October 2, 2025 • 38 mins
Human history is absolutely riddled with ridiculous inventions. Some are cartoonishly specific. Others, like the disco ball, serve no purpose other than amusement -- and there's absolutely nothing wrong with that. In today's episode, Ben, Noel and Max dive into the dazzling (get it?) history of the 'myriad reflector.'
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Ridiculous History is a production of iHeartRadio. Welcome back to
(00:27):
the show, fellow Ridiculous Historians. Thank you, as always so
much for tuning in. We can't wait to introduce you
to the Man, the myth, the legend, the super producer,
mister Max Tracksuit, Beil Bottoms, Williams, Shiny Boy, Shiny Boy Williams.
Speaker 2 (00:46):
Wait, so you did not wait that I have been introduced?
Speaker 3 (00:50):
There he is.
Speaker 1 (00:51):
That's Noel Brown, you heard as well. I am Ben
Bullen as well, and Noel. We are very excited about
this one. We've been working on it for a minute
a while ago, sixty of them.
Speaker 3 (01:06):
A while ago.
Speaker 1 (01:09):
Of course, we were talking off air, as we do,
and I think we were all three of us just mystified.
But you know what it was. It was one of
our conversations about how strange things seem normal, and you,
in an earlier pitch meeting, you said, guys, do you
(01:30):
think about disco balls?
Speaker 3 (01:33):
Yeah?
Speaker 4 (01:33):
And it's funny because that was a while back and
it hadn't really occurred to me at the time that
disco balls has sort of seen a bit of a resurgence,
a renaissance, a renaissance, a disco ball renaissance in the
form of like TikTok's decor things and projects, art projects,
crafts and stuff like that, and also pinterest even as
(01:54):
far back as and little.
Speaker 1 (01:56):
Homemade disco balls, you know.
Speaker 4 (01:58):
Yep, at c stores in like fruit shaped disco balls
and anything kind of sparkly and mirrored, and a lot
of this kind of new disco ball boom times can
be traced back to like a lot of things trends
to COVID times, but even further back than that, I think,
you know, both of us probably pictured starting an episode
(02:20):
about the history of disco balls, talking about you know,
disco but whether you grew up you know, cut cutting
rugs in the East Village disco texts of the seventies,
or like Ben and I have been to an LCD
sound System show in the last decade or so. Oh,
that's massive disco ball they have on their stage and
it's an incredible lighting effect, which we'll get to. Or
(02:42):
speaking of lighting effects, you're just into having sparkly twinkle
lights dancing.
Speaker 3 (02:48):
Around your bedroom or living room.
Speaker 4 (02:50):
You're probably familiar with the iconic lighting effects slash art
object colloquially known as the disco ball, but then I
think we both thought we'd probably start this conversation about
the history of disco balls talking about disco Yes, not
the case though.
Speaker 1 (03:04):
Eh, well, we're going in a different direction as you
as you called it there, Noel, I want to credit
where due is very important to me personally, so I
just want to thank you in advance for being our
research associate on this excellent work here. You you dug in,
(03:28):
you did the research, and you've delivered a lot of
stuff I didn't know about disco balls. So I'm going
to learn from you.
Speaker 4 (03:36):
Where you know, I get a little pet project and
will be in my bonnet every now and again. But
this is a It definitely intersects with a lot of
other stuff that I'm interested in, and I personally own
about five disco balls in my house. But like we teased,
would you believe that the origins of this delightful mirroage
sphere or date back way way way wait, wait, wait, wait,
(03:59):
way further than John Travoltz's iconic disco dancing in Saturday
Night Fever.
Speaker 3 (04:03):
So let us go. Let's take it back way back.
Speaker 4 (04:06):
Not to the psychedelic sixties or the booming fifties or
what is it the wartime forties or the Roaring twenties.
Let's go way way back to the early nineteen hundreds,
where we joined the beginning of the story of the
disco ball already in progress.
Speaker 1 (04:20):
Oh my gosh, this is a phrase that you taught
me through your research the Myriad Reflector. You might remember
the slightly lesser beloved Arcade Fire album Reflector that was
produced by James A. Murphy of LCD sound System and
had a bit of a disco feel to it. And
they're talking about they have the most popular song on
(04:42):
there was called Reflector. Pretty certain that is a reference
to the original name for the disco ball, which was.
Speaker 3 (04:49):
The Myriad Reflector.
Speaker 4 (04:51):
We, as we've mentioned, typically think of it as linked
to the disco era of the seventies. However, the first
kind of piece of decor let's call it, or a
lighting effect or whatever, actually dates all the way back
to eighteen ninety seven. I was off by three years,
but hey, you know, not too bad to good old Charlestown, Massachusetts,
(05:14):
where members of a local electricians union were getting together
for their annual Electricians Ball. Oh so yeah, like they did,
and they decided to take their electrician skills and parlay
those into a.
Speaker 3 (05:27):
Cool kind of showpiece. I guess for this shindick.
Speaker 1 (05:32):
Okay, yeah, yeah yeah. They were getting this from vinepaar
dot com. Their idea was that they would make a thing,
as you said, Noel, a flex really a showpiece ornament
that could emit light visible for miles around Boston. And
(05:52):
to do this they created invented their own incandescent lamps
that would cast a no number of colors and a
carbon arc that are all reflected off what they called,
as you said, a mirror ball. And we first learned
about this in the Electrical Worker, which was the Electricians'
(06:15):
union magazine trade paper whatever you might call it. One
hundred percent the bulletin posted in the magazine promised a
new novelty that would change a hall into a brilliant
fairy land of flashing, changing living colors, a place of
a million colored sparks darting and dancing, chasing one another
(06:36):
into every nook and corner, filling the hall with dancing
fireflies of one thousand hues.
Speaker 4 (06:42):
Gotta give them notes for using dancing a future too
many times, or at least but the rest of this
is it not poetry?
Speaker 1 (06:50):
I love it in a.
Speaker 3 (06:51):
Place, a place span of a million colored sparks.
Speaker 1 (06:54):
I like the way you did the intonation of thousand
hues by the way, thank you.
Speaker 3 (06:59):
Yeah, it feels like a place that I want to
go to.
Speaker 1 (07:03):
Yeah, there it is. And this was at the time
a one off thing, a very special unique boy. It
was custom made for the Gup Party. Yeah, they weren't
planning to make a hundred of these and sell them
throughout New England until a guy named Louis Bernard Woost
(07:24):
Woeeste applied for a patent because the streets were watching.
And so in nineteen seventeen, as he said, this guy
goes to our friends at the US Patent Office and
he says, I got a crazy pitch. You heard he reflectors, Right,
you've heard of the word myriad, Well, why not a
(07:45):
myriad reflector.
Speaker 4 (07:47):
Which just means a lot of reflectors, that's all it means.
Myria just means many, you know, multitudes of a plenty
and you know, so ultimately, while it may sound like
a clever marketing kind of name, it really is just
like a descriptive for the purposes of filing the patents
which we're going to read from.
Speaker 1 (08:07):
He does get the patent. He's got a company out
there in the Natty, Cincinnati. I don't know if they
called it the Natty in nineteen seventeen, but in the
nineteen twenties they said, look, we're going to fill all
your favorite clubs, all your dance holes with these dancing
fireflies of a thousand que thousand hues.
Speaker 5 (08:31):
So that's good.
Speaker 3 (08:31):
That's more marketing speak right there. Let's let's read a
little bit more from the inventor himself. When it gets
a little more dry, but not too much less delightful,
you want to you want to take this one, Ben,
and we go back and forth.
