Almost four decades ago, a struggling major league baseball team, a young deejay and a musical genre collided to create a small burst of anarchy in center field at Comiskey Park.

Originally billed as "Teen Night," the events of July 12, 1979, have entered Chicago lore as Disco Demolition, and they have survived in history when other promotional stunts gone awry have not.


"What's most astounding to me is on the spot I was villainized. It was not a universally loved promotion," Mike Veeck, then a young White Sox promotions guy (and the son of team owner Bill), said this week. "Now I've become the grandfather, not quite avuncular but kind of, of an interesting moment in time that everyone celebrates except the White Sox."

"The Tribune sells the shirts!" said Lance Tawzer, curator of a new exhibit about Disco Demolition, pointing to an Elmhurst History Museum wall and a vintage-looking shirt ($22) commemorating the event with name, date and a drawing of Comiskey Park, albeit with a peaceful outfield scene. "You guys sell those shirts. I bought that from your store."

The event has entered T-shirt territory in part because the deejay, Steve Dahl, is still around, now the afternoon guy on WLS-AM 890, the flagship station of the Chicago White Sox, and one of the most prominent Sox fans in town. The military-style helmet he wore on the field that day is on loan to the Baseball Hall of Fame, Tawzer said.

It's lived on because it was such a compelling collision of cultures: the tribalism of sports, the tribalism of music and the big businesses, a baseball team and a radio station, trying to harness those powers for profit.

And it continues to resonate because new generations interpret it with fresh eyes. Most recently Disco Demolition has been painted as mainstream culture (rock music) trying to quash the dance music (disco) first championed in African-American, Latino and gay clubs.

Dahl, in an interview this week, rejected that line of interpretation, that the event was "racist and homophobic. That's revisionist identity politics," he said. But more on that later.

The latest example of the evening's life after death is "Disco Demolition: The Night Disco Died," the engaging small exhibition newly opened at the Elmhurst museum that's earned a reputation for taking on big topics in Chicago culture: beer-making, the Cubs-Sox rivalry, the Popeil infomercial family.

Using the 2016 book of the same title as its basis, but adorned with scores of artifacts from the era, the show guides visitors through all the forces that had to come together to create a small bonfire in the outfield between games of a doubleheader and the White Sox being forced to forfeit the second of the two games.

Nearly as compelling as the re-creation of the event is the exhibit's time-capsule qualities. From the checkerboard guitar of Cheap Trick's Rick Nielsen to the borderline softball uniform worn by White Sox catcher Mike Colbern that day to the wall-card discourse on the rise of disco music and rock fans' rebellion against it, the show takes visitors back to a not-at-all simpler and definitely less aesthetically pleasing time.

Vintage AV devices such as an eight-track player start up the video snippets accompanying each section, drawn from a 2004 documentary on Disco Demolition. There is a "Disco Sucks" belt buckle that Dahl himself owns, a copy of his 1979 Rod Stewart parody single "Do You Think I'm Disco" and, using even more polyester than the Sox uniforms of that day, a sort of re-creation of John Travolta's "Saturday Night Fever" white three-piece suit.

The wall text is by Chicago writer Dave Hoekstra, who co-wrote the book with Dahl and photographer Paul Natkin, whose pictures are featured throughout. Hoekstra, in the exhibit, talks about the White Sox as a struggling team that year and one whose owner and his son were big fans of Barnumesque showmanship.

Dahl, Hoekstra writes, had already been fired from his first Chicago station, WDAI, when it decided to switch formats and become an all-disco station in late 1978. At his new station, WLUP-FM, the 24-year-old deejay would start a disco record, scratch the turntable needle across the record and then drop in the sound of an explosion.

Meanwhile WLUP, known as "The Loop," was an emerging powerhouse that embraced the rock 'n' roll ethos of black T-shirts and big power chords. General sales manager Jeff Schwartz made the connection between Comiskey's exploding scoreboard and Dahl's on-air destruction of disco records.

"Between Veeck and Schwartz, the concept ... was born," the exhibit says. Fans of the station at 97.9 FM could get into a Sox doubleheader for just 98 cents "if they brought a disco record to be blown up."


