Disco Sucks 25 Years On

[AKA]

Disco Sucks 25 Years On

Demolition DJ recalls rally gone wrong

By Andrew Dansby
Rolling Stone

With the benefit of hindsight, sure, there was an undercurrent of violence in the premise, but the promotion sounded simple enough. The Chicago White Sox were looking for a way to put fans in the seats, so admission to a twi-night double header against the Detroit Tigers was $0.98 . . . and a disco LP. The plan was to place the latter in a box between the games and blow it to smithereens. The former, well, it was a sufficiently modest price to allow for ample beer consumption. What organizers hadn't counted on was rioting by drunken fans, partial destruction of the field at Comiskey Park and the cancellation of the second game.

The event known as Disco Demolition Night -- picked by ESPN as one of the ten most shocking moments in baseball history and by RollingStone.com as one of fifty Baseball Moments That Rocked -- celebrates its twenty-fifth anniversary today. DJ Steve Dahl, who might be responsible for the concept of a Disco Demolition if not exactly its implementation into Major League Baseball, will be celebrating the event with a party at Harry Carey's bar in Chicago following a documentary on the event to air on PBS this evening.

In 1979, Dahl found himself at a radio station that was changing formats. He left and continued to work in a rock format at Chicago's the Loop station. He'd do daily on-air disco demolitions with sound effects, "just to make fun of the place I used to work," he says. "It was actually a fairly self-serving pursuit, but as I continued to make fun of the format, it became clear that I'd tapped into some kind of sentiment."

A sales manager at the Loop and Mike Veeck, son of White Sox owner Bill Veeck, had the idea to take the idea to the next step. The team had typically hosted a Teen Night promotion that was sponsored by a local Top Forty station. The two decided to ice Teen Night in favor of Disco Demolition, though Dahl said that he had some initial doubts that were quickly quelled. "I really didn't expect it to be a success," he says. "It takes many people to fill up a baseball stadium. Even if you drew an additional 10,000 people for a game, it could still look empty. Nobody was more shocked than I was."

Feverish "fans" (it's believed that attendees that night were more rock rabble rousers than Sox faithful) filled the stadium with thousands left outside, ticketless, despite having a dollar and disco record in hand. Then the first big logistical error became apparent. "The first problem," Dahl says, "is that they stopped collecting the albums when they had enough to fill the bin [to be blown up on the field]. So people started using them as Frisbees. There were guys in the outfield wearing batting helmets to protect themselves."

The mayhem only grew worse after the first game ended. Dahl, clad in military garb and a helmet, took to the field and led a "Disco sucks!" chant before blasting the records to the great dancefloor in the sky. Then the fans grew unruly, taking to the field, setting fires and tearing up a batting cage.

Dahl has teamed with Bob Odenkirk (Mr. Show) and Jim Zulevic, a pair of alumni from Chicago's famed Second City comedy theater that launched the careers of John Belushi, Bill Murray and others, to write a feature film screenplay based on the event.

Disco didn't quite die on July 12, 1979. The Pittsburgh Pirates embraced Sister Sledge's "We Are Family" as their anthem during a championship run later that same season. And many purveyors of today's alternative rock are serving up dancefloor-tinged music that owe a bit of retro-chicness to disco.

Despite taking a military-colored stance against disco a quarter century ago, Dahl isn't so vehement today. "I'm a musician myself, so I have a hard time telling anybody what kind of music to make," he says. "I gotta be honest with you, it wasn't so much about the music as it was about the lifestyle. The whole white, three-piece suit thing. In my mind, when I think about what Disco Demolition was about, it was about eighteen-to-twenty-four-year-old disenfranchised rock guys like myself not wanting to have to look like that to get laid."

[ABlairican Pie]

Oh yeah, I remember the summer of 1979 where KISW was "torpedo-ing" the Village People's "In the Navy". There was also a 45 single I later bought called "Kill the Bee Gees" by a local punk band the Accident. God, I wish I still had that 45.

