On the morning of Good Friday, April 5, 1985, something happened on the radio that had never happened before. For a few minutes, it didn’t matter which station you turned to. They were all playing the same song.
More than 8,000 radio stations around the world had agreed to do it together. AM and FM, big city signals and little small-town ones, all cueing up the same record at the same minute. The idea came from a pair of DJs who thought the whole dial should speak with one voice for a few minutes. And for once, it did.
The song was “We Are the World.” Michael Jackson, the pop singer millions already knew from “Thriller,” wrote it with Lionel Richie, the soft-voiced star behind “Hello” and “All Night Long.” The two of them put it together in early 1985, and a huge group of famous singers recorded it to raise money for famine relief in Africa. By April it was everywhere.
A boy named Joel Murphy, 10 years old and crazy about radio, happened to be home that morning. School was out for the holiday. So he did what a radio-obsessed kid does. He grabbed a tape recorder, sat by the dial, and started turning it.
“I was a 10 year-old radio and music geek at the time and, luckily, my 5th grade class was on Easter Break that day,” he said later.
What he heard stopped him. Station after station, every one he landed on, the same voices, the same melody, lined up almost perfectly across the whole band. He kept rolling. From stations up in upstate New York over to Quebec, Vermont, Montreal and Ottawa, the song followed him up and down the dial. Every twist landed on it.
In his words, every station was “playing… the same exact thing!!!!”
He saved that tape for decades. Years later he put it online, so you can sit where he sat and hear it for yourself. The hiss between stations, the little bursts of static as the dial moves, and under all of it, the same song rising again and again at 10:50 in the morning.
Here is the actual recording that boy made, the dial moving from one station to the next with “We Are the World” on every one.
The real 1985 tape of one radio dial catching the song on station after station
If you’ve forgotten how the song itself goes, or you just want to hear that famous lineup of singers again, this is the official version.
The official “We Are the World” recording with its star-packed chorus
People argue about a lot of things Michael did. This one is hard to argue with. For a few minutes one spring morning, a song he helped write pulled the whole radio dial into the same room. A 10-year-old pressed record, and all these years later we can still hear what that sounded like.