Many more people showed up than expected, Veeck said this week, interviewed by phone at the ballpark of the St. Paul Saints, a minor-league team he co-owns with actor Bill Murray. "We were just really understaffed," he said.

And after Dahl, driving on the field in a Jeep, orchestrated the explosion of a bin full of the disco records people had brought, thousands of fans stormed the field, hurling records, stealing the bases, getting a small fire started.

It made national news, of course, although the greatest damage was to the field and, via the forfeit, to the Sox's record. There were no injuries and only 39 arrests. Tribune sports columnist David Israel, the next day, was less outraged than many: "As far as riots go, this one was fairly lovely," he wrote. "I mean, it isn't going to make anyone forget Grant Park of the Days of Rage."

That quote is on the wall at the exhibit. So is a framed letter that Bill Veeck sent to a fan from Elgin.

"I apologize abjectly," it says in part. "The lack of taste of many of the non-fans, both as to behavior and signs and slogans, was as offensive to me as it was to you. There was a great deal of unpleasantness that evening and I assure you promotions of this nature will never be repeated."

Veeck issued the man a refund for July 12.

"It was an unexpected yet incredibly fun night of Rock and Roll mayhem with a little baseball thrown in," Dahl said via email this week. "Just a bunch of '70's kids blowing off a little steam. It has come to be a yearly reminder of how old I'm getting."

Another reminder: The rock deejay who fronted the infamous anti-disco event emailed his answers after attending the musical "The King and I."

Disco Demolition has also been a touchstone for his career, he said: "If they weren't there themselves, almost everybody knows someone who was. I've heard so many great stories over the years. I wasn't on the field when it was overrun, so it's always fun to hear from the people who were."

But there is this notion — brought home recently in an NPR story, podcast and elsewhere — that the event was, on some deeper level, about suppression of minority culture. The exhibit addresses that head-on, laying out the pros and cons of the argument in a wall card. "How do you look into the hearts of 60,000 attendees and 10,000 wall jumpers and judge whether race or homophobia was a catalyst?" it asks.

The decision to put "Controversy" in quotes, though, tells you which way it leans.


Hoekstra, reached by phone while he was visiting with Veeck, said he was in attendance that night and considers the cultural suppression argument "the furthest thing from the truth."

By 1979, he pointed out, disco was no longer underground. The Rolling Stones had made "Miss You" and Rod Stewart "Do Ya Think I'm Sexy," and highly produced disco records were dominating Billboard charts.

The anti-disco movement was a cultural force that Dahl and Disco Demolition tapped into, but it did not create. And if some rock fans yearned for a more organic sound — Tom Petty and Cheap Trick get nods in the show — or if they feared some of their favorite bands were selling out, that is, on a certain level, understandable.

Either way, though, the show points out, the event helped fuel the rise of Chicago house music and, subsequently, EDM, calling it "the greatest contribution Disco Demolition made to American popular culture."

Frankie Knuckles, the father of house, made the case himself.

"I witnessed that caper that Steve Dahl pulled," Knuckles told the Tribune, in a quote the show reproduces. "It scared the record companies so they stopped signing disco artists. So we created our own thing to fill the gap."

It is, perhaps, telling that the most colorful and visually interesting aspect of the exhibition is the section on disco. Just as telling, though, was when some music arose from the speaker in that area, a former hard-rock band that took a stab at the new music for a May 1979 release.

"That's Kiss' disco song, 'I Was Made for Lovin' You,'" Tawzer said. "That's the moment when they jumped that shark."

Former Comiskey organist Nancy Faust attended one of the exhibition's ancillary events, Tawzer said, and related that she tried to play "Take Me Out to the Ball Game" to quell the crowd that had jumped onto the field. It was no match for the combustible merger of rock, disco and a little modest rebellion.

"Disco Demolition: The Night Disco Died," through Oct. 8, Elmhurst History Museum, 120 E. Park Ave., Elmhurst. Free; 630-833-1457 or www.elmhursthistory.org

Twitter @StevenKJohnson


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