Speaker 1 (08:45):
Yeah, let's round, Robin. Sounds great, all right. So, pulling
from the actual facts, patent shout out Lauren Vogelbaum, our
buddy says, my invention relates to reflectors to be used
for exhibition or theatrical purpose is for the production of
effects effects.
Speaker 3 (09:04):
Exactly.
Speaker 1 (09:04):
Love that.
Speaker 4 (09:05):
You got to think about this too, man, because now
we think of like effects, lighting.
Speaker 3 (09:09):
Effects, special effects, visual effects.
Speaker 4 (09:12):
But this is I think a pretty novel use of
this term. He needed something to call it right like,
and maybe I'm wrong, maybe I'm reaching here, but it
does feel like as early as this was file that
this is probably where you start to see this term,
if not coined by him, it's around this time where
you start to see maybe more theatrical devices that are
(09:33):
there to generate an effect. Although now that I think
about it, Ben, I bet you even farther back than that,
because it makes me think of the kind of tricks
that mediums would pull, you know, back in the day
and having dry ice and various things. So I'm probably reaching.
Speaker 1 (09:47):
Well, every every patent is a pitch. I think we're
with you on this wouldn't because.
Speaker 4 (09:51):
No, no, I just mean the term effects feels like
there may have been a time where it was a
little more novel than than it is today.
Speaker 3 (09:58):
And I might misjudging it timeline here a little bit,
but it just was worth mentioning.
Speaker 1 (10:03):
But he goes on. Luis goes on to specify and
explain what he means by effects.
Speaker 3 (10:10):
He does.
Speaker 4 (10:10):
He goes on in the patent, the object of my
invention is to produce a myriad reflector reflecting surfaces, the
same to be arranged in such a manner that the
several reflections shall be projected at varying angles. The device
itself being arranged so that it may be rotated or
otherwise moved, so that the reflections may create spectacular effects.
Speaker 1 (10:33):
Okay, all right, we're escalating a little.
Speaker 3 (10:36):
We are.
Speaker 1 (10:36):
We started with effects and now it's a spectacular effect.
Speaker 3 (10:40):
That's true.
Speaker 1 (10:40):
I can hear I can hear Louie gassing himself up
as he's writing this.
Speaker 4 (10:45):
One hundred recent It is fun to read these patterns
sometimes because while there is some sparkly no pun intended
language in here, in general it is just a very
cut and dry description of what makes the thing unique,
and that's obviously very necessary for a pattern.
Speaker 3 (10:59):
We'll reread it.
Speaker 4 (11:00):
These last two points that basically outlines those exact things
what makes it unique.
Speaker 1 (11:06):
Right, and it's design, which you have to prove for
a patent, and do check out our excellent series on
patents and IP. I can call it excellent because we
didn't write it. Our pal Max did.
Speaker 3 (11:20):
So here we go.
Speaker 2 (11:21):
Somehow it is not absolutely boring, and I don't know how.
Speaker 4 (11:25):
Oh, I really agree this stuff is fascinating. I think
all of us says. We definitely try to. We're like
a dog with a bone with patents and IP.
Speaker 1 (11:34):
So here is the first point, we'll round Robin this.
Louis specifically goes to Uncle Sam and describes what we
would call the disco ball. He says, you guys know mirrors, right,
He doesn't say that, but that's his pitch. He says,
a myriad reflector comprising mirrors mounted to form a polyhedron,
(11:55):
bounded by a convex system of playing faces E L
A N E in combination with means for suspending the device,
the little thing that you hang it from, so that
it may be swung and rotated simultaneously to produce way
for it myriad reflections when light rays from an extraneous
(12:18):
source are through there on, I.
Speaker 4 (12:20):
Would argue he should have used the word external instead
of extraneous. There does an extraneous mean it's like extra
and not necessary.
Speaker 3 (12:29):
Yeah, kind of.
Speaker 1 (12:31):
External would be good because.
Speaker 4 (12:33):
It's not contained within the device and it's required separate,
like external light source not included.
Speaker 3 (12:40):
Let's just say, but, y'all, what he's.
Speaker 4 (12:42):
Doing here is very brilliantly and plainly and of course
a little dryly describing how mirrors work and the fact
that it's convex, and that is is it's arranged in
the circular or spherical array is what gives you that
massive spread and throw of these light rays as they're
reflect off of those surfaces and then bouncing in all
(13:02):
different directions, essentially in three hundred and sixty degrees in
all directions, because there's one of these on every possible
inch of the surface area of the ball. And that's
what gives you this insane coverage. And the bigger the ball,
the more insane the coverage. That LCD sound System one.
Then when they hit that for a lighting effect, it
lights up the whole theater like and it's you know,
(13:24):
if there's smoke in the room, you start to see
these just what's the word swaths of light kind of
cutting through the fog, and it's an absolutely remarkable thing
to behold. And I actually included a second point here,
but Ben pointed out off Mike that is basically the
same thing except for what Except as.
Speaker 1 (13:41):
The mirrors are separated from each other, the facets are
separated by a non reflecting subst got it, which is
why the mirror ball, the myriad reflection looks.
Speaker 3 (13:52):
Like a grid. There you go, one hundred percent, that's
exactly right.
Speaker 4 (14:02):
Let's jump into the rise fall rerise and reimagining of
the myriad reflector, or as it came to be known,
the mirror ball or the disco ball. So this company
that you talked about, Ben Stevens and Wost, we don't
know much about Stevens.
Speaker 3 (14:17):
We know about Wost, who's the one who filed the patent.
Speaker 4 (14:19):
Their flagship magnificent globe, as they marketed it. It was
twenty seven inches and covered with, as they described it,
more than twelve hundred special made mirrors.
Speaker 3 (14:30):
They were able to sell these like hotcakes to dance halls,
like you said, Ben, skating rinks, jazz clubs, nightclubs.
Speaker 4 (14:39):
This is obviously very much pre disco. This is more
in the pre war kind of swinging, you know, big
band era, right, yeah, yeah, and this.
Speaker 1 (14:49):
Has got to be a banger. When you go into
the club, you know you're in the party district. You
can go here, jazz at one of three places. Which
place are you gonna go to? You're gonna go to
the one with the mirror ball. People are space man. Yeah.
There's a nineteen twenty one copy of Illustrated World that
(15:09):
features a photograph of what we call the disco ball today,
and it says, no, this is not a photograph of
the Heavens, the Milky Way, or New Constellation. It was
made at a dance palace in Dayton, Ohio.
Speaker 3 (15:26):
Sounds like a disk at the end. There no offense
to date, No, no offense.
Speaker 1 (15:30):
We love you.
Speaker 4 (15:30):
This is hilarious, especially when you did it in that voice.
And I love the idea of a dance palace bio.
Speaker 2 (15:36):
Actually, I'm trying to think Dayton and Canton share an airport.
I actually have family in Dayton, Ohio.
Speaker 1 (15:43):
I'm sorry for your loss.
Speaker 2 (15:45):
Yeah, no, no, I am not someone who lives in
Ohio for very obvious reasons.
Speaker 4 (15:51):
Well, I'm sure there's great things about it, and it
would appear that one of those great things might have
included a disco ball, an early example of a badass
disco ball.
Speaker 1 (15:58):
Wait, wait, why are we? Why are we weirdly dissing
the Buckeye State here?
Speaker 3 (16:02):
I didn't mean too. It was my fault I started,
and I fully walk it back. Y'all are great.
Speaker 2 (16:06):
We love four and a half years of this podcast
experience of dissing Ohio, and I'm not changing now.
Speaker 3 (16:12):
All right, all right, Well, let's it's differences that make
us a good tea.
