As Chicago shock jock Steve Dahl drove onto the field at Comiskey Park on July 12, 1979, the 50,000-strong crowd in the stands was already fired up and nearly ready to explode. It wasn’t the loss of the Chicago White Sox that was filling the air with tension, or the double-header encore that was scheduled to begin shortly.
What had so many people in the baseball stadium ready to rage that night was disco, or rather their hatred of the genre’s smooth, danceable grooves. The people in this crowd were rock ’n’ rollers and they were angry with how disco had pushed their music off the charts, out of the clubs, and into seeming irrelevance.
From the middle of the baseball diamond, 24-year-old Dahl grabbed his mic and began to inflame the crowd further, proclaiming the Disco Demolition Night gathering “officially the world’s largest anti-disco rally” and vowing, “We’re never gonna let ‘em forget it! They’re not gonna shove it down our throats! We rock ’n’ rollers will resist, and we will triumph!”
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His stunt—doing his typical shock-jock banter culminating in blowing up an entire box of disco records, a move he had become known for—was officially sanctioned by the owners of the White Sox as a gimmick to get fans in seats. What no one had anticipated was the number of people who would storm the stadium, eager for a chance to demonstrate their anti-disco fever or that the passionate crowd would turn into an out-of-control mob that would destroy the field and shut down Comiskey Park, leaving a mark on America’s cultural history long after the smoke cleared.
With disco in, rock was now out
In the 1970s, disco swept through the country like a forest fire. Its spark ignited in the underground party scenes of communities of color and the gay community, gained traction as popular nightclubs in music meccas like NYC realized its power, and then jumped to the air waves to become a mainstream sensation.
For a decade, disco culture was unstoppable and unavoidable. Its electric beats, frenzied dance marathons, and open embrace of the counterculture—drugs, sex, and the full spectrum of sexuality—lit up a generation. This was not the prim and proper American Bandstand of the 1960s; disco was dominated by the sultry voices of women and Black artists and by the groovy moves of dancers whose faces were scarce in the audience of Dick Clark’s popular ABC show.
Disco may have been an all-consuming force for many, but for others the shift was startling. When one song or genre wins on the Billboard charts, another gets shuffled to the bottom. With disco in, rock was now out.
Dahl’s issue was not that he hated disco music, though he was a rock DJ. Rather, his objection to disco was personal. He had only been working at the station that brought him to Chicago for a few short months when management decided to go all-in on disco. Both rock and Dahl were let go. While he found a new job at a different station, he couldn’t get over the slight. Disco had done him dirty, now he would do the same to it.
In an interview in 2016, Dahl explained his ensuing anti-disco campaign: “That’s all it was—it was only me being mad that I lost my job.” As part of his radio bit, he began blowing up disco records on air and found that it “struck a chord,” so he just “went with it.”
What he may not have realized when he first began destroying disco was that he was tapping into the growing anti-disco backlash. This faction was mostly white and mostly male and they objected to feeling pushed aside by a genre of music that celebrated Blackness, queerness, and feminism.
In a 1979 year-end review, music journalist Dave Marsh, who was one of the earliest critics to call out the seedy undertones of Disco Demolition Night, wrote in Rolling Stone that “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, but broadcasting has never been an especially civil-libertarian medium.
The Chicago White Sox management had nothing against disco. What they did have was a desire to do anything they could to sell more tickets during the poorly attended season. When Mike Veeck, the son of the Chicago White Sox’s owner, heard about Dahl’s disco destroying antics, he had an idea.
On July 12, the White Sox were scheduled to play a double header at home. What if they branded the game “Disco Demolition Night” and offered cheap tickets to any fan who brought a disco record to the ticket office? During the break between games, Dahl would take the mic and blow up the collected records.
The plan was soon set in motion, but none of the parties involved had any idea of how successful it would be. When Veeck met with local law enforcement, he estimated that the event would bring in 35,000 people. The Chicago PD laughed at him. Dahl says he wasn’t thrilled to be participating because he didn’t think anyone would show up.
It wasn’t until he took to the field after the first game that he realized he was wildly wrong.
By the end of the first game, around 50,000 people had filled the stands. More were turned away at the door. As the night became increasingly rowdy, people tried to sneak into the stadium through the holes in the tops of the walls.
