Disco Demolition Night

(The following is a slightly updated version of a post that originally appeared in July 2009.)

Steve Dahl is a name most Americans outside of the Chicago area are unfamiliar with these days, but thirty-five years years ago today, his promotional effort for the radio station he worked for at the time made him the talk of the nation . . . and brought out an ugliness that would play itself out in America for years, if not decades.

In 1979, Dahl, a rock radio deejay in Chicago at WLUP-FM, stoked hatred of disco by rock and roll fans by entertaining them with screeds against disco and mockeries of disco records. That spring, a game between the Chicago White Sox and the Detroit Tigers was rained out, and a White Sox-Tigers game scheduled for July was turned into a double header to compensate for the canceled game. Sensing an opportunity to promote his radio station, Dahl struck a deal with Mike Veeck, son of White Sox owner Bill Veeck, to have a "Disco Demolition Night" between the two games. Rock fans were encouraged to bring disco records to Comiskey Park and drop them in a large receptacle, which would be exploded between the two games.

On July 12, 1979, 90,000 rock fans came to Comiskey Park with copies of disco records, far more than the ballpark could accommodate. Those who couldn't get in were turned away. Many more tried to scale the walls. During the first game, the stands were overflowing with spectators and the hated disco LPs . . . not to mention marijuana smoke. Not all of the records could fit in the receptacle for the explosion; those that couldn't be collected were used as Frisbees by the stoned rock fans, hitting spectators who'd actually come to see the games.

Finally, at the end of the first game, Dahl himself went out to center field and had the receptacle exploded with a bomb. It tore a hole in the grass and the chaos encouraged the stoned fans to storm the field; rioting started, small fires were lit, and a batting cage was destroyed. Finally, the Chicago police had to be called in to restore order. The second game was again canceled and forfeited to the Tigers.

The significance of this event cannot be understated. This is where, to many, the rise of modern American conservatism began. While many rock fans hated disco on musical grounds - repetitive and meaningless lyrics, overorchestrated arrangements, cosmopolitan trendiness - many more hated it on racial and elitist grounds. After all, most disco performers were black, and several of them were women. There were the racially integrated but very gay Village People, and many disco fans were black, gay, Latino, and of the white urban working class. (Suburban whites tended to look down on the Tony Manero type personified by John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever.)

The Disco Demolition Night at Comiskey Park brought out the bigots, not the people who merely disliked the music and nothing else. Nile Rodgers, leader of the disco group Chic, likened the event to a Nazi-style book burning, but there was also a whiff of the Rolling Stones's Altamont event of a decade earlier in which the lower, meaner elements of pop music fandom converged to vent their misanthropy.

Disco did suck to some extent. The craze inspired some awful records, mainly in the form of novelty records like "Disco Duck," and even some of the more seriously produced disco songs of the seventies were rather unlistenable. Even worse, the disco craze inspired non-disco performers to try their hand at the music - Paul McCartney, Dolly Parton, Ethel Merman, and Rod Stewart all put out disco records, and the less said about them, the better. Heavy metal fans were consistent in their hatred of disco - Kiss released their own disco song, "I Was Made For Loving You," in 1979, and that record caused members of the Kiss Army to go AWOL. But what sucked even more was the fear of gay men, black divas, and white proles harbored by the smug, suburban white male teenagers who either went to Comiskey Park for Disco Demolition Night or wished they could have been there. These kids grew up to be the men who vote Republican, watch Fox News, supported welfare reform, cheered for war in Iraq, and are likely go to Tea Party rallies to register their displeasure with President Obama's policies . . . and President Obama. They also listen to Rush - not the band, the Limbaugh. 

Disco Demolition Night probably did more damage to rock and roll than anything else, because it made the whole rock scene seem stodgy and elitist due to the wrongheaded reactionarism of a few. After being dormant in the early eighties, disco came back - although it's now called "electronically arranged dance music" - and it's been joined by rap and hip-hop, both of which are certainly danceable. Rock and roll, thanks to the elitism of its fans, has remained the province of white males at a time when there are fewer and fewer of them as a percentage of the population - and white male kids today love hip-hop, which has forced several new-rock stations (especially in New York) to go off the air.  Now there's irony for you. 

Steve Dahl still works in broadcasting . . .sort of.  He hosts a daily radio show as part of a subscription podcast venture he started in 2011.  And he still thinks disco sucks - for musical reasons only, I'm sure. The first wave of disco did indeed die out shortly after the anti-disco rally on that July night in Comiskey Park. But while he may have won the battle in 1979, Dahl clearly lost the war. (Mike Veeck lost his job; he was blacklisted by Major League Baseball for letting this promotional stunt be held.) And rock lost a lot of its credibility. Nothing for Dahl to brag about.