Speaker 4 (16:17):
It sure is so there was a bit of a
boom time for the disco ball followed by a bit
of an approaching bust time. A depressions came. Yeah, I
it was a bit of a depression. No one was
wanting sparkles at this point. They wanted, you know, to
be able to feed their families. So Stevens and Wost
did stop production of the disco balls, and it kind of, I.
Speaker 3 (16:36):
Don't know, took a back seat in the zeitgeist for
quite a while. Wasn't produced again until the nineteen forties
when we have a new company entering the chat ooh.
Speaker 1 (16:47):
And I love their name. Just from a writing perspective,
Omega National Products sounds like Illumination Global Dlimited.
Speaker 4 (16:55):
It does very much so, and call back to our
recent Kentucky Derby episode. This company was based in Louisville, Kentucky.
So at this point the company is has I don't know,
they're back to it. They're kind of capitalizing on some
of the popular art deco okay styles they're popular at
(17:17):
the time, modestly successful at first, but not an immediate hit.
What set the Louisville company, Omega National Products apart from
Stevens and woe's was that they weren't just making the balls.
They were making this flexible, like faux fabric y type
the sheets of mirrored material that were again in keeping
(17:40):
with that Art Deco furniture style of the era that
was super popular and you could like bedazzle stuff. You
may remember Liberaci's very you know, iconic mirrored piano that
was done using these flexible mirror ball sheets.
Speaker 1 (17:57):
Yeah. Liberacci famously the most subtle musician in history.
Speaker 3 (18:02):
Yep.
Speaker 4 (18:02):
And also I mean I got there's this incredible clip
of him from I think he was on laughing that
mega sixties show where all the like girls kind of
wore bikinis and painted their bodies and Goldie Hawn was
on it originally, I want to say. And he does
this thing where he's like, hey, young people, what you
groove in this Liberaci? And I'm here with you, And
it's like the most go home dad.
Speaker 3 (18:25):
Kind of thing you've ever seen in your life. Deedly,
do do you feeling groovy? Liberacis he's turning on, That's
what he says.
Speaker 1 (18:33):
And Omega is turning on for sure, because they are
the only source of this new miracle substance, this application
of mirrored sheets in that grid thing. They're saying, we
don't just make balls. You name an object, we can
put our mirror amalgamation upon it. And so they get
(18:56):
a bunch of clients. We're talking jukebox hauls, amusement parks.
People are coming to them and asking them to put
this stuff on any imaginable thing. But the main thing
they still love is the original mirror ball.
Speaker 3 (19:12):
That's right.
Speaker 4 (19:13):
And these things, you know, ranged in size for any budgets,
and they were produced largely by women because this is
during World War Two, and as we've talked you know
often on the podcast, the men were away and the
women took over those factory jobs, and it led to
of course the whole Rosie the Riveter thing and a
(19:33):
lot of like you know, demands for equal rights for
women because like you know, women get the job done.
Speaker 3 (19:39):
I mean, and that's absolutely true.
Speaker 4 (19:41):
And it's weird that it took this to create that outcry,
but sometimes that's what it takes, I guess, especially.
Speaker 3 (19:48):
In times where things are maybe a little more backwards.
Speaker 1 (19:50):
Dude, It's like we were saying in this is a
bit backstage, and I acknowledge this may sound pretentious, but
we have literally travel the world teaching people how to
make a good show. And maybe one day you and
I will make a good show as well.
Speaker 4 (20:07):
Yeah, who knows, maybe someone will travel to us to
teach us how to do it.
Speaker 1 (20:11):
But one of the key things that I think speaks
to Omega's brilliance here is that they decided to meet
the consumer where they're at. I think it's key to
meet people where they're at. And so they say, we're
not just going to make one size fits all mirror balls.
We're going to see if someone can just afford a
(20:33):
tiny one, A tiny boy that's.
Speaker 3 (20:35):
For you for your keys, maybe you know, put it
on your key rank.
Speaker 4 (20:38):
So yeah, no, it's they are absolutely meeting the customer
where they are six feet They're accommodating all sizes and
budgets and needs, and they go from the two inches
you mentioned, Ben to six feet in diameter. We even
see ones as large as forty eight inches, amounting to
you at the time, y'all four grand and we must
(21:01):
inflation calculator that bad boy.
Speaker 3 (21:03):
So let's can we get a Can we get a boop? Max?
Do you want a boop?
Speaker 2 (21:07):
I'll take a boop, dude, I'm booping currently, this is
a boop.
Speaker 4 (21:13):
Nineteen forty four thousand dollars. We're forty esque ish. We
don't have an exact number here in today's dollars. Twenty grand,
twenty wow, that's a lot of cheddar. That's a ball scratch.
It's a big ball, man, You got you gotta throw
down if you want to ball that size. Omega National,
to your point, Bend had the monopoly on this this product.
(21:35):
They at one point we're producing as many as ninety
percent of the world's disco balls.
Speaker 1 (21:41):
What a cool so. I love specific brags and flexes.
Speaker 3 (21:46):
I like the Glitter Company. Remember when we discussed it.
Speaker 1 (21:49):
Yeah, oh yeah, that's a good callback. I love the
idea of picture it this way. You are in the
c suite of a mega national and maybe you're going
on a date, right, You're meeting your prospective spouse in
the future, because everyone was getting married back then. And
they say, what do you do? And you say, I
(22:10):
make ninety percent of the world's disco balls, not one
hundred percent.
Speaker 3 (22:15):
No, one hundred percent. I would kill to be that person.
We know.
Speaker 1 (22:20):
The company should pointed out, continues to produce mirrored balls
disco balls for a lot of big time operations. And
you want the best, you go Omega, you go Omega?
What do you want the best? That's a free tagline.
By the way, guys, you're welcome. They've been at it
for a long time. They should know.
Speaker 4 (22:39):
It would appear that some of their high end clients
are folks like Beyonce, who really is responsible in many
ways for the resurgence of the disco ball, because it's
a big part of her or has been a big
part of her stage performances. And Madonna, I want to
say in the nineties, there might have been the late
eighties or mid eighties, like there was a concert tour
where she would merge from a giant disco ball that
(23:01):
would crack open. And they also produce them for like
film and television shows like Dancing with the Stars and
even the Academy Awards.
Speaker 1 (23:10):
Oh that makes sense. Yeah, shout out to Oscar. But
we have a question that I think is on everybody's mind.
How did the idea of the myriad reflector or the
mirrored ball become so inherently tied to the era of disco.
Speaker 4 (23:29):
Well in the nineteen seventies, we really did start to
see these guys being strung up in disco texts and
made a fixture of the zeitgeist and of pop culture.
It is tough to kind of pin down, as the
vine par article points out, exactly which club in New
(23:51):
York City first kind of brought these glowing do dads back,
but places like the Loft in the East Village in
New York played a huge role, as well as a
venue known as The Gallery, which was created by an
iconic disco booster named Nikki Siano. I just want to
(24:13):
take this opportunity to if you want to do a
deeper dive into disco that includes a lot of this stuff.
Great podcast I worked on some years ago with this
cooly cool guy named Steve Greenberg who's a record producer
and he was around during a lot of this stuff,
and he does a super deep dive into the history
of disco in the Speed of Sound podcast. We did
(24:34):
like a multi part series on disco that includes Saturday
Night Fever nineteen seventy seven, huge smash hit movie with
John Travolta where he does a very iconic disco dance
featuring a mirror ball and an unfortunate event that kind
of brought Disco to its knees the Disco Demolition Night
(24:55):
in Chicago at Comiski Park.
