Disc Jockey Quotes

The day Spenkelink was put to death a popular Jacksonville disc jockey aired a recording of sizzling bacon and dedicated it to the doomed man.

Though many strive to hide their human libidinousness from themselves and each other, being a force of nature, it breaks through. Lots of uptight, proper Americans were scandalized by the way Elvis moved his hips when he sang "rock and roll." But how many realized what the phrase rock and roll meant? Cultural historian Michael Ventura, investigating the roots of African-American music, found that rock 'n' roll was a term that originated in the juke joints of the South. Long in use by the time Elvis appeared, Ventura explains the phrase "hadn't meant the name of a music, it meant 'to fuck.' 'Rock,' by itself, has pretty much meant that, in those circles, since the twenties at least." By the mid-1950s, when the phrase was becoming widely used in mainstream culture, Ventura says the disc jockeys "either didn't know what they were saying or were too sly to admit what they knew.

It had never once occurred to me in thirty-six years of living that anyone listened to Mexican music for pleasure. Yet here there were a dozen stations blaring it out. After each song, a disc jockey would come on and jabber for a minute or two in Spanish in the tone of a man who has just had his nuts slammed in a drawer.

The disc jockey announced the tunes as though they were made by his family or best friends: King Solomon, Brother Otis, Dinah baby, Ike and Tina girl, Sister Dakota, the Temps.

Sinatra’s final radio days were filled with minor quarter-hours and one full-length series in which he was relegated to the role of a disc jockey. By 1950 people were writing his professional obituary. His public image had taken a beating, his personal life a succession of wives, scrapes, and alleged friendships with gangsters. It would take a 1953 film, From Here to Eternity, and a subsequent acting career to save him.

The telephone company is urging people not to use the telephone unless it is absolutely necessary, in order to keep the lines open for emergency calls. We'll be right back after this break to give away a pair of Phil Collins concert tickets to caller number 95. -unidentified radio disc jockey after the 1990 Los Angeles earthquake

Bob [Crane] was driven to success, and he sought perfection in his work, right from the start.

Jack Webb had been active in radio for several years before Dragnet propelled him to national prominence. He had arrived at KGO, the ABC outlet in San Francisco, an unknown novice in 1945. Soon he was working as a staff announcer and disc jockey. His morning show, The Coffee Club, revealed his lifelong interest in jazz music, and in 1946 he was featured on a limited ABC-West network in the quarter-hour docudrama One out of Seven. His Jack Webb Show, also 1946, was a bizarre comedy series unlike anything else he ever attempted. His major break arrived with Pat Novak: for 26 weeks Webb played a waterfront detective in a series so hard-boiled it became high camp. He moved to Hollywood, abandoning Novak just as that series was hitting its peak. Mutual immediately slipped him into a Novak sound-alike, Johnny Modero: Pier 23, for the summer of 1947. He played leads and bit parts on such series as Escape, The Whistler, and This Is Your FBI. He began a film career: in He Walked by Night (1948), Webb played a crime lab cop. The film’s technical adviser was Sergeant Marty Wynn of the Los Angeles police. Webb and Wynn shared a belief that pure investigative procedure was dramatic enough without the melodrama of the private eye. The seeds of Dragnet were sown on a movie set.

Then, in 1942, a disastrous strike against the record companies disrupted the industry and upset the delicate balance of business. Though it hit directly at record producers, the real target was radio. James C. Petrillo, president of the American Federation of Musicians, was alarmed at the rapid proliferation of disc jockeys. He objected to the free use of recorded music on the air, charging that jocks had cost musicians their jobs at hundreds of radio stations. Petrillo wanted to impose fees at the source, the big companies like RCA and Columbia, where the records were produced. The final agreement, which was not accepted by the two biggest companies until 1944, created a union-supervised fund for indigent and aging musicians

Disc jockeys telephoned my house and wanted to discuss (on the air) the incidence of “filth” in the Haight-Ashbury, and acquaintances congratulated me on having finished the piece “just in time,” because “the whole fad’s dead now, fini, kaput.” I suppose almost everyone who writes is afflicted some of the time by the suspicion that nobody out there is listening, but it seemed to me then (perhaps because the piece was important to me) that I had never gotten a feedback so universally beside the point.

If you are playing music in any situation and not connecting with people's emotions, what are you actually doing?

While he is universally remembered as Colonel Hogan, Bob Crane must be credited for paving the way for radio personalities and disc jockeys for generations to come.

Bob Crane’s advancement to KNX is the stuff of legend.

Opium? No! Cocaine? No! The Great American Brain Killer Is Dance Music!’ – Portland Oregonian, 1932 T

Broadcaster's Poem I used to broadcast at night alone in a radio station but I was never good at it partly because my voice wasn't right but mostly because my peculiar metaphysical stupidity made it impossible for me to keep believing their was somebody listening when it seemed I was talking only to myself in a room no bigger than an ordinary bathroom I could believe it for a while and then I'd get somewhat the same feeling as when you start to suspect you're the victim of a practical joke So one part of me was afraid another part might blurt out something about myself so terrible that even I had never until that moment suspected it This was like the fear of bridges and other high places: Will I take off my glasses and throw them into the water, although I'm half blind without them? Will I sneak up behind myself and push? Another thing: As a reporter I covered an accident in which a train ran into a car, killing three young men, one of whom was beheaded. The bodies looked boneless, as such bodies do More like mounds of rags and inside the wreckage where nobody could get at it the car radio was still playing I thought about places the disc jockey's voice goes and the things that happen there and of how impossible it would be for him to continue if he really knew.

The disc jockey played “Blue Hawaii” as a golden oldie, and I wondered where Bubba was—not my own brother, but the vampire now known only as Bubba.

I dated a disc jockey for a time, a man I met at a jazz club. That went on for only a few months. After he’d worried me half to death with too much talking, I dumped him by calling into a radio station and dedicating the Billie Holiday song to him “You Ain’t Gonna Bother Me No More.

Meanwhile, I still worked with Dr. Ferrante. He came up with different ways to try to help me with my approach to football. Back then, we listened to Walkmans and cassette tapes before games. This was almost ten years before Apple invented the iPod. Dr. Ferrante asked me to put together a playlist of the top twenty pregame songs that got me in the right football mood. Then he asked me to record my dad, my mom, my sister, and my brother as they each gave me a positive thought to take out onto the field. I took all the recordings to a local radio disc jockey, who was nice enough to mix them together on a cassette tape for me.

Peary played the role in its best years, he and Waterman shared about equally in real time as Gildy at the NBC microphone. After Gildersleeve, Peary shaved his mustache, lost 50 pounds, and, in 1954, turned up as a disc jockey on KABC. He died March 30, 1985; Waterman died Feb. 1, 1995.