Early on the morning of July 12, Mike Veeck met with a group of off-duty Chicago police who would be working security. They thought that was hilarious. But by 4 o'clock that afternoon, about that many had lined up outside Comiskey.
Andrew Brown was one of them. He was there on an outing with his Cub Scout den. This was a big deal. Andrew and his fellow Cub Scouts entered Comiskey Park. But when he made his way to his seat along the first base side, Andrew noticed that something was very different. There were no empty seats. He was there, too. As the first game began, he noticed that not all of the paying customers had left their disco records in boxes at the gates, as they were supposed to do.
So it was starting to become a little mayhem-ish. In the bottom of the ninth of the first game, chants of "disco sucks" almost drowned out the sounds of baseball. The White Sox lost the first game. He wore a helmet and army fatigues. The Jeep stopped in center field. Dahl grabbed a microphone and whipped the crowd of about 48, into a frenzy. He led a chant of "Disco sucks. We rock 'n' rollers will resist, and we will triumph! From there, Dahl directed attention to a large box in center field.
It was full of some of the disco records that had been collected at the gates. Then someone lit a fuse. Went out through the centerfield gate. It was safe to say that I had probably mistaken what was going to happen next. As Dahl made his way back to the press box, he had no idea what was going on. But Dave Gaborek saw the whole thing. And then that caused an avalanche of all the kids just running on the field and burning banners. He watched as team officials took the field.
One of them was Sox owner Bill Veeck, who used a wooden leg as the result of a war injury. And he can't move his peg leg out of the sod. But they just couldn't control the crowd.
It got too many people on the field to control. Some pulled up turf in centerfield and fanned the flames that were already consuming small piles of disco vinyl. With the chaos raging all around them, the umpiring crew and team officials discussed whether the field had been rendered unplayable. But the White Sox had to forfeit the second game. It was just the fourth forfeiture in modern MLB history. Bill Veeck sold the team in , and Mike was out of baseball for 10 years.
Originally, their efforts were going to involve wearing white sheets and robes — they got rid of that part of it. 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. Even disco labels were changing the designs of 12in-single sleeves to make their products look less like disco records.
Within a short period of time, Warner Bros decided there was no longer a disco department. We became the dance music department — disco was a dirty word.
Virtually every record label did the same thing. In some senses, the after-effects of Disco Demolition went on for years. As Echols notes, the Rolling Stones had frequently toured with black artists, including Stevie Wonder and Ike and Tina Turner, who were warmly received by their audience, but when Prince supported them in , he was booed offstage.
In others, it proved an entirely pyrrhic victory. Ironically, the most revolutionary development took place in Chicago, the city where disco had supposedly been killed: inspired in equal part by the raw disco edits of DJ Frankie Knuckles and European electronic music by Fad Gadget and Kraftwerk, former Comiskey Park usher Vince Lawrence and Jesse Saunders co-wrote the first house single, On and On , in Meanwhile, the two biggest stars of the s — Michael Jackson and Madonna — were disco acts in all but name.
Commemorating Disco Demolition Night in the US political climate of makes a strange kind of sense, though. Disco Demolition: the night they tried to crush black music. Disco inferno Steve Dahl beside the dumpster full of records collected for Disco Demolition Night. Funky town: Chicago nightclubs in the s — in pictures. Read more.
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