Speaker 1 (24:58):
Right and pretty long time fellow Ridiculous historian, you may
recall that we did an entire episode on Disco Demolition Night.
This was a pivotal moment in history. It's about forty
six years after this occurred. It was a promo event
on July twelfth, nineteen seventy nine. Long story short, do
(25:22):
check out the episode the Chicago White Sox Twilight doubleheader
against the Detroit Tigers, and it quickly fell into pandemonium
because of the activity of a guy we could call
a predecessor of a podcaster, a DJ named Steve Dahl.
He was known on WLUP ninety seven point nine Rock Yeah,
(25:46):
Pardon my Radio voice for mocking disco. He didn't like disco.
He had been fired from a previous gig because the
station switched from rock to disco, and Steve had principles.
So they asked all these fans to bring with them
a disco record when they when they came to the game,
and if you brought a disco record, you got a
(26:08):
discount on admission. You would get ninety eight cents admission
and you would lend your well, you donate your disco
vinyl to be gathered up and then blown up live
in front of the audience between the games. It did
not go well.
Speaker 3 (26:27):
It didn't go out for various reasons.
Speaker 4 (26:29):
But I don't know if we talked about this in
the episode then, but it does occur to me that,
like vinyl records are sharp, doesn't it seem like someone
could catch some shrapnel from this.
Speaker 1 (26:38):
That's exactly what happened.
Speaker 4 (26:40):
Oh okay, I'm not remembering cool check out the episode.
Speaker 2 (26:43):
It was terrible and they oversold the event and stuff
like that. I just want to jump in here and
draw a recent parallel to I know I mentioned to
you guys, but it's been referred to as Baseball fire Festival.
But this past season they held a baseball game at
I forgot which speedway was, but at of speedway event
(27:05):
and they marketed and it had the Atlanta baseball team
in it. So that was a big deal around us.
But it was like something that it had a massive
rain delay the entire time. But oh, I remember hearing
about this, and but like it's like one of these
things where it's like, oh, yeah, you heard all these
things that happened.
Speaker 3 (27:19):
It's so bad.
Speaker 2 (27:20):
And then you find out beforehand that there was like
they were selling seats that didn't face the field. They
ran out of hot dog buns before the game started,
handing people just single hot dogs and stuff.
Speaker 1 (27:33):
Throwing at them.
Speaker 3 (27:34):
So if you've.
Speaker 2 (27:35):
Heard of for the listeners out there, if you've heard
of that story that happens to year, I just wanted
you to know that Disco Demolition Night was so much worse.
Speaker 4 (27:44):
Oh my god, I mean it's outrageous. Like I didn't
even remember about the shrapnel. So do check that out.
It makes perfect sense.
Speaker 5 (27:49):
But most of the facts.
Speaker 3 (28:11):
Max with the facts.
Speaker 4 (28:12):
Indeed, most importantly I think for our purposes here is
that this really represented this shift into like almost a
demonization of disco. There already was a lot of tension
from the rockers, you know, folks that were more into
like heavier music. I imagine this era. Yeah, definitely, we've
got punk happening. Disco definitely has been around, sort of
(28:35):
maybe seen as having its having had its heyday, and
people are a little sick of it. And I'm not
saying that's wrong, but the way this was handled was
in fact wrong because Disco was, of course a huge
part of the black, Latino and queer community, that club culture,
and that musical scene, and there was a sense at
(28:57):
this event that folks were not only prote and the music,
but protesting the people that made it and.
Speaker 3 (29:05):
Becoming a culture war.
Speaker 1 (29:13):
We know that disco, being the new kid on the
block genre wise, was clearly going to be vulnerable to
attack and criticism and mockery. And this is what leads
folks like Nile Rogers, co founder of a band called
Sheik the Disco Band.
Speaker 3 (29:32):
Uh.
Speaker 1 (29:32):
He looked at the footage the day after this happened
in Kmisky Park and he said to us, it felt
like a Nazi book burning. Thank goodness they didn't burn
all the disco records, because I unreservedly love a lot
of disco. I'm stupid super into it.
Speaker 4 (29:52):
See, I love it very much as well. I love
the hypnotic kind of repulsiveness of it. I love a
lot of the arrangements.
Speaker 3 (30:00):
Fun are you kiddy? Yeah?
Speaker 4 (30:02):
Absolutely, And I mean I really love a lot of
electronic music as well, and a lot of that was
begat from disco culture, like techno and house music and
four on the Floor that beats that is so propulsive
and hypnotics Kroud rock over in Germany, things like craft
work and can and things like that. While they were
pre disco, there is a similar hypnotic kind of what's
(30:26):
the word that Alex Williams likes to use a lot
motoric beat quality that is sort of this trance inducing
sort of type of music.
Speaker 3 (30:33):
So red meat for me.
Speaker 1 (30:35):
That's our composer, Alex Williams. You'll recognize them at the
beginning and end of every episode.
Speaker 3 (30:40):
Mm hmm, you sure will. But I guess we can
wrap this episode.
Speaker 4 (30:43):
I'm just kind of bringing it back to what we
talked about at the top, this idea of disco balls.
Disco has been having a resurgeon since the early two thousands, man.
I mean, like a lot of that New York sleeze
kind of music like the Yeah Yeah yeahs, and a
lot of that dance punk kind of stuff like The
Rapture and Phoenix even and you know, a lot of
(31:04):
bands have been truly honoring that four on the floor
and kind of disco quality LCD sound system as we mentioned.
But as a art object, disco balls have really kind
of come back in a big way since.
Speaker 1 (31:19):
COVID right, yeah, yeah, and I think this is something
a lot of us have encountered in our own neck
of the Global Woods. The lockdown, Max, give me dramatic
music here in a word where you can't go outside.
What do you do to make your home more interesting?
(31:42):
Disco ball?
Speaker 3 (31:44):
That's right.
Speaker 1 (31:44):
People are buying disco balls for their own homes, which
I love. And nol, I believe that you are the
proud owner of a couple of myriad reflectors.
Speaker 4 (31:54):
Yeah, I got one upstairs as small. I got ones
downstairs at my studio this medium, and I have like
a couple of sort of artsy stized one.
Speaker 3 (32:00):
They have one that looks like it's melting. I just
it's fun.
Speaker 4 (32:04):
And a YouTuber that I was watching, I'm sorry I
didn't copy the link, but just look up history of
disco balls on YouTube and.
Speaker 3 (32:12):
You'll find this video. It's like nine minutes.
Speaker 4 (32:14):
She pointed out that I think a lot of people
really started getting into disco balls and they realized that
it would also reflect daylight. So you just hanging in
your living room and you have really nice natural light
coming in. You wake up in the morning to a sparkly, dancy, twinkly.
Speaker 3 (32:29):
Light show and it roles. It just feels good, you know.
Speaker 1 (32:32):
Okay, Yeah, I could see that. We know that one
producer of disco balls not related to Omega, a person
named Libby Rasmussen, talked to The New York Times and
said that during her first year of disco ball production,
during the COVID lockdown, she got over five thousand orders
(32:55):
and further demand seemed to be increasing. You also so
found a stat from Etsy that appears to confirm this trend.
