Disco Demolition Night by Todd Taylor

CIVIL RIGHTS… AND EXPLOSIONS
Bill Veeck, Jr. was owner of the Chicago White Sox in 1979. Veeck had been a journeyman baseball club owner and a staunch supporter of civil rights.

In 1947, Veeck hired the American League’s first black player, Larry Doby. A year later, he signed forty-two-year-old Negro League pitching legend Satchel Paige to a contract, making Paige the oldest rookie ever to play professional baseball. Although Veeck had an artificial leg, he participated in a day-long civil rights march in Selma, Alabama in March 1965, without the use of crutches. Fellow baseball club owners often derisively likened Veeck to circus huckster PT Barnum: a sucker for a good promotion.

Veeck’s accomplishments forever changed the face and tenor of baseball. He was the first owner to introduce fireworks displays after games. At Comiskey Park, he developed and deployed the “Monster,” which was an enormous, garish, Willy-Wonka-inspired scoreboard. It came with sirens, sound effects, flashing lights, and multicolored pinwheels. It also shot fireworks whenever the White Sox hit a home run. As a fan of the fans, another Veeck innovation was the picnic area in the ballpark. He created this by replacing portions of the left field walls with wire screens and setting up picnic tables under the seating areas. (1)

On May 2, the Detroit Tigers vs. Chicago White Sox game at Comiskey was rained out. American League rules called for the game to be made up at the teams’ next meeting in Chicago.
The 1979 Chicago White Sox were “second-rate,” to put it nicely. More bluntly, they sucked pretty hard. At 40-46, they were twenty-two games out before the All-Star break. Average attendance was slightly more than 10,000 fans.

On July 12, the White Sox were scheduled for a twilight doubleheader against the equally struggling Detroit Tigers to make up for the previously rained-out game. The preceding night’s game had drawn only 15,520 fans.

Veeck put his son Mike—and White Sox marketing director—in charge of getting asses in seats. Bill didn’t balk or blush when his son brought up the idea of a promotion, an event hyperbolically billed to “bring an end to the disco era.” Bill lived in hyperbole when it came to promotion. It didn’t sound like that big of deal.

Mike Veeck had been listening to a twenty-four-year-old DJ, Steve Dahl, on the radio. Dahl was planning to blow up disco records in a shopping mall.

“I called him at 10:05 AM, as soon as he got off the air,” Mike said, “and offered him the chance to do that at Comiskey Park. He was going to do it in front of three thousand kids. It didn’t take long to convince him he could do it in front of forty thousand kids.” The planned promotion was a joint effort between the White Sox and Chicago radio station WLUP-FM, The Loop, and also involved station Promotion Director Dave Logan and Sales Manager Jeff Schwartz.

The promotion promised the presence of Steve Dahl and the official “Rock Girl” of the station, Lorelei (2), who was featured in all of the radio station’s advertisements. Disco had become a personal battle for Dahl, not just an abstract potshot or a woefully easy musical target. Previously, Dahl gained popularity in Chicago at FM rock station WDAI. In 1978, WDAI abandoned its AOR rock format. It embraced disco and changed its name to “Disco DAI.” This prompted an abrupt and unexpected end to Dahl’s show and employment at the station. He and the station parted ways on Christmas Eve in 1978. Happy holidays, Steve.

Disco’s ubiquity couldn’t be denied. Saturday Night Fever, the Bee Gees, and Donna Summer swarmed the airwaves. Kermit the Frog sang “Disco Frog” on Sesame Street in 1979. That same year, a band called Chic (3) entered 1979 riding the very top of disco’s rollercoaster. Their debut single, “Le Freak,” sold a million copies within a month. It hit number one in America, where it remained for six weeks. According to Billboard, it was the third most popular song of 1979. (One of Chic’s founders, Nile Rogers denies that Chic was disco. Rogers stated that, “People couldn’t tell the difference between us and Lipps Inc.” Fair enough. I still can’t tell the difference. I’m no discomusicologist.)

After parting ways with WDAI, Dahl landed on his feet at WLUP. The Loop’s format had recently changed from light to hard rock. Dahl’s fans followed him and echoed his pro-rock, anti-disco sentiments. Dahl smashed disco records over his head. Dahl mugged for the cameras taking bites out of disco records.

Dahl also cited philosophical, dermatological, and classic Marxist reasons for his disdain for this particular genre of music: “Disco is a disease. It’s a thing you have to be near-perfect to get into. You have to have perfect hair and a three-piece suit, and musically it’s just the same song with different words… I’m allergic to gold jewelry, hate the taste of piña coladas, and I’m a cheapskate.”