[Dean Winchester]

it's time to do the same for hip hop, LOL

[Penny Lane]

Originally posted by AKA
Disco Sucks 25 Years On

Demolition DJ recalls rally gone wrong

By Andrew Dansby
Rolling Stone

With the benefit of hindsight, sure, there was an undercurrent of violence in the premise, but the promotion sounded simple enough. The Chicago White Sox were looking for a way to put fans in the seats, so admission to a twi-night double header against the Detroit Tigers was $0.98 . . . and a disco LP. The plan was to place the latter in a box between the games and blow it to smithereens. The former, well, it was a sufficiently modest price to allow for ample beer consumption. What organizers hadn't counted on was rioting by drunken fans, partial destruction of the field at Comiskey Park and the cancellation of the second game.

The event known as Disco Demolition Night -- picked by ESPN as one of the ten most shocking moments in baseball history and by RollingStone.com as one of fifty Baseball Moments That Rocked -- celebrates its twenty-fifth anniversary today. DJ Steve Dahl, who might be responsible for the concept of a Disco Demolition if not exactly its implementation into Major League Baseball, will be celebrating the event with a party at Harry Carey's bar in Chicago following a documentary on the event to air on PBS this evening.

In 1979, Dahl found himself at a radio station that was changing formats. He left and continued to work in a rock format at Chicago's the Loop station. He'd do daily on-air disco demolitions with sound effects, "just to make fun of the place I used to work," he says. "It was actually a fairly self-serving pursuit, but as I continued to make fun of the format, it became clear that I'd tapped into some kind of sentiment."

A sales manager at the Loop and Mike Veeck, son of White Sox owner Bill Veeck, had the idea to take the idea to the next step. The team had typically hosted a Teen Night promotion that was sponsored by a local Top Forty station. The two decided to ice Teen Night in favor of Disco Demolition, though Dahl said that he had some initial doubts that were quickly quelled. "I really didn't expect it to be a success," he says. "It takes many people to fill up a baseball stadium. Even if you drew an additional 10,000 people for a game, it could still look empty. Nobody was more shocked than I was."

Feverish "fans" (it's believed that attendees that night were more rock rabble rousers than Sox faithful) filled the stadium with thousands left outside, ticketless, despite having a dollar and disco record in hand. Then the first big logistical error became apparent. "The first problem," Dahl says, "is that they stopped collecting the albums when they had enough to fill the bin [to be blown up on the field]. So people started using them as Frisbees. There were guys in the outfield wearing batting helmets to protect themselves."

The mayhem only grew worse after the first game ended. Dahl, clad in military garb and a helmet, took to the field and led a "Disco sucks!" chant before blasting the records to the great dancefloor in the sky. Then the fans grew unruly, taking to the field, setting fires and tearing up a batting cage.

Dahl has teamed with Bob Odenkirk (Mr. Show) and Jim Zulevic, a pair of alumni from Chicago's famed Second City comedy theater that launched the careers of John Belushi, Bill Murray and others, to write a feature film screenplay based on the event.

Disco didn't quite die on July 12, 1979. The Pittsburgh Pirates embraced Sister Sledge's "We Are Family" as their anthem during a championship run later that same season. And many purveyors of today's alternative rock are serving up dancefloor-tinged music that owe a bit of retro-chicness to disco.

Despite taking a military-colored stance against disco a quarter century ago, Dahl isn't so vehement today. "I'm a musician myself, so I have a hard time telling anybody what kind of music to make," he says. "I gotta be honest with you, it wasn't so much about the music as it was about the lifestyle. The whole white, three-piece suit thing. In my mind, when I think about what Disco Demolition was about, it was about eighteen-to-twenty-four-year-old disenfranchised rock guys like myself not wanting to have to look like that to get laid."

