Moody Blues "The Voice"

Before the internet, rarely did you know what a radio disc jockey looked like unless you went to a station event. Once all radio stations added websites, the curtain that most DJs hid behind finally lifted. Listeners finally got to match the voice to the face. With all due respect, people never look like how we envision. In one instance, a story floated around the radio station I worked in the early-2000s that station bosses refused to put photos of the DJs on the station's new website because one particular DJ had the proverbial "face for radio". To this day, I still don't know who this person is (or even if the story is true).

The Romantics "Talking in Your Sleep"

With a racing heart, I wake up drenched in sweat following another "dead air dream". What's a dead air dream, you ask? Well, it's a recurring dream most people in the industry have at one time or another. The premise is simple: you're a DJ whose song is ending and for whatever reason you cannot find another song and the impending dead air paralyzes you. A friend of mine who has been out of radio for over a decade recently admitted he still suffers from the occasional dead air dream nightmare.

Paul Davis "Cool Night"

If my mispronouncing the word rain was bad, enter my colleague Rob who took things to another level. During the fall of 1997, Rob quit his gig working with me as part-time DJ doing the evening show. He had just been hired to host a morning show and double as Program Director at a suburban radio station. Being the trooper he was, Rob didn't want to leave his boss in a pinch without giving a full two weeks notice. Instead he soldiered on working practically 20 hours a day for two weeks and one evening his exhaustion finally caught up with him.

Just before signing off, he played the weather jingle and started reading his final weather break of the night. His brain clearly had a plan, but his mouth was not cooperating because the only word to come out of his mouth was "cooley". Standing in the back of the studio, I watched Rob completely freeze and turn a shade of red that even tomatoes envied. He couldn't recover from his blunder and anyone listening that night heard about 20 seconds of a catchy weather jingle play before Rob pressed the "out" jingle. As soon as he turned off the microphone, we both broke out in laughter. He kept saying, "Cooley?!? What the hell was that?!?". Years later, I mentioned the story to him and he claimed to have that infamous weather report on a cassette tape somewhere in his basement. Despite my pleas for a copy, he never turned it over--which, in the era of YouTube, is probably for the best....

Gloria Estefan "Turn the Beat Around"

Things I Don't Know Why I Remember: WPNT-FM midday host Lynne Murray backselling a Gloria Estefan song and saying "I wonder if her friends call her Glo?".

John Mellencamp & Meshell Ndegeocello "Wild Night"

Before there was Google or YouTube, radio disc jockeys all scrambled to figure out how to pronounce Meshell Ndegeocello's name.  Her vocals in "Wild Night" helped turn the song into one of John Mellencamp's biggest hits of the 90s.  

Stereo MC's - "Connected"

The often forgotten, but catchy as hell song "Connected" came from Stereo MC's.  The group (of producers and disc jockeys) later remixed Madonna's "Frozen" in the 1998.