DJ Steve Dahl at the dumpster during Disco Demolition Night
Introduction
On July 12, 1979, Disco Demolition Night took place at baseball stadium Comiskey Park in Chicago, home of the Chicago White Sox. Just a promotional stunt for a baseball game or a racist, homophobic expression of white resentment against a subculture that had become too mainstream?
Disco – Dancing at Studio 54 1978
Disco
Late 1970s disco was everywhere. The charts were littered with disco hits, rock acts like The Rolling Stones (Miss You, Emotional Rescue), Rod Stewart (Da’ Ya’ Think I’m Sexy?), Pink Floyd (Another Brick In The Wall, Blondie (Heart Of Glass), Kiss (I Was Made For Lovin’ You) and sometime later Queen (Another One Bites The Dust), incorporated disco into their music and achieved huge successes with it. September 13, 1973, marked the first time the term “disco” was used, in the article “Discotheque Rock ’72: Paaaaarty!”, written by Vince Aletto for Rolling Stone magazine.
Disco as a musical form was the product of the black and gay communities, who danced and partied together. At the time it was forbidden by law for two people of the same sex to dance together. The music originated from clandestine clubs, gradually conquering the mainstream.
Disco music was characterized by instantly recognizable rhythms (the so-called “four-on-the-floor”), lushly orchestrated melodies, a positive message and use of technological innovations, especially synthesizers. The guitar, the primary domain for rock music, was used for funky accents and riffs. Solos were not part of the music, except for the break-down, everything returning to the bare beat, eliminating all other instruments.
Starting from 1972 disco songs turned into hits in the regular charts. The O’Jays’ Love Train was the first disco songs to reach the first position in the American Billboard charts. In November 1974 the first disco radio show started broadcasting: Disco 102, 4 hours non-stop disco music every Saturday night on a New York radio station. On October 26, 1974, Billboard introduced the Disco Action charts, which was compiled by club DJs. That very same year Rock The Boat (The Hues Corporation) and Kung Fu Fighting (Carl Douglas) were the bestselling singles. Disco was getting huge.
Discotheques were specialized in extending songs and mixing songs, resulting in one big rhythm fest, created to bring the crowd to ecstasy. All over the world discotheques started popping up. New York’s Studio 54 sparked the world’s imagination. Disco dancing was taught at dance schools. Disco was everywhere. And then there were the movies, Thank God It’s Friday, but more particularly Saturday Night Fever, which catapulted disco into the mainstream. Disco could not be avoided.
Also see the article Disco – The 20 best singles for more information on (the rise and fall of) disco and a real disco top 20, compiled by the A Pop Life blog.
Disco Sucks
In the meantime there was a large group of music lovers, who thought the new music was below par. Where had the guitars gone? Where was the rock? Where was the rebellion? The irony behind that question was totally lost on them. If there had ever been a genre born out of rebellion, it was disco. A few decades earlier rock was born out of that very same sense of rebellion. But, as is often the case with initially rebellious, innovative movements, the followers became more papist than the Pope. Rock was rock and rock had to stay rock and had to be dominant. Rock was white. Disco wasn’t. An element that cannot be discarded and would eventually help fuel Disco Demolition Night.
Rock artists incorporating disco in their music were “sell-outs”. Punk was also seen as a reaction against disco, while in fact it wasn’t. It was directly aimed at the established rock groups, who had lost every touch with the day to day experience of the youthful. The English punks in particular were relatively positive in their assessment of disco. PIL, the band of former Sex Pistols singer John Lydon, released the single Death Disco on June 29, 1979, but its inspiration didn’t come from hatred against disco, but the passing of Lydon’s mother: “I watched her die. She was tough, my mum. She asked me to write a disco song for her funeral. This was hardly happy stuff.”
But, disco-parodies and anti-disco songs were released, like Disco Duck (Rick Dees), Disco Boy and Dancin’ Fool (Frank Zappa) and in The Netherlands Disco Really Made It (It’s Empty And I Hate It) by Gruppo Sportivo. The anti-disco movement was huge, particularly in the US. Out of Chicago, in March of 1979, shock-DJ Steve Dahl started openly ridiculing disco, the music and its gay expression. Late 1978 he was fired from a radio station that had switched from rock to disco. Dahl wanted blood. He recorded a single: Do You Think I’m Disco? (a parody of Rod Stewart’s Da’ Ya’ Think I’m Sexy?).
On July 6, 1979, Van McCoy died after having been in a coma for a week. Dahl ‘celebrated’ the news by destroying a copy of McCoy’s disco hit The Hustle live on air. But why did he hate disco so much? “I hate disco because I can’t get a white three-piece suit that fits me off the rack, that hangs well. I can’t dance”… He became popular, his followers were called the Insane Coho Lips Anti-Disco Army. Their motto? “The eradication of the dreaded musical disease known as DISCO”. Heavy words.