Speaker 4 (33:05):
Yeah, from that same New York Times piece that the
vine Pair article referenced, Etsy searches for disco ball increased
nearly four hundred percent in twenty twenty two during the
past three months and when that article was released compared
to that same time period the previous year. Another person
that they spoke to, a let's see Sophie Peoples and
(33:26):
artists from Oakland, California, talks about the kind of inseparability
from gay nightlife and culture. They say, being in the
queer community, disco balls have kind of always been a
part of that culture and a part of nightlife, and
tucked inside of our apartments and hanging from our windows
and sitting in the soil of our houseplants. Oftentimes, queer
and trans people are kind of the creative pavers of
(33:48):
what's on trend, and it just sometimes takes everyone else
a little bit longer to catch up. And that's absolutely
true of a lot of slang, of a lot of
cultural things, trends, clothing, fashion, etc. You can trace a
lot of that back to the queer community, and you know,
like drag culture and things like that.
Speaker 1 (34:06):
Sure, the recursive property of esthetics, right, million we talked
about the nineties with nineteen nineties. Sorry, I have to
date myself and specify with our pal Ross Bettisch, who
is going to be returning for a conversation about wrestling.
We're really excited there. We know that, look, everything that
(34:28):
is cool at some point will become uncool and it
will become cool again. Society is a lot of things,
but not particularly original, right.
Speaker 4 (34:42):
I want to know it's cyclical for sure. And in
fact that a vine Pear article that we've been referencing
the headline of it is the Spinning, Shimmering History of
the Disco Ball and begins with the line everything old
is new again, And that comes from the very pithy
singer songwriter Peter Allen who's more of a musical theater guy.
Speaker 1 (35:05):
Big fan of musical theater. I dig it, I have
a pitch for you guys, just thinking out loud here.
You know, I'm a damn peer. I'm not a sunlight entity.
Is there a way to make it like a dark
disco ball, like something that will reflect darkness.
Speaker 4 (35:22):
It's a good question. That would be really cool. Maybe
like if you cover it with tiny black holes.
Speaker 1 (35:26):
Okay, there we go, or like the you know, now
my head's in hot topic and dad zooks gosh, speaking
a date in yourself. I wonder about a black light
disco ball. I feel like there are so many directions
people can take the concept of myriad reflectors too. You know,
this is just a brilliant invention and I can't thank
(35:50):
you enough, Nol. I love learning about inventions.
Speaker 3 (35:53):
No man, we all do, and thank you as well. Ben.
And if you want on your own melted disco ball,
look no further than melteddisco ball dot com, where you
two can have one of any number of melti diisco
ball arrangements.
Speaker 4 (36:07):
And they're super affordable and super fun. Not sponsored by them,
but I asked. I was tickled that they have their
own domain, and I believe they were featured in Vogue
and trend Book according to their own website that claims
that they are the new trends.
Speaker 3 (36:26):
Take that for what it's worth. Amazing.
Speaker 1 (36:28):
I want one. This is the next gift for your
loved one. This is a great way to surprise people.
By the way, totally the the idea of like Okay.
So recently I received a very thoughtful gift from a
friend of the show. I've been thinking a lot about
how astonishing and profound a thoughtful gift can be, you know,
(36:53):
not a gift card, not a Hallmark card, just something
that means I know who you are and I think
about you. Gosh, yes, and a disco ball you have
persuaded me knowl absolutely fits that criteria.
Speaker 4 (37:09):
Well, I think so too, and Kate Regev, an architect
and historian at Zubatkan owner representation in New York City, agrees,
And I think we'll close out the episode with a
quote from them from that New York Times piece. I
do think that there are cultural shifts that are going
on that also play into the return of nineteen seventies design.
There's a decadence and exuberance and shapes and materials, shiny
(37:32):
metals like brass and chrome, bright patterns and bold tones
like orange and avocado green. That speaks to people's interests
today in moving away from the cozy, homey, comforting spaces
we craved during the heat of the pandemic. I think
people are looking for ways to celebrate again. They're looking
for moments of joy.
Speaker 1 (37:50):
And with that, thank you so much for tuning in,
fellow disco fans, fellow fans of Stay It Alive, Stay
In All Live. Big, big thanks to our super producer,
mister Max Williams, our research associate for today's episode.
Speaker 3 (38:07):
Noel Brown m M.
Speaker 4 (38:08):
Thanks too, Alex Williams who composed our theme, the Disco
Boy himself, the Disco Duck, and Christ Frasciotis and Nieves
Jeff CODs here in spear.
Speaker 1 (38:18):
Also big thanks to our pals that Ridiculous Crime. If
you dig us, you will love them. Take our word
for it. They're very much disco people, and I think
it's time to let the ball drop.
Speaker 3 (38:30):
Yeah, let's go take a little disco now. We'll see
you next time, folks. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit
the iHeartRadio app Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to
your favorite shows.
Ridiculous History is a production of iHeartRadio. Welcome back to
(00:27):
the show, fellow Ridiculous Historians. Thank you, as always so
much for tuning in. We can't wait to introduce you
to the Man, the myth, the legend, the super producer,
mister Max Tracksuit, Beil Bottoms, Williams, Shiny Boy, Shiny Boy Williams.
Speaker 2 (00:46):
Wait, so you did not wait that I have been introduced?
Speaker 3 (00:50):
There he is.
Speaker 1 (00:51):
That's Noel Brown, you heard as well. I am Ben
Bullen as well, and Noel. We are very excited about
this one. We've been working on it for a minute
a while ago, sixty of them.
Speaker 3 (01:06):
A while ago.
Speaker 1 (01:09):
Of course, we were talking off air, as we do,
and I think we were all three of us just mystified.
But you know what it was. It was one of
our conversations about how strange things seem normal, and you,
in an earlier pitch meeting, you said, guys, do you
(01:30):
think about disco balls?
Speaker 3 (01:33):
Yeah?
Speaker 4 (01:33):
And it's funny because that was a while back and
it hadn't really occurred to me at the time that
disco balls has sort of seen a bit of a resurgence,
a renaissance, a renaissance, a disco ball renaissance in the
form of like TikTok's decor things and projects, art projects,
crafts and stuff like that, and also pinterest even as
(01:54):
far back as and little.
Speaker 1 (01:56):
Homemade disco balls, you know.
Speaker 4 (01:58):
Yep, at c stores in like fruit shaped disco balls
and anything kind of sparkly and mirrored, and a lot
of this kind of new disco ball boom times can
be traced back to like a lot of things trends
to COVID times, but even further back than that, I think,
you know, both of us probably pictured starting an episode
(02:20):
about the history of disco balls, talking about you know,
disco but whether you grew up you know, cut cutting
rugs in the East Village disco texts of the seventies,
or like Ben and I have been to an LCD
sound System show in the last decade or so. Oh,
that's massive disco ball they have on their stage and
it's an incredible lighting effect, which we'll get to. Or
(02:42):
speaking of lighting effects, you're just into having sparkly twinkle
lights dancing.
Speaker 3 (02:48):
Around your bedroom or living room.
Speaker 4 (02:50):
You're probably familiar with the iconic lighting effects slash art
object colloquially known as the disco ball, but then I
think we both thought we'd probably start this conversation about
the history of disco balls talking about disco Yes, not
the case though.
Speaker 1 (03:04):
Eh, well, we're going in a different direction as you
as you called it there, Noel, I want to credit
where due is very important to me personally, so I
just want to thank you in advance for being our
research associate on this excellent work here. You you dug in,
(03:28):
you did the research, and you've delivered a lot of
stuff I didn't know about disco balls. So I'm going
to learn from you.
Speaker 4 (03:36):
Where you know, I get a little pet project and
will be in my bonnet every now and again. But
this is a It definitely intersects with a lot of
other stuff that I'm interested in, and I personally own
about five disco balls in my house. But like we teased,
would you believe that the origins of this delightful mirroage
sphere or date back way way way wait, wait, wait, wait,
(03:59):
way further than John Travoltz's iconic disco dancing in Saturday
Night Fever.
