FEATURE:
The Day Disco Was Demolished
IN THIS PHOTO: D.J. Steve Dahl organised and hosted Disco Demolition Night. This was a Major League Baseball (MLB) promotion on Thursday, 12th July, 1979, at Comiskey Park in Chicago, Illinois. The night ended in a riot. At the climax of the event, a crate filled with Disco records was blown up on the field between games of the twi-night doubleheader between the Chicago White Sox and the Detroit Tigers/PHOTO CREDIT: Paul Natkin/WireImage
The Death of the Genre in the Musical Landscape of 1979
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I have been thinking a lot…
PHOTO CREDIT: Getty Images
about the year 1979. It is one of the most fascinating and diverse years in music history. The end of every decade brings this need for change. Artists sensing a new decade should maybe be a fresh start. A chance for older sound and movements to be replaced. We saw it at the end of the 1980s and 1990s. The end of the 1970s was no different. Before getting to a history event in 1979 and how it factored in the context of the music scene of the time, I have been considering the eclectic music of the year. I had an idea for a film that used the music and politics of 1979. A mix of a musical, drama and comedy, an opening scene could feature a mixture of songs from the year. A dazzling one-take sequenced, it would bring in everything from Disco Fleetwood Mac’s Tusk. An actress, a Disco lover or protagonist, dancing through New York City as the music plays. So many colours, sounds and sights. Imagining that made me think deeply about 1979 and how Disco was about to be publically burned and dismissed after a baseball game in the U.S. Now, Disco is very much back and in rude health. A new wave of Disco albums through the past few years has revitalised the genre. From Kylie Minogue to Beyoncé, it is wonderful seeing a style of music once deemed dead rising and strong! Think about the albums that were out in 1979. How the foreground was shifting. The Clash, Pink Floyd, Fleetwood Mac and Gang of Four released seminal albums. The more I think about 1979 and the importance of the music, the more it saddens me we are almost forty-five years from a major event that was a consecration of the genre. A type of music recently popular and at the forefront was seen as deceased. It was marked and declared in a major event.
I want to bring in a few features that discuss a moment in 1979 that was a stunt steeped in discrimination and racism. Netflix's The Saint of Second Chances told the story of the Chicago White Sox owners whose notorious ‘disco demolition’ stunt was blamed for toppling an entire music genre. In the BBC feature from last year, Dorian Lynskey gave some context and insight into a strange and horrifying moment:
“For fans of disco and baseball alike, the night of 12 July 1979 is one to remember for all the wrong reasons. In a notorious promotional stunt, a Chicago DJ named Steve Dahl detonated a dumpster filled with disco records between White Sox games at Comiskey Park, leading to a riot. Years later, Dahl claimed that disco was "probably on its way out" but admitted that his stunt "hastened its demise". Nile Rodgers of the disco group Chic told biographer Daryl Easlea, "It felt to us like a Nazi book-burning."
The so-called Disco Demolition Night figures in every history of disco but The Saint of Second Chances, a new Netflix documentary about flamboyant White Sox owner Bill Veeck and his son Mike, approaches it as a baseball story. Indeed, at the time it was seen as a shameful night for major league baseball rather than the symbolic death of disco. The Chicago Tribune damned it as "an outrageous example of irresponsible hucksterism that disgraced the sport of baseball" in a leader column headlined Veeck asked for it.
In the summer of 1979, the flailing White Sox were attracting on average just 15,000 fans to a stadium with a capacity of almost 45,000. Bill Veeck needed a gimmick to boost ticket sales, and Mike, the team's director of marketing, turned to Steve Dahl. The previous Christmas, Dahl had been dropped from Chicago radio station WDAI when it switched, like so many others, from rock to disco. He reinvented himself at rival station WLUP as an anti-disco culture warrior who encouraged his followers, the Insane Coho Lips, to besiege and occupy disco nights in the city with the rallying cry "Disco sucks!"
PHOTO CREDIT: Getty Images
Comiskey Park had previously hosted a "Salute to Disco", with dancers on the field. Mike figured, "We ought to have a night for people who hate disco." He had the brainwave of offering discounted 98 cent tickets to anyone who brought along a disco record for Dahl and his sidekick Garry Meier to ceremonially detonate between games during the White Sox doubleheader against the Detroit Tigers. On the night, the stadium was filled to capacity, with thousands more people fighting to get in. The dumpster designated for the disco vinyl soon overflowed, so many of the excess records were repurposed as aerial missiles. The first game unfolded to a ceaseless chant of "Disco sucks!" Afterwards, Dahl and Meier circled the field in a jeep, wearing military fatigues. "This is now officially the world's largest anti-disco rally!" Dahl bragged.