Dahl had formed an on-air anti-disco, card-carrying army called the “Insane Coho Lips.” The strange name was an amalgamation of The Insane Unknowns (4), a well-known South Side street gang, and the Coho salmon fishing fleet in Burnham Harbor that Dahl passed every morning on his way to work. The Cohos lofted Dahl’s “disco sucks” banner and zealously attacked a form of music they considered exclusive, expensive, and empty. They got their class war on by attacking the soundtrack to the hedonism of the elite. They also just liked having fun and laughing along with Dahl.

Disco-makers viewed Dahl and his listener-army differently. “It was the rockers versus the discoers,” said Harry Wayne Casey, frontman of Florida band KC And The Sunshine Band (5). “We were like Elvis in the fifties and the Beatles in the sixties. Of course there was a backlash. We changed music… I had two hits on the charts, ‘Please Don’t Go’ and ‘Yes I’m Ready.’… I just figured the guy [Dahl] was an idiot.”

The meeting between the White Sox and The Loops’ management went well. A name for the promotion was agreed upon: Disco Demolition Night. It was a simple promotion distilled to a short sentence: Let’s blow up some disco records.

AN OUNCE OF PRECAUTION?

The plan called for admission at the double header to be 98 cents for any fan who brought a disco record. The ticket price matched The Loop’s frequency. FM 98. The hope was that 20,000 disco records would be collected by the ticket takers, placed in a big box in the outfield, and the box would be detonated between the two games by Dahl, signifying the hopeful and abrupt end to the disco era.

Disco Demolition Night overlapped the ballpark’s Teen Night. The consensus was they needed more than Cub Scout and Boy Scout troops to fill the stands. It was predicted and hoped of the promotion would draw 25,000—10,000 of which would be new patrons to the old ballpark. Sox Park had a seating capacity of 52,000.

“I was really just trying to get through the evening without being humiliated,” Dahl said. “I mean, how many people could you draw? A few thousand? The park would still look empty.”

“Rock Girl” Lorelei threw out the first ball.

Once the gates opened at the beginning of the first game, it quickly became apparent that Disco Demolition Night would exceed all attendance expectations.

“I remember forking over a Bee Gees disc for 98 cents and, as I recall, they actually gave back two cents in change when turning in the voucher with your dollar at the ticket box,” said fan Glenn McCullom.

“We brought the Saturday Night Fever Soundtrack, a double record, which was good for two of us to get in,” said K.M. Lisowski, another fan.

Attendees also brought along and strung up homemade banners, primarily made from bed sheets. On TV, the “Disco Sucks” battle cry could be clearly read from throughout the ball park. Not televised were the “What do Linda Lovelace and disco have in common?” banner and the more political, fuck-you-Australia “Welcome Home Skylab” banner (6).

Fans made giant paper airplanes with the Lorelei posters and threw them onto the field. Other fans came ready for a battle against disco with bottle rockets and long cardboard tubes. The empty center of wrapping paper rolls served nicely as suburban bazookas. For reasons still unexplained, the second base umpire was particularly targeted for bottle rocket attacks.

Beer vendor sales were brisk. Brian Pegg reported that, “On Disco Demolition night, I sold forty-nine cases of beer. Ordinarily, twenty cases were considered an outstanding total for a single night game. Thirty to thirty-five would be pretty good for a double header.” Math showed that’s just shy of two-and-a-half times the usual volume of beer sales at a typical game. Raging against disco proved a thirsty business.

After 20,000 disco records were collected for demolition, ticket takers let fans keep their records—proof of how unprepared they were by the boosted attendance. “So that was a bad start,” Dahl admitted. “And then things just kind of got worse from there.”

In short order, fans glided records like Frisbees all through the park. The game was stopped constantly as disco records were thrown out on the field. Vinyl’s sharp. It shatters, leaves ragged edges.

“They would slice around you and stick in the ground,” Rusty Staub, player representative for the Detroit Tigers said. “It wasn’t just one, it was many. Oh, god almighty, I’ve never seen anything so dangerous in my life. I begged the guys to put on their batting helmets.” Defensive players. Guys in the outfield. Not just guys batting. Ron LeFlore, a former convict and center fielder for Detroit, was visibly afraid. In the later innings of the first game, fans remember the Tigers running back to the dugout, then removing their helmets.

