hours to air out the office. I vowed I’d nail those four jokers the next time I saw them.

 

I finally got the chance to pay back The Four Preps for their dead fish. All afternoon they rehearsed their current hit single “Down by the Station.” At one point in the song, they crossed downstage to the “T” mark on the floor where they were supposed to stand to finish the song. That evening when the show was on live, they crossed the stage to find the “T” mark had been replaced by a large pile of plastic vomit from a joke store. It looked tremendously realistic. Deke and I roared with laughter as they jumped away from it, trying not to lose their places in the lip-sync. Ah, revenge is sweet.