Dahl triggered the explosives, sending shards of shattered vinyl 200ft into the air. More than 5,000 fans took this as their cue to storm the field, tearing up the grass, kindling bonfires, and stealing the bases, until they were dispersed by riot police. With the ground a battlefield, the White Sox had to forfeit the second game. This mayhem was all televised, making it an international scandal. The Veecks were disgraced. Bill sold the team the following year. "That event was so traumatic it broke his heart," author Neal Karlen says in the documentary. Mike became persona non grata in the world of baseball. Jimmy Piersall, the White Sox's own broadcaster, called Disco Demolition Night "the worst promotion in the history of the world".
Disco's last gasp
From a music perspective, Dave Marsh of Rolling Stone saw the debacle as an ugly expression of the reactionary backlash that was sweeping American in 1979, the year the Reverend Jerry Falwell founded the Moral Majority, a conservative evangelical lobbying group. "White males, eighteen to thirty-four are the most likely to see disco as the product of homosexuals, blacks, and Latins," Marsh wrote, "and therefore they're the most likely to respond to appeals to wipe out such threats to their security."
Dahl has always denied bigotry. "This event was just a moment in time. Not racist, not anti-gay. Just kids, pissing on a musical genre," he insisted in his 2016 memoir Disco Demolition: The Night Disco Died. Yet at the time he derided disco as effeminate and described rock'n'roll as "threatened as a species". A media consultant canvassing young men on behalf of radio stations in 1979 reported, "Obviously, some people dislike disco for being black and gay." Ushers at Comiskey Park noticed that fans weren't just bringing along disco records. They were more likely to deposit funk and R&B discs than, say, Debby Boone's gloopy 1978 chart-topper You Light Up My Life. In their eyes, the target wasn't mainstream pop music but black music.
Disco didn't perish overnight. Donna Summer's Bad Girls led an all-disco top three in the Billboard Hot 100 that week, remained at number one for five weeks and was succeeded by Chic's Good Times. But that was the last gasp of disco's chart supremacy after two years during which it accounted for three in four chart-toppers. Across the land, radio stations who had not long ago switched from rock to disco hastily U-turned, while thousands of discotheques closed their doors.
In the long run, though, disco won. In Whit Stillman's 1998 movie The Last Days of Disco, one character delivers a passionate defence of a misunderstood scene: "Disco was too great, and too much fun, to be gone forever! It's got to come back someday." That same year, a Chaka Khan sample powered Stardust's massive hit Music Sounds Better With You, initiating a craze for disco-house records which was then picked up by Madonna and Kylie Minogue. Music critics began celebrating disco's underground roots and its pioneering gay, black and Hispanic DJs. By the time Nile Rodgers appeared on Daft Punk's Get Lucky in 2013, the rehabilitation was complete. In 2019, the White Sox's decision to invite Steve Dahl to Comiskey Park to commemorate the 40th anniversary of Disco Demolition Night was widely condemned. "I wouldn't have done it [in 1979] if I thought it would hurt anyone," Mike Veeck says in the documentary.
Nile Rodgers could see the backlash gathering in April when he told Rolling Stone, "Disco is the new black sheep of the family, so everyone has to jump on it". Two days before Disco Demolition Night, the New York Times published a column called Discophobia, in which Robert Vare equated disco with national decline: "The Disco Decade is one of glitter and gloss, without substance, subtlety or more than surface sexuality… After the lofty expectations, passions and disappointments of the 1960s, we have the passive resignation and glitzy paroxysms of the Disco 1970s."
Even in a world without "Disco Sucks", then, pop music would have been ready to move on. In his book Major Labels, the critic Kelefa Sanneh argues that the disco crash made way for new forms of blockbuster dance-pop such as Michael Jackson's Thriller and Madonna's Like a Virgin (produced by a rejuvenated Nile Rodgers), not to mention the rise of hip-hop and the birth of house music. (In a pleasing twist, the first ever house record, On and On by Jesse Saunders, was co-written by Vince Lawrence, who had been an usher at Comiskey Park on 13 July 1979.) Far from dying, dance music became more innovative and diverse. Modern club culture is indebted to the rise of disco but also to its fall”.
PHOTO CREDIT: Getty Images
A night steeped in racism, hatred, homophobia and anger, the Disco Demolition Night was more than a dislike of a genre. It was more political than that. A concerted effort to crush Black music. The Guardian’s Alexis Petridis wrote about one of music’s most notorious events in a feature from 2019:
“Forty years on, Disco Demolition Night remains one of the most controversial events in pop history. Last month, when the White Sox commemorated its anniversary, it attracted widespread criticism from Billboard to Vice and the Economist, of a kind that was absent in 1979. Then, only Dave Marsh of Rolling Stone suggested that there was something distinctly ugly about the vast crowd of white men publicly destroying music predominantly made by black artists, dominated by female stars and with a core audience that was, at least initially, largely gay. “White males, 18 to 34, are the most likely to see disco as the product of homosexuals, blacks and Latins, and … to respond to appeals to wipe out such threats to their security.”