Speaker 3 (04:03):
So let us go. Let's take it back way back.
Speaker 4 (04:06):
Not to the psychedelic sixties or the booming fifties or
what is it the wartime forties or the Roaring twenties.
Let's go way way back to the early nineteen hundreds,
where we joined the beginning of the story of the
disco ball already in progress.
Speaker 1 (04:20):
Oh my gosh, this is a phrase that you taught
me through your research the Myriad Reflector. You might remember
the slightly lesser beloved Arcade Fire album Reflector that was
produced by James A. Murphy of LCD sound System and
had a bit of a disco feel to it. And
they're talking about they have the most popular song on
(04:42):
there was called Reflector. Pretty certain that is a reference
to the original name for the disco ball, which was.
Speaker 3 (04:49):
The Myriad Reflector.
Speaker 4 (04:51):
We, as we've mentioned, typically think of it as linked
to the disco era of the seventies. However, the first
kind of piece of decor let's call it, or a
lighting effect or whatever, actually dates all the way back
to eighteen ninety seven. I was off by three years,
but hey, you know, not too bad to good old Charlestown, Massachusetts,
(05:14):
where members of a local electricians union were getting together
for their annual Electricians Ball. Oh so yeah, like they did,
and they decided to take their electrician skills and parlay
those into a.
Speaker 3 (05:27):
Cool kind of showpiece. I guess for this shindick.
Speaker 1 (05:32):
Okay, yeah, yeah yeah. They were getting this from vinepaar
dot com. Their idea was that they would make a thing,
as you said, Noel, a flex really a showpiece ornament
that could emit light visible for miles around Boston. And
(05:52):
to do this they created invented their own incandescent lamps
that would cast a no number of colors and a
carbon arc that are all reflected off what they called,
as you said, a mirror ball. And we first learned
about this in the Electrical Worker, which was the Electricians'
(06:15):
union magazine trade paper whatever you might call it. One
hundred percent the bulletin posted in the magazine promised a
new novelty that would change a hall into a brilliant
fairy land of flashing, changing living colors, a place of
a million colored sparks darting and dancing, chasing one another
(06:36):
into every nook and corner, filling the hall with dancing
fireflies of one thousand hues.
Speaker 4 (06:42):
Gotta give them notes for using dancing a future too
many times, or at least but the rest of this
is it not poetry?
Speaker 1 (06:50):
I love it in a.
Speaker 3 (06:51):
Place, a place span of a million colored sparks.
Speaker 1 (06:54):
I like the way you did the intonation of thousand
hues by the way, thank you.
Speaker 3 (06:59):
Yeah, it feels like a place that I want to
go to.
Speaker 1 (07:03):
Yeah, there it is. And this was at the time
a one off thing, a very special unique boy. It
was custom made for the Gup Party. Yeah, they weren't
planning to make a hundred of these and sell them
throughout New England until a guy named Louis Bernard Woost
(07:24):
Woeeste applied for a patent because the streets were watching.
And so in nineteen seventeen, as he said, this guy
goes to our friends at the US Patent Office and
he says, I got a crazy pitch. You heard he reflectors, Right,
you've heard of the word myriad, Well, why not a
(07:45):
myriad reflector.
Speaker 4 (07:47):
Which just means a lot of reflectors, that's all it means.
Myria just means many, you know, multitudes of a plenty
and you know, so ultimately, while it may sound like
a clever marketing kind of name, it really is just
like a descriptive for the purposes of filing the patents
which we're going to read from.
Speaker 1 (08:07):
He does get the patent. He's got a company out
there in the Natty, Cincinnati. I don't know if they
called it the Natty in nineteen seventeen, but in the
nineteen twenties they said, look, we're going to fill all
your favorite clubs, all your dance holes with these dancing
fireflies of a thousand que thousand hues.
Speaker 5 (08:31):
So that's good.
Speaker 3 (08:31):
That's more marketing speak right there. Let's let's read a
little bit more from the inventor himself. When it gets
a little more dry, but not too much less delightful,
you want to you want to take this one, Ben,
and we go back and forth.
Speaker 1 (08:45):
Yeah, let's round, Robin. Sounds great, all right. So, pulling
from the actual facts, patent shout out Lauren Vogelbaum, our
buddy says, my invention relates to reflectors to be used
for exhibition or theatrical purpose is for the production of
effects effects.
Speaker 3 (09:04):
Exactly.
Speaker 1 (09:04):
Love that.
Speaker 4 (09:05):
You got to think about this too, man, because now
we think of like effects, lighting.
Speaker 3 (09:09):
Effects, special effects, visual effects.
Speaker 4 (09:12):
But this is I think a pretty novel use of
this term. He needed something to call it right like,
and maybe I'm wrong, maybe I'm reaching here, but it
does feel like as early as this was file that
this is probably where you start to see this term,
if not coined by him, it's around this time where
you start to see maybe more theatrical devices that are
(09:33):
there to generate an effect. Although now that I think
about it, Ben, I bet you even farther back than that,
because it makes me think of the kind of tricks
that mediums would pull, you know, back in the day
and having dry ice and various things. So I'm probably reaching.
Speaker 1 (09:47):
Well, every every patent is a pitch. I think we're
with you on this wouldn't because.
Speaker 4 (09:51):
No, no, I just mean the term effects feels like
there may have been a time where it was a
little more novel than than it is today.
Speaker 3 (09:58):
And I might misjudging it timeline here a little bit,
but it just was worth mentioning.
Speaker 1 (10:03):
But he goes on. Luis goes on to specify and
explain what he means by effects.
Speaker 3 (10:10):
He does.
Speaker 4 (10:10):
He goes on in the patent, the object of my
invention is to produce a myriad reflector reflecting surfaces, the
same to be arranged in such a manner that the
several reflections shall be projected at varying angles. The device
itself being arranged so that it may be rotated or
otherwise moved, so that the reflections may create spectacular effects.
Speaker 1 (10:33):
Okay, all right, we're escalating a little.
Speaker 3 (10:36):
We are.
Speaker 1 (10:36):
We started with effects and now it's a spectacular effect.
Speaker 3 (10:40):
That's true.
Speaker 1 (10:40):
I can hear I can hear Louie gassing himself up
as he's writing this.
Speaker 4 (10:45):
One hundred recent It is fun to read these patterns
sometimes because while there is some sparkly no pun intended
language in here, in general it is just a very
cut and dry description of what makes the thing unique,
and that's obviously very necessary for a pattern.
Speaker 3 (10:59):
We'll reread it.
Speaker 4 (11:00):
These last two points that basically outlines those exact things
what makes it unique.
Speaker 1 (11:06):
Right, and it's design, which you have to prove for
a patent, and do check out our excellent series on
patents and IP. I can call it excellent because we
didn't write it. Our pal Max did.
Speaker 3 (11:20):
So here we go.
Speaker 2 (11:21):
Somehow it is not absolutely boring, and I don't know how.
Speaker 4 (11:25):
Oh, I really agree this stuff is fascinating. I think
all of us says. We definitely try to. We're like
a dog with a bone with patents and IP.
Speaker 1 (11:34):
So here is the first point, we'll round Robin this.
Louis specifically goes to Uncle Sam and describes what we
would call the disco ball. He says, you guys know mirrors, right,
He doesn't say that, but that's his pitch. He says,
a myriad reflector comprising mirrors mounted to form a polyhedron,
(11:55):
bounded by a convex system of playing faces E L
A N E in combination with means for suspending the device,
the little thing that you hang it from, so that
it may be swung and rotated simultaneously to produce way
for it myriad reflections when light rays from an extraneous
(12:18):
source are through there on, I.