Comiskey Park – Home Of The White Sox
Chicago White Sox
The Chicago White Sox were always on the look-out for promotional stunts and in 1979 more so than ever before. There were money issues, so they were in desperate need of a crowd. Earlier the Sox had organized a Salute To Disco which had turned into a success. So Mike Veeck, son of Sox owner Bill Veeck, brought his father’s words “think opposites” into practice. Bill thought “We ought to have a night for people who hate disco”. Enter Steve Dahl.
The idea was that two games were played on the night, both against the Detroit Tigers. During the intermission something would be done with the Disco Sucks story. The promotional stunt was that everyone was granted access for just 98¢ on the condition that they bring along a disco record. Those records would be blown up during intermission, followed by the second baseball game.
Disco Demolition Night – Before the explosion
Disco Demolition Night
July 12, 1979: the day of the double games and the promotional stunt, promotor Bill Veeck met with the Chicago police department and told them his estimated attendance for the day: 35,000 people at Comiskey Park. The police laughed, that many people was an idiotic number, especially in a season drawing 15,000 on average. Both underestimated the anti-disco movement’s fanatism. More than 100,000 people showed up. The entrance gates were sealed off after approximately 60,000 had already entered the stadium. The 40,000 outside tried their best to overcome the obstacles in order to get in. “A tremendous promotion”!
Soon the organizers noticed this wasn’t the standard audience they were used to. The “disco sucks” chants were endless, and lasted the entire first game. Because the official trays for collecting the vinyl records were overflowing, people took their vinyl records into the stands. Before and during the game those records flew through the air like razor-sharp frisbees. The baseball players were afraid to enter the field without head protection. It’s a miracle no-one go hurt. The first game was stopped several time because of flying vinyl, fireworks, liquor bottles and lighters. After the game ended in a 4-1 victory for the Detroit Tigers, it was time to blow up the vinyl that had been brought in by the crowd.
Dahl, dressed in army fatigues and a helmet, drove onto the field with some colleagues in a Jeep. They drove around bit and stopped at the dumpster filled with vinyl records. The chant “disco sucks” was started yet again. Dahl took the microphone and said:
This is now officially the world’s largest anti-disco rally! Now listen—we took all the disco records you brought tonight, we got ’em in a giant box, and we’re gonna blow ’em up reeeeeeal goooood.
Disco Demolition Night – The explosion
The dumpster was detonated. Pieces of vinyl flew up into the air well up to 60 meters (200 feet) high, the crowd went crazy and found ways to enter the field. A few at first, then dozens, then hundreds, then thousands. The promotional stunt quickly escalated into a full-scale riot. The explosion itself had already left the field virtually unplayable, but the crowds tore down everything they could get their hands on. Even the home plate was removed. Riot police had to come in and sweep the field. The second game was never played. End result: 39 arrests and 6 people with minor injuries.
To top it all off, it was all being broadcast live, because sports, and baseball in particular, is huge in the US. The sports commentators watched in horror as their sport was desecrated by a bunch of rampaging savages: “So many people, insecure, don’t know what to do with themselves and how to have a good time. They follow somone who’s a jerk.”
That “jerk” and his colleagues couldn’t return to home plate after the siege and were directed out of the stadium in the Jeep, where they were welcomed by all those outside who had heard the explosion inside the stadium. They were quickly directed back to the stadium’s press room.
Disco Demolition Night – After the explosion
Consequences Disco Demolition Night
Dahl became ever more popular for a while, until he was fired in 1981. He kept on making radio, slipping ever further into an alcohol addiction. He now runs podcasts and his own website, where he makes money selling Disco Sucks and Disco Demolition Night merchandise. The events also resulted in the forfeit of the second Sox game and forced the family Veeck to sell the Chicago White Sox within a year. The family had become persona-non-grata in the world of baseball. The original Comiskey Park stadium was demolished in 1991, after a new stadium had been built just south of the original one. That new stadium doesn’t bear the name Comiskey Park anymore.
July 12, 1979, is generally regarded as the start of disco’s rapid decline. By the end of 1979 disco was nowhere to be found in the charts anymore. Disco had gone back underground and many artists licked their wounds. Take a look at the documentary The Bee Gees: How Can You Mend a Broken Heart, where Disco Demolition Night is also a part of the band’s story. The impact was big, huge even. The question remains whether or not disco’s immense popularity would have led to a serious backlash anyway, but that will forever be nothing more than speculation.