Dahl remains defiant. He didn’t respond to a request for an interview for this feature, but made his position clear in the 2016 book Disco Demolition: The Night Disco Died. “I’m worn out from defending myself as a racist homophobe,” he wrote. “The event was not anti-racist, not anti-gay … we were just kids pissing on a musical genre.” Moreover, he was defending “the Chicago rock’n’roll lifestyle” from an unwanted musical invasion. The rise of disco to mainstream success on the back of Saturday Night Fever’s unexpected success was “a repudiation of all things rough – like rock’n’roll and bar nights” and “demean[ed] the ordinary life that kids inhabited”.
To understand Disco Demolition Night, you have to understand how commercially dominant disco had become in the US at the time. Of the 16 singles that made the top of the US chart in the first half of 1979, only three were not disco tracks. The previous year, disco singles had been No 1 for 37 weeks out of 52. “In any big city in America, you could turn the radio dial and catch disco on as many as five or more stations,” says Alice Echols, cultural historian, academic and author of Hot Stuff: Disco and the Remaking of American Culture. “It had pushed AOR not to the margins precisely, but classic rock didn’t have the dominance on radio that it once had. Live music venues were increasingly switching over to disco.”
This didn’t please everyone. “Even though record labels were making a lot of money off disco, they were holding their nose,” she says. “They were worried about it crashing, but they wanted it to crash so they could go back to classic rock. There was also a grassroots anti-disco movement, a national effort on the part of people involved with AOR. There were people who thought it threatened their livelihoods, because of its gobbling up of live venues; there were people who just thought it sounded plastic and synthetic and commercial; there were people who were just nakedly racist and homophobic.”
Nichols says that disco’s dominance was, for some of the haters, inseparable from issues such as busing and affirmative action, initiatives designed to reduce racial segregation in US schools and colleges. Fear of disco, she says, was partly “the fear that American identity was no longer synonymous with whiteness. DJs in Detroit formed a disco vigilante group called the Disco Dux Klan. Originally, their efforts were going to involve wearing white sheets and robes – they got rid of that part of it. And then there were people like Steve Dahl, for whom disco represented a sort of emasculation: you couldn’t wear a scruffy T-shirt and jeans, you had to get dressed up and, worst of all, your girlfriend or wife expected you to humiliate yourself by fucking dancing. Some of the push back against disco also had to do with feminism.”
Whatever the reasons behind it, Disco Demolition Night had a startling and immediate impact. Radio stations that had switched to disco switched back to rock. The Grammy awards cancelled their best-disco-recording category after only one year. Chic, who as Echols points out, “had made millions of dollars for Atlantic Records since 1977” – Le Freak was the biggest-selling single in the label’s history – found “suddenly no one at the label would take their calls”. Even disco labels were changing the designs of 12in-single sleeves to make their products look less like disco records. In the second half of 1979, only one disco single – Michael Jackson’s Don’t Stop Til You Get Enough – made US No 1, for a solitary week”.
PHOTO CREDIT: Paul Natkin/Getty Images
I will finish by looking more at 1979 and the radical shifts in terms of sound and tastes. How radio stations more or less ignored Disco in favour of harder sounds. Maybe not entirely racist and homophobic, it was clear there was a new need to promote Rock and music considered more masculine and ‘important’. The fact that, in July, we mark forty-five years of this horrifying moment. Now Disco has found a new generation and artists. It is very much present today. People would not have imagined back in 1979. Although artists like Madonna brought Disco into their music in the 1980s, it was declare the genre was a less prominent currency after 1979. Now, it is such an important part of modern Pop. The New York Times wrote in 2023 about a PBS documentary, The War on Disco. That documentary explored the backlash against the genre and the issues of race, gender and sexuality that informed it:
“All subcultures have their tipping points, and disco’s began in earnest in 1977. The year brought “Saturday Night Fever,” the smash hit movie about a blue-collar Brooklynite (a star-making performance from John Travolta) who escapes his rough reality by cutting loose on the dance floor. Inspired by the movie, middle-aged thrill seekers began dressing up in white polyester and hitting the scene. The same year saw the opening of Studio 54 in Manhattan, which became famous for its beautiful-people clientele and forbidding door policy.