The Tigers were not the sole targets of the record fling-a-thon. Chicago pitcher Ed Farmer picked up a record that had sailed by closely to his face. He was confused. It was a Beach Boys record. It wasn’t even disco.

Other fans suffered from the flight of records.

“Later that night,” Sox fan K.M. Lisowski said, “my friend’s husband got hit in the head with a ‘Frisbeed’ record, and I remember getting cut with the edge of a broken 45 that had been flung our way.”

David Schaffer, director of operations for the Sox, said that security had been beefed up from thirty to forty-five men in anticipation of a large crowd.

Another miscalculation: This wasn’t the typical baseball crowd. It was a rock concert-type crowd.

The White Sox lost to the Tigers 4-1 in the first game.

A SUCCESSFUL DISASTER

The umpires ordered the grounds crew to clear debris from the warning track between innings of the first game.

By the end of the first game, the ballpark was filled well beyond its maximum capacity. On the books, paid fan attendance for the evening was 47,795. Over 12,000 extra fans crammed in. The majority snuck in though the Sox’s porous security. The official tally didn’t include the fans who brought ladders, formed human ladders, or shimmied up drain pipes into the park.

It was at this time that Mike Veeck, along with The Loop and the Sox organization, realized they had woefully underestimated the draw of disco’s suckage. “It turned out there were 60,000 inside the park and another 30,000 to 40,000 on the streets around the park,” Veeck said “Traffic was backed up all the way out to O’Hare Airport. Who had any idea that many kids would come out? WLUP was a 5,000-watt station, it wasn’t a giant.”

The Chicago police department closed exits on the Dan Ryan Expressway at 31st and 35th streets to discourage late-arriving fans. Traffic gridlock stretched for miles around Chicago’s South Side.

Dahl was dressed like a character in M*A*S*H. He wore an Army jacket bedazzled with fishing lures over a Hawaiian shirt. An Army helmet was strapped loosely to his head. He was ushered to the outfield in a Jeep with his second-in-command Garry Meier, Lorelei, and body guards. Dahl admits he hadn’t prepared a speech.

“Steve started to get the crowd excited as only Steve could do, chanting “disco sucks” over and over,” Lorelei said. “I think that mantra was probably the kicker—the swarming sound was getting louder and louder. It was deafening.” The crowd was going bananas in their seats.

The big box filled with the fans’ 20,000 disco records had been brought out to center field. A short burst of fireworks were touched off in a row in front of the box. That lead up to an impressive percussive charge, which detonated a fireworks “bomb.” Vinyl disco records were blown to bits. Some continued to burn after they landed in fragments on the field.

“That blowed up real good!” Dahl exclaimed.

NOW WOULD BE A GREAT TIME FOR A PLAN... RUN!

Dahl didn’t really have a plan after the explosion, except to get off the field, maybe go home, maybe watch the second game. There was no advisement from anyone with a microphone to the fans to stay in their seats, to remain calm. Folks were riled up.

Here’s a recap: big explosion; adrenaline-high levels of “disco sucks!” excitement in the air; a large, mostly empty, beautifully-lit, largely-untouchable field beckoning fans; crazy-low security; and a silence so pregnant that its water was about to break.

This is when the trouble began.

What started at 8:40 PM was a confluence of several key factors.

Outside the park, some of the temporary ticket booths—staffed with older people—were being rocked by disgruntled fans who couldn’t get inside the park. Some of the yellow-jacketed security guards were moved off the field to take care of that issue.

“What happened next was the worst thing that could possibly happen,” said Mike Veeck. “The crowd began thinking as one and they realized there were only thirty-five to forty police [security] on the field. When a crowd begins thinking as one, there is no such thing as ‘crowd control.’”

Conservatively, on the field, it was one security guard per 1,333 fans. Not good odds for reestablishing order.

“It was like popcorn. Boom! Everyone jumped on the field.” One fan stated. The fans’ feeling of rushing the field was, “sort of like the pennant celebration we would never get.”

The players who had returned to the field for pre-game warm-ups for the second game quickly retreated.

“Before I knew it, I had a bodyguard on either side of me,” Lorelei remembered, “Each grabbed one of my upper arms and literally lifted me off the ground, running with me towards the Jeep, throwing me in the back. Steve jumped in the Jeep and we started rolling. I looked behind me and understood why I was whisked off—crowds of people were streaming onto the field.”

The Jeep drove out of the stadium and onto the street. It looped around and its occupants snuck back inside as 10,000 people ran onto the field.