The first game was not going well for the White Sox. But things got worse towards the end as the crowd grew increasingly boisterous. Most of them weren’t there to see baseball; they were there to riot against disco and they were ready to get the party started. Mid-play, records began to rain down on the field as loud chants of “Disco sucks!” drowned out the action.
“The first disc that was thrown missed me by a couple of inches–missed the right side of my head by a couple of inches,” said White Sox Outfielder Rusty Torres. “They’re going. ‘Rusty, disco sucks!’ and being real loud and ‘We’re going to kill disco today’ and ‘Disco is dead’ and this and that. And I’m going, ‘No, I was just in a discotheque last night. How are you going to achieve that?’”
When the first game ended, the crowd was tense and ready to let loose. When Dahl drove onto the field, he was both frightened and pleased by how many people were there. He was also worried that he would lose his job.
“People were throwing cherry bombs and beers at us, and those were the people that liked us. So it was that kind of a night,” Dahl said.
He hadn’t prepared any specific remarks, so he grabbed the mic and let loose with his normal shock jock routine of hyping up the crowd, though this one was already ready to combust. “We took all the disco records that you brought tonight. We have them in a giant box and we’re going to blow them up real good,” he shouted. He lit the fuse to the giant box filled with disco records.
It’s hard to imagine that the explosion that ensued was condoned by White Sox management. Pieces of vinyl flew into the air. A hole was blown into center field, with chunks of the baseball field flying into the stands, and smoke filled the arena and stayed there on the windless night.
With the deed done, Dahl took a final ride around the stadium as his fans cheered, and then he left the field. It was time for the second game to begin.
Baseball players trickled back onto their singed diamond and began to warm up, but the anti-disco crowd wasn’t done. First a few, then a flood of people stormed the field. There was no one there to stop them. The mob, fired up on booze, pot, and anti-disco fever, began to run the bases. They dug up home plate and slid down the giant foul ball pole. They broke glasses full of beer and lit records that hadn’t been put in the box on fire. One witness claimed to have seen a couple getting it on behind third base. It was utter mayhem on the field at Comiskey Park.
White Sox owner Bill Veeck tried to gain control, pleading over the intercom for everyone to, “Please clear the park or we’ll have to call off the game and close the park.” Announcer Harry Caray pleaded with people to return to their seats so the next game could start, even going so far as to sing a round of “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” in an effort to soothe the music-mad mob.
But no one listened. In the end, the White Sox had to forfeit a game that could clearly no longer be played on the increasingly ruined field and the riot police were called in to deal with the crowd.
As the smoke cleared, the regretful White Sox management got started on cleaning up their field. Thirty-nine rock fans sobered up to realize they now faced the legal consequences of arrest. And a handful of people were being treated for minor wounds.
Disco Demolition Night went down as an insane, historic night in music history. But unlike other events, its meaning has grown more complex as the years have passed.
While it was originally seen by most as a one-off chaotic event that pitted two genres of music against each other, some have pointed out more recently that there were darker undertones to the anti-disco sentiment. They suggest that rather than commemorating Disco Demolition Night as a notable musical event, what it really represented was a frenzy of homophobia and racism toward a genre of music that had been started and carried to popularity by minority groups.
Dahl rejects these claims, at least as far as his role was concerned. “I don’t know where that comes from. I’d like to have somebody show me some proof of that. We didn’t blow up Jimi Hendrix records. We didn’t blow up David Bowie records. It was really just a rock n roll vs disco thing,” he says.
But while Dahl denies having any knowledge at the time of a more sinister motive behind the anti-disco backlash, others say that it was all too present.
Dahl might not have seen a Jimi Hendrix record in the mix, but Vince Lawrence who was an usher at Comiskey Park the night of July 12, said a lot of people weren’t just bringing in disco records—they also had R&B and funk records to destroy.
“I want to say maybe the person bringing the record just made a mistake. But given the amount of mistakes I witnessed, why weren’t there any Air Supply or Cheap Trick records in the bins? No Carpenters records—they weren’t rock’n’roll, right? It was just disco records and black records in the dumpster,” Lawrence told The Guardian.
Disco’s viral popularity began to die out at the turn of the decade, though as happens with the evolution of music, it is still very much alive and well today in the house music that it birthed. Rock rose again for a time, surely to the delight of the fans of Disco Demolition Night, but then came hip-hop and rap and ’90s grunge and pop. The rollercoaster of musical popularity is always twisting and turning. No amount of mayhem can stop it.