“There was this image of the crowd outside the door on the news, with people being divided into winners and losers,” said DeNooyer, the “War on Disco” producer. “And the majority were losers because they didn’t get by the rope. It was an image that spoke powerfully, and it certainly encouraged a view of exclusivity.”
At least one man had reason to take it all personally. Steve Dahl was a radio personality for Chicago’s WDAI, spinning album rock and speaking to and for the white macho culture synonymous with that music. On Christmas Eve in 1978 Dahl lost his job when the station switched to a disco format, a popular move in those days. He didn’t take the news well. Jumping to WLUP, Dahl launched a “Disco Sucks” campaign and, together with the White Sox promotions director Mike Veeck, spearheaded Disco Demolition Night.
Organizers expected around 20,000 fans on July 12, 1979. Instead, they got around 50,000, some of whom sneaked in for free. Admission was 98 cents (WLUP’s frequency was 97.9), leaving attendees plenty of leftover cash for beer. Located in the mostly white, working-class neighborhood of Bridgeport, Comiskey Park had a built-in anti-disco clientele.
During the first game of the doubleheader, fans threw records, firecrackers and liquor bottles onto the field. By the time the crate of records was blown up, the place was going nuts, with patrons storming the field and rendering it unplayable. The White Sox had to forfeit the second game.
There were other anti-disco protests around the country in the late ’70s, but none so visible or of greater consequence. As the film recounts, reaction was swift; radio consultants soon began steering toward nondisco formats. “Disco Demolition Night was a real factor, and it did happen very quickly,” DeNooyer said. “And we hear from artists in the film who experienced that.” Gigs started drying up almost immediately.
Commercial oversaturation didn’t help. Disco parodies were becoming rampant, including a memorable one in the 1980 comedy “Airplane!,” and novelty songs had been around since Rick Dees’ “Disco Duck” in 1976 (followed up by the lesser-known “Dis-Gorilla” in 1977). But the film makes clear that the Disco Demolition fiasco and resultant coverage was a major factor in the death of disco’s mainstream appeal.
“The War on Disco” also features a 2016 interview with Dahl, who insists racism and homophobia had nothing to do with that particular display of anti-disco fervor. Demolition Night attendees who were interviewed for the film echo this sentiment.
“I would not dispute that is their truth,” Brooks said. “But I think one of the insidious ways that white supremacy has done a number on this country is that it permeates every aspect of our cultural lives. People don’t want to be told that they’re entangled in something that’s not entirely of their control.”
It’s also important to note that disco didn’t die so much as its more mainstream forms ceased to be relevant. The music and the culture morphed into other dance-ready genres including house music, which ironically emerged in Chicago. When you go out and cut loose to electronic dance music, or EDM, you are paying homage to disco, whether you know it or not. The beat is still pulsating. The sexual and racial identities remain eclectic. The Who may have bid “Sister Disco” goodbye in their 1978 song, but the original spirit lives on. As Brooks put it, “Its vibrancy and its innovations just continued to gain momentum once the spotlight moved away from it”.
PHOTO CREDIT: Chicago History Museum, via PBS
The Specials, XTC, David Bowie and The Cure were among the artists who were signalling change. They were not new artists, but I feel there was extra demand and push of their music. It was a period of transition. Even in 1979, there were albums with Disco at their heart or in their bones. From Michael’s Jackson’s Off the Wall to ABBA’s Voulez-Vous through to Donna Summer’s Bad Girls and Chic’s Risqué, there were signs that the genre was still very much commercial and popular. I don’t think that the Disco Demolition Night was the reaction and voice of the majority in the U.S. It was a tough time for Disco. In 1980, the legendary Studio closed after only three years. Its owners, Steve Rubell and Ian Schrager, were convicted of tax evasion. Perhaps the sad last nail in the coffin. I have been thinking about the quality and importance of music in 1979 without considering Disco. It would be unthinkable to see today something like the Disco Demolition Night. If Pop or Rap were given the same treatment. There was this building hatred and discrimination that manifested in a stunt that did a lot of damage. It was not a case of cheap publicity. It fuelled and fostered attitudes of racism and homophobia music wider afield than Boston. Attitudes of ignorance and aggression towards Disco artists, music and culture. I guess there have always been conflicts between groups of music fans through the decades. This was much more poisonous and political. Not really about the sound and what the music represented. I hope, on 12th July, we look at why the Disco Demolition Night took place, its impact and repercussions. How Disco did die out but has become reborn and reshaped. It is being moulded and revitalised by artists today. We should mark forty-five years of a major event in music history to appreciate Disco culture and examine how we got to a point in time where something like the Disco Demolition Night could occur. As we have seen and has been proven in years since…
DISCO could never be crushed.