Stop racism – Stop homophobia
Racism and homophobia
But the main consequence was a shared distaste. Disco Demolition Night looked a bit too much like combating a cultural phenomenon that was misunderstood, or to be more accurate, intensely hated, by the majority of white music lovers. The white neighborhood where Comiskey Park was situated was known for its blatant racism. At the time Chicago was still a shockingly segregated city. Black players of the Chicago White Sox were regularly harassed, intimidated and attacked, until they were recognized as club players. The shift to the (political) right in the US was on the rise (ultimately leading to the unfortunate election of Ronald Reagan) and Chicago went along gladly.
In the stadium, usher Vince Lawrence noticed many people not bringing along just disco records, but many of them just brought black music, like R&B, funk and soul (Al Green, Curtis Mayfield, Marvin Gaye). The disco singles by white rock artists were nowhere to be found. The audience that showed up for Disco Demolition Night was 100% white. It all reeked of a public rejection of everything not white, not rock and not applying to the (hetero) standards. 50,000 like-minded against a generally black, gay, Latin cultural expression that had conquered the world.
In 1979 there were few outside of the black and gay communities that truly understood the cultural meaning, one of them was Rolling Stone magazine writer Dave Marsh:
Your most paranoid fantasy about where the ethnic cleansing of the rock radio could ultimately lead… White males, eighteen to thirty-four, are the most likely to see disco as the product of homosexuals, blacks and Latins, and therefore they’re most likely to respond to appeals to wipe out such threats to their security. It goes almost without saying that such appeals are racist and sexist.
Rolling Stone, Dave Marsh, 27-12-1979
It’s quite remarkable that so few mentioned, or even recognized, the racist undercurrent at the time. In Detroit two DJs founded the Disco Duck Klan, an obvious referral to the racist Ku Klux Klan. They even contemplated performing in all white sheets. Luckily the idea was canned, but still.
But many within the black and gay communities felt outraged.
You think a different way, walk a different way, sing a different way, dance a different way. It scares people and Chicago’s notorious for that.
Frederick Dunson, Frankie Knuckles Foundation
They set our records on fire and our dreams became a disco inferno.
Ru Paul, drag queen and actor
It was a book burning. It was a racist, homophobic book burning.
Vince Lawrence
It felt to us like Nazi book-burning. This is America, the home of jazz and rock and people were now afraid even to say the word ‘disco’.
Nile Rodgers (Chic)
She [Donna Summer] could really sing and I disliked the veiled racism of the anti-disco movement.
Bruce Springsteen, talking about the song Cover Me, which he initially wrote for Donna Summer
There was a time when disco music was huge, and for a lot of gay people and minorities, that was our music. We embraced it and danced to it, and we expressed ourselves with joy… The vast majority of the people who burned that music were rockers and metalheads, and I remember that was really upsetting. It was all wrapped up in the psychosis of ‘disco music is for gays, disco music is for black people’. It was a very xenophobic expression, with gay people included in the whole mix of things.
Rob Halford (singer Judas Priest)
In 1981 Prince was greeted with the very same sentiments of the predominantly white crowd when he opened for The Rolling Stones in Los Angeles. Also see Prince and The Rolling Stones, 1981.
DJ Dahl thought it was all rubbish. He was only defending “the Chicago rock’n’roll lifestyle… The event was not anti-racist, not anti-gay… we were just kids pissing on a musical genre”. The original Chicago White Sox promoter, Mike Veeck, was more understanding: “I wouldn’t have done it if I thought it would hurt anyone”.
House music
End of disco?
By the end of 1979 disco had more or less vanished from the charts. The term “disco” was replaced by “dance” and all was like it was in the early 1970s. Disco was back underground and would pop up now and again as a sub-genre, like Hi-NRG. But disco would evolve into house and the current dance music, disco would return bigger than ever before. The suppression of a subculture eventually backfired.
Fun fact: Vince Lawrence, the usher in Comiskey Park, co-wrote the very first house single: Jesse Saunders’ On & On and turned into one of the main innovators within house music. Chicago House even became a genre unto itself.
In closing
The predominantly white organizers and executors of Disco Demolition Night didn’t see any harm in it, some still don’t to this very day. Musicians, LGBTQ activists and blacks on the other hand clearly did see something wrong with the whole idea. Any way you look at it, I think we can all agree that burning and detonating works of art will never be light entertainment. That’s a lesson history has taught over and over again, I hope.
Besides, let’s be real here. Disco also did bring beautiful timeless music. Just see Disco – The 20 best singles.
Video
This story contains an accompanying video. Click on the following link to see it: Video: Disco Demolition Night.