LOL I remember that baseball game well! The big Disco/rock debate! I watched that Tigers/ White Sox game.Being from Michigan I was a big Tiger fan at the time .I remember cheering against Disco but Now I have to say that I like Disco(especially the Beegees) I love the Bee Gees!

[Janice]

I love disco.

[tvje]

Disco is like any other type of music. Some of it is good, some of it is bad.

I felt, if you don't like Disco, don't listen to it. No need to go crazy and destroy a bunch of records. And by buying the Disco records to destroy them, your still giving the Disco people your money.

But I understand how the anti - Disco people felt. I feel the samy way about late 90's- early 00's Teen Pop. But if it is on the radio, I change the radio dial, or if is on tv, I change the channel. I don't go out, buy Britney Spears CDs (making her and her record label richer in the process) and destroy them. That is crazy.

[musicradio77]

Disco lives and I always will! I listened to all sorts of music in addition to disco. That was sad that it happened 25 years ago that lots of fans who doesn't like disco very much during a baseball game at the old Kamisky Park where the White Sox played the Tigers. As I always say, disco lives on!

[Tuesday Weld]

I happen to like disco.

[musicradio77]

After its departure from disco, hip hop was starting to explode and the Sugarhill Gang's "Rapper's Delight" was born.

[Cactus Jack]

I like disco

[Nighthawk76]

I'm not a huge fan of Disco overall, but I love The Bee Gees and Saturday Night Fever!

[vashti1999]

It's funny how the Bee Gees were thought of as a disco act when they'd been recording around 15 years or so before SNF came along. Aside from that, I LOVE disco.

[AKA]

I think that there's some great disco out there, but the reason the genre failed is because the majority of it was dreck.

One of the final nails in the coffin, I believe, was when rock acts (The Rolling Stones, Rod Stewart, The Beach Boys) started to capitalize on the craze, yielding mostly sickeningly bad results.

[AKA]

The Beach Boys' disco song is so weird it has to be heard.

The year is 1979, and two years earlier, the group saw The Bee Gees (whose style in the early '60s was similar to that of The Beach Boys) garner a huge amount of success with their soundtrack to Saturday Night Fever (which, if you've been hiding under a rock for 27 years, was disco).

Hoping to endure the same resurgence, The Beach Boys, along with producers Bruce Johnston and Curt Becher, came up with "Here Comes The Night," which is an unapologetic disco remake of a twelve-year-old Beach Boys song that originally appeared on the 1967 album Wild Honey.

The new "Here Comes The Night" can be found on 1979's L.A. (Light Album), The Beach Boys' first album for CBS Records.

Since it's just so... bizarre... I decided to rip a copy of it and upload it to my webspace for a limited time so you folks can here it.

So, click here for disco, Beach Boys-style... all ten minutes, fifty-two seconds of it. It could very-well be what killed disco.

"Here Comes The Night" was released as a single in June, 1979 and peaked at number 40 on the U.S. Billboard charts.

[Dr. Jazz]

Originally posted by AKA
I think that there's some great disco out there, but the reason the genre failed is because the majority of it was dreck.

One of the final nails in the coffin, I believe, was when rock acts (The Rolling Stones, Rod Stewart, The Beach Boys) started to capitalize on the craze, yielding mostly sickeningly bad results.

Mick Jagger still says that "Miss You" is not a disco song. Most people disagree, but I agree with him to a point. It has a "disco" sound to it, which at the time it seemed everyone was going disco, but the stones are a rock band and I believe there was a little touch of rock to "Miss You." And a little harmonica too. It's still one of my favorite RS songs.

Also, I have never liked how some people refer to certain bands - namely Kool & The Gang - as a "disco" band. Kool & The Gang had hits before & after the disco era. They were originally a jazzy funk band. They had like maybe two big hits that were considered "disco" and that was all it took for them to forever be labeled as a disco band. "Cherish", "Joanna", "Misled" were all hits they had after disco faded, but that doesn't seem to matter.