Speaker 4 (12:20):
Would argue he should have used the word external instead
of extraneous. There does an extraneous mean it's like extra
and not necessary.
Speaker 3 (12:29):
Yeah, kind of.
Speaker 1 (12:31):
External would be good because.
Speaker 4 (12:33):
It's not contained within the device and it's required separate,
like external light source not included.
Speaker 3 (12:40):
Let's just say, but, y'all, what he's.
Speaker 4 (12:42):
Doing here is very brilliantly and plainly and of course
a little dryly describing how mirrors work and the fact
that it's convex, and that is is it's arranged in
the circular or spherical array is what gives you that
massive spread and throw of these light rays as they're
reflect off of those surfaces and then bouncing in all
(13:02):
different directions, essentially in three hundred and sixty degrees in
all directions, because there's one of these on every possible
inch of the surface area of the ball. And that's
what gives you this insane coverage. And the bigger the ball,
the more insane the coverage. That LCD sound System one.
Then when they hit that for a lighting effect, it
lights up the whole theater like and it's you know,
(13:24):
if there's smoke in the room, you start to see
these just what's the word swaths of light kind of
cutting through the fog, and it's an absolutely remarkable thing
to behold. And I actually included a second point here,
but Ben pointed out off Mike that is basically the
same thing except for what Except as.
Speaker 1 (13:41):
The mirrors are separated from each other, the facets are
separated by a non reflecting subst got it, which is
why the mirror ball, the myriad reflection looks.
Speaker 3 (13:52):
Like a grid. There you go, one hundred percent, that's
exactly right.
Speaker 4 (14:02):
Let's jump into the rise fall rerise and reimagining of
the myriad reflector, or as it came to be known,
the mirror ball or the disco ball. So this company
that you talked about, Ben Stevens and Wost, we don't
know much about Stevens.
Speaker 3 (14:17):
We know about Wost, who's the one who filed the patent.
Speaker 4 (14:19):
Their flagship magnificent globe, as they marketed it. It was
twenty seven inches and covered with, as they described it,
more than twelve hundred special made mirrors.
Speaker 3 (14:30):
They were able to sell these like hotcakes to dance halls,
like you said, Ben, skating rinks, jazz clubs, nightclubs.
Speaker 4 (14:39):
This is obviously very much pre disco. This is more
in the pre war kind of swinging, you know, big
band era, right, yeah, yeah, and this.
Speaker 1 (14:49):
Has got to be a banger. When you go into
the club, you know you're in the party district. You
can go here, jazz at one of three places. Which
place are you gonna go to? You're gonna go to
the one with the mirror ball. People are space man. Yeah.
There's a nineteen twenty one copy of Illustrated World that
(15:09):
features a photograph of what we call the disco ball today,
and it says, no, this is not a photograph of
the Heavens, the Milky Way, or New Constellation. It was
made at a dance palace in Dayton, Ohio.
Speaker 3 (15:26):
Sounds like a disk at the end. There no offense
to date, No, no offense.
Speaker 1 (15:30):
We love you.
Speaker 4 (15:30):
This is hilarious, especially when you did it in that voice.
And I love the idea of a dance palace bio.
Speaker 2 (15:36):
Actually, I'm trying to think Dayton and Canton share an airport.
I actually have family in Dayton, Ohio.
Speaker 1 (15:43):
I'm sorry for your loss.
Speaker 2 (15:45):
Yeah, no, no, I am not someone who lives in
Ohio for very obvious reasons.
Speaker 4 (15:51):
Well, I'm sure there's great things about it, and it
would appear that one of those great things might have
included a disco ball, an early example of a badass
disco ball.
Speaker 1 (15:58):
Wait, wait, why are we? Why are we weirdly dissing
the Buckeye State here?
Speaker 3 (16:02):
I didn't mean too. It was my fault I started,
and I fully walk it back. Y'all are great.
Speaker 2 (16:06):
We love four and a half years of this podcast
experience of dissing Ohio, and I'm not changing now.
Speaker 3 (16:12):
All right, all right, Well, let's it's differences that make
us a good tea.
Speaker 4 (16:17):
It sure is so there was a bit of a
boom time for the disco ball followed by a bit
of an approaching bust time. A depressions came. Yeah, I
it was a bit of a depression. No one was
wanting sparkles at this point. They wanted, you know, to
be able to feed their families. So Stevens and Wost
did stop production of the disco balls, and it kind of, I.
Speaker 3 (16:36):
Don't know, took a back seat in the zeitgeist for
quite a while. Wasn't produced again until the nineteen forties
when we have a new company entering the chat ooh.
Speaker 1 (16:47):
And I love their name. Just from a writing perspective,
Omega National Products sounds like Illumination Global Dlimited.
Speaker 4 (16:55):
It does very much so, and call back to our
recent Kentucky Derby episode. This company was based in Louisville, Kentucky.
So at this point the company is has I don't know,
they're back to it. They're kind of capitalizing on some
of the popular art deco okay styles they're popular at
(17:17):
the time, modestly successful at first, but not an immediate hit.
What set the Louisville company, Omega National Products apart from
Stevens and woe's was that they weren't just making the balls.
They were making this flexible, like faux fabric y type
the sheets of mirrored material that were again in keeping
(17:40):
with that Art Deco furniture style of the era that
was super popular and you could like bedazzle stuff. You
may remember Liberaci's very you know, iconic mirrored piano that
was done using these flexible mirror ball sheets.
Speaker 1 (17:57):
Yeah. Liberacci famously the most subtle musician in history.
Speaker 3 (18:02):
Yep.
Speaker 4 (18:02):
And also I mean I got there's this incredible clip
of him from I think he was on laughing that
mega sixties show where all the like girls kind of
wore bikinis and painted their bodies and Goldie Hawn was
on it originally, I want to say. And he does
this thing where he's like, hey, young people, what you
groove in this Liberaci? And I'm here with you, And
it's like the most go home dad.
Speaker 3 (18:25):
Kind of thing you've ever seen in your life. Deedly,
do do you feeling groovy? Liberacis he's turning on, That's
what he says.
Speaker 1 (18:33):
And Omega is turning on for sure, because they are
the only source of this new miracle substance, this application
of mirrored sheets in that grid thing. They're saying, we
don't just make balls. You name an object, we can
put our mirror amalgamation upon it. And so they get
(18:56):
a bunch of clients. We're talking jukebox hauls, amusement parks.
People are coming to them and asking them to put
this stuff on any imaginable thing. But the main thing
they still love is the original mirror ball.
Speaker 3 (19:12):
That's right.
Speaker 4 (19:13):
And these things, you know, ranged in size for any budgets,
and they were produced largely by women because this is
during World War Two, and as we've talked you know
often on the podcast, the men were away and the
women took over those factory jobs, and it led to
of course the whole Rosie the Riveter thing and a
(19:33):
lot of like you know, demands for equal rights for
women because like you know, women get the job done.
Speaker 3 (19:39):
I mean, and that's absolutely true.
Speaker 4 (19:41):
And it's weird that it took this to create that outcry,
but sometimes that's what it takes, I guess, especially.
Speaker 3 (19:48):
In times where things are maybe a little more backwards.
Speaker 1 (19:50):
Dude, It's like we were saying in this is a
bit backstage, and I acknowledge this may sound pretentious, but
we have literally travel the world teaching people how to
make a good show. And maybe one day you and
I will make a good show as well.
Speaker 4 (20:07):
Yeah, who knows, maybe someone will travel to us to
teach us how to do it.