Among the revelers was actor Michael Clarke Duncan (the big dude in The Green Mile), a Chicago South Side native. He was among the first fans to run onto the field and slide into third base. Other fans took the roles of umpires, calling both “safe!” and “out!” Fans took bases. (An usher salvaged first base.) Fans dug out home plate. The pitching rubber was stolen from the infield. Duncan admitted to stealing a bat from the dugout.

Bill Veeck’s “Monster” flashed, “Please Return to Your Seats.”

Harry Caray stared down in disbelief at the field from his broadcast booth as the batting cage was wheeled out to the outfield then trounced, disassembled, and set on fire along with the remains of the disco records and the big box. A shirtless fan climbed to the top of one of the foul poles. Another fire burned in centerfield. The head groundskeeper shook his head in disbelief as the benches from the special picnic area were dragged out into the middle of the field and set ablaze. Revelers jumped through that fire.

Harry Caray tried to restore order by yelling “Holy cow!” over the public address system. He then asked the crowd, “What say we all regain our seats so we can play baseball again?” When none of the excitable fans took their seats, a tremor of horror resonated in Harry Caray’s voice. “People, people, please get off the field!” Jimmy Piersall, Caray’s broadcasting partner, was openly disgusted and repeated over and over that, “These are not baseball fans here. These kids are obviously on something more than beer.”

Unruly? Absolutely.

Chicago Sun-Times columnist Bill Gleason called the event “an unmitigated horror… They were vulgarians who came to Comiskey Park to be ruffians.” But people weren’t physically violent to one another. This was no replay of the 1968 Democratic National Convention bloodbath eleven years prior in the same city. Fans were really worked up; they got all hyper. Much of the crowd, once on the field, simply milled around aimlessly. Some sat in the infield.

Fans from the upper decks couldn’t get down to the field. More than half of the fans on the lower deck didn’t go on the field and began chanting, “Na na na na, na na na na, hey assholes, sit down.”

Bill Veeck looked at a quickly dissipating silver lining. “The great thing was all the kids were stoned,” he said. “Had we had drunks to deal with, then we would have had some trouble. The kids were really docile.”

At 9:08 PM the Chicago police department’s tactical force entered Sox Park and efficiently took care of business clearing the field. Within five minutes, they had the situation under control. The cops had no trouble dispersing the crowd. The police and players showed an incredible amount of restraint in their dealings with the unruly revelers. This was not a true riot. True riots offer resistance to law enforcement and provide cops ample opportunity to work on their batting averages. This event was a gang load of partiers not given enough supervision. It was a bunch of nutty kids.

After the police sweep, Bill Veeck returned to the playing field and grabbed a microphone. “Please keep your rain checks,” he told the crowd. “We’ll tell you what to do with them once we figure it out ourselves.” Behind the scenes, Veeck was busy rescheduling the game as part of a Sunday doubleheader against the Tigers.

Surveying a field strewn with bottles, exploded cherry bombs, smoldering patches in the midfield, and broken disco records, The Tigers countered that the Sox forfeit on the grounds that the delay was not a result of “an act of God.” Tigers manager Sparky Anderson was vehement that his players would not take the field in any case due to safety concerns.

Umpire crew chief Dave Phillips agreed with Sparky and stated, “The field is not in playable condition.” Home plate had been uprooted from the ground and hadn’t been measured. The grounds crew was showing no effort to put it properly back in.

The White Sox were ordered by American League president Lee MacPhail to forfeit the second game of the twi-night doubleheader. It was only the fourth forfeit in American League history (7).

At the end of the evening, six people reported mild injuries. One vendor broke a hip. Thirty-nine people were arrested for disorderly conduct.

The Sox lost both games.

GET YOUR BIG FOAM POINTY FINGER OUT

The local Chicago press wasn’t kind to Dahl, the Veecks, or Disco Demolition Night. Predictably, the media asked, “What went wrong? How did this disturbance by youthful crowds happen?”

Channel 7’s Rosemarie Gulley’s insight was as good as any for this cocktail of hyperactivity: “The explosion, the heat, and a lot of drugs.”

Other talking head snippets called the promotion “a gimmick that’s gone too far,” and “They created a climate… (word not omitted, just a pause) “an error in planning.” (End of statement, back to footage.)

Deputy Chief Charles Pepp invented one word and one new meaning in his short explanation of the promotion. “It was a good methology to get a crowd, but it overworked.” (Italics mine.) Bill Veeck echoed the chief’s sentiment. “Sometimes a promotion can work too well.”

Later, a report caught up with Dahl and his thoughts on the Demolition.

Reporter: “You don’t feel culpable?”

Dahl: “I’m not a security guard.”

Reporter: “Would you do it again?”

Dahl: “Yes… with more security guards.”

Later, Dahl—in a less pragmatic mood—expressed some regret. “I’ve always felt bad. I’m a baseball fan. I’ve always felt bad that the second game was canceled.”

Two days later, Sox Park hosted a large concert called The Loop’s “Day in the Park,” featuring Eddie Money, Molly Hatchet, Thin Lizzy, Santana, and Journey, further ripping up the outfield for the rest of the season.

IT’LL BE SO FAMOUS, IT’LL BE INFAMOUS

Predictably, Disco Demolition Night (8) was criticized throughout the disco community.

Unpredictably, Sox promoter Mike Veeck was blacklisted from Major League Baseball. “After that, I didn’t work for ten years,” Veeck said. “The second that first guy shimmied down the outfield wall, I knew my life was over... It backfired, and I took the heat. And it cost me personally. I went down the sewer. I didn’t work in baseball until 1989.”

Twenty-two years after Disco Demolition Night—in Miami, Florida on Thursday, July 13, 2001—Mike Veeck, then a marketing consultant for the Florida Marlins, asked Harry Wayne Casey of KC And The Sunshine Band, to accept his apology on behalf of the entire disco world. Casey accepted. “I feel redeemed,” Casey said. “It gives closure to the whole thing… It wasn’t a very nice thing to do. There was no reason or call for it. It was a direct hit on myself and other artists who did that for a living. I didn’t bash his baseball team.”

So, did Dahl kill disco? Maybe yes. Maybe no. Maybe both. Most likely not. Well, no.

“You know, I think that it was a fad,” Dahl said. “And it was probably on its way out. But I think it hastened its demise. I don’t want to take credit for killing it.” Later, however, the Bee Gees personally told Dahl that he did, in fact, destroy disco.

It feels good to blame someone else and to know the exact moment things started heading downhill for good. It’s much easier than looking inside.

The disco juggernaut was still able to prance around in sparkly platforms and satin bodysuits behind bubble machines and into the national consciousness post-Disco Demolition Night. On Wednesday, October 17, 1979, The Pittsburgh Pirates won the World Series in the best of seven games against the Baltimore Orioles. The Pirates proudly blasted Sister Sledge’s hit disco anthem “We Are Family” as their adopted theme song throughout the final game of the 1979 season.

Todd Taylor is co-editor and co-publisher of Razorcake fanzine. When he was eight years old, sitting on a Pic’n’Save floor, looking up at the blasting speaker overhead, he wanted to become a millionaire and then spend every last cent of it making it illegal to play whatever was playing over the loudspeaker. (It just happened to be disco.) Separately, he also vowed to never again wear bell bottoms, starting the day when he could buy his own big boy pants. He also thanks Mary Clare Stevens and Kari Hamanaka for their assistance with this piece.


FOOTNOTES:

1 Bill Veeck, in 1960, added player’s surnames on the back of their uniforms. Veeck also installed a shower behind the speaker horns in the center field bleachers for fans to cool off on hot summer days.

2 Lorelei Shark: “I even did a spot with Pete Rose and another with a baby orangutan.”
“Yes, I am those famous biting lips in The Rocky Horror Picture Show poster.”

3 Chic’s Nile Rogers had been an active Black Panther at the age of sixteen. Duran Duran’s bassist John Taylor had envisioned the band he was in as a combination of Chic and the Sex Pistols.

4 The Insane Unknowns itself was an amalgamation. Two gangs, the Division Skulls and the Unknown Souls, merged in 1967 and called themselves the Insane Unknowns.

5 K.C and the Sunshine Band took their name from lead vocalist Harry Wayne Casey’s last name (“KC”) and the “Sunshine Band” from KC’s home state of Florida, “The Sunshine State.” KC originally called the band KC & The Sunshine Junkanoo Band.

6 Skylab was engineered to fail within five years. The day before, on July 11th, 1979, NASA’s version of duct taping a pair of Chucks to get every last step out of them—called Skylab—broke up in the atmosphere and scattered its remains across the Australian outback.

7 Other forfeits in baseball history: June 4, 1974’s ten-cent beer night fiasco and forfeiture in Cleveland preceded this event. On August 10, 1995 30,000 Dodger fans throwing baseballs onto the field followed this event.

8 Steve Dahl has copyrighted the term “Disco Demolition.”