Speaker 1 (20:11):
But one of the key things that I think speaks
to Omega's brilliance here is that they decided to meet
the consumer where they're at. I think it's key to
meet people where they're at. And so they say, we're
not just going to make one size fits all mirror balls.
We're going to see if someone can just afford a
(20:33):
tiny one, A tiny boy that's.
Speaker 3 (20:35):
For you for your keys, maybe you know, put it
on your key rank.
Speaker 4 (20:38):
So yeah, no, it's they are absolutely meeting the customer
where they are six feet They're accommodating all sizes and
budgets and needs, and they go from the two inches
you mentioned, Ben to six feet in diameter. We even
see ones as large as forty eight inches, amounting to
you at the time, y'all four grand and we must
(21:01):
inflation calculator that bad boy.
Speaker 3 (21:03):
So let's can we get a Can we get a boop? Max?
Do you want a boop?
Speaker 2 (21:07):
I'll take a boop, dude, I'm booping currently, this is
a boop.
Speaker 4 (21:13):
Nineteen forty four thousand dollars. We're forty esque ish. We
don't have an exact number here in today's dollars. Twenty grand,
twenty wow, that's a lot of cheddar. That's a ball scratch.
It's a big ball, man, You got you gotta throw
down if you want to ball that size. Omega National,
to your point, Bend had the monopoly on this this product.
(21:35):
They at one point we're producing as many as ninety
percent of the world's disco balls.
Speaker 1 (21:41):
What a cool so. I love specific brags and flexes.
Speaker 3 (21:46):
I like the Glitter Company. Remember when we discussed it.
Speaker 1 (21:49):
Yeah, oh yeah, that's a good callback. I love the
idea of picture it this way. You are in the
c suite of a mega national and maybe you're going
on a date, right, You're meeting your prospective spouse in
the future, because everyone was getting married back then. And
they say, what do you do? And you say, I
(22:10):
make ninety percent of the world's disco balls, not one
hundred percent.
Speaker 3 (22:15):
No, one hundred percent. I would kill to be that person.
We know.
Speaker 1 (22:20):
The company should pointed out, continues to produce mirrored balls
disco balls for a lot of big time operations. And
you want the best, you go Omega, you go Omega?
What do you want the best? That's a free tagline.
By the way, guys, you're welcome. They've been at it
for a long time. They should know.
Speaker 4 (22:39):
It would appear that some of their high end clients
are folks like Beyonce, who really is responsible in many
ways for the resurgence of the disco ball, because it's
a big part of her or has been a big
part of her stage performances. And Madonna, I want to
say in the nineties, there might have been the late
eighties or mid eighties, like there was a concert tour
where she would merge from a giant disco ball that
(23:01):
would crack open. And they also produce them for like
film and television shows like Dancing with the Stars and
even the Academy Awards.
Speaker 1 (23:10):
Oh that makes sense. Yeah, shout out to Oscar. But
we have a question that I think is on everybody's mind.
How did the idea of the myriad reflector or the
mirrored ball become so inherently tied to the era of disco.
Speaker 4 (23:29):
Well in the nineteen seventies, we really did start to
see these guys being strung up in disco texts and
made a fixture of the zeitgeist and of pop culture.
It is tough to kind of pin down, as the
vine par article points out, exactly which club in New
(23:51):
York City first kind of brought these glowing do dads back,
but places like the Loft in the East Village in
New York played a huge role, as well as a
venue known as The Gallery, which was created by an
iconic disco booster named Nikki Siano. I just want to
(24:13):
take this opportunity to if you want to do a
deeper dive into disco that includes a lot of this stuff.
Great podcast I worked on some years ago with this
cooly cool guy named Steve Greenberg who's a record producer
and he was around during a lot of this stuff,
and he does a super deep dive into the history
of disco in the Speed of Sound podcast. We did
(24:34):
like a multi part series on disco that includes Saturday
Night Fever nineteen seventy seven, huge smash hit movie with
John Travolta where he does a very iconic disco dance
featuring a mirror ball and an unfortunate event that kind
of brought Disco to its knees the Disco Demolition Night
(24:55):
in Chicago at Comiski Park.
Speaker 1 (24:58):
Right and pretty long time fellow Ridiculous historian, you may
recall that we did an entire episode on Disco Demolition Night.
This was a pivotal moment in history. It's about forty
six years after this occurred. It was a promo event
on July twelfth, nineteen seventy nine. Long story short, do
(25:22):
check out the episode the Chicago White Sox Twilight doubleheader
against the Detroit Tigers, and it quickly fell into pandemonium
because of the activity of a guy we could call
a predecessor of a podcaster, a DJ named Steve Dahl.
He was known on WLUP ninety seven point nine Rock Yeah,
(25:46):
Pardon my Radio voice for mocking disco. He didn't like disco.
He had been fired from a previous gig because the
station switched from rock to disco, and Steve had principles.
So they asked all these fans to bring with them
a disco record when they when they came to the game,
and if you brought a disco record, you got a
(26:08):
discount on admission. You would get ninety eight cents admission
and you would lend your well, you donate your disco
vinyl to be gathered up and then blown up live
in front of the audience between the games. It did
not go well.
Speaker 3 (26:27):
It didn't go out for various reasons.
Speaker 4 (26:29):
But I don't know if we talked about this in
the episode then, but it does occur to me that,
like vinyl records are sharp, doesn't it seem like someone
could catch some shrapnel from this.
Speaker 1 (26:38):
That's exactly what happened.
Speaker 4 (26:40):
Oh okay, I'm not remembering cool check out the episode.
Speaker 2 (26:43):
It was terrible and they oversold the event and stuff
like that. I just want to jump in here and
draw a recent parallel to I know I mentioned to
you guys, but it's been referred to as Baseball fire Festival.
But this past season they held a baseball game at
I forgot which speedway was, but at of speedway event
(27:05):
and they marketed and it had the Atlanta baseball team
in it. So that was a big deal around us.
But it was like something that it had a massive
rain delay the entire time. But oh, I remember hearing
about this, and but like it's like one of these
things where it's like, oh, yeah, you heard all these
things that happened.
Speaker 3 (27:19):
It's so bad.
Speaker 2 (27:20):
And then you find out beforehand that there was like
they were selling seats that didn't face the field. They
ran out of hot dog buns before the game started,
handing people just single hot dogs and stuff.
Speaker 1 (27:33):
Throwing at them.
Speaker 3 (27:34):
So if you've.
Speaker 2 (27:35):
Heard of for the listeners out there, if you've heard
of that story that happens to year, I just wanted
you to know that Disco Demolition Night was so much worse.
Speaker 4 (27:44):
Oh my god, I mean it's outrageous. Like I didn't
even remember about the shrapnel. So do check that out.
It makes perfect sense.
Speaker 5 (27:49):
But most of the facts.
Speaker 3 (28:11):
Max with the facts.
Speaker 4 (28:12):
Indeed, most importantly I think for our purposes here is
that this really represented this shift into like almost a
demonization of disco. There already was a lot of tension
from the rockers, you know, folks that were more into
like heavier music. I imagine this era. Yeah, definitely, we've
got punk happening. Disco definitely has been around, sort of
(28:35):
maybe seen as having its having had its heyday, and
people are a little sick of it. And I'm not
saying that's wrong, but the way this was handled was
in fact wrong because Disco was, of course a huge
part of the black, Latino and queer community, that club culture,
and that musical scene, and there was a sense at
(28:57):
this event that folks were not only prote and the music,
but protesting the people that made it and.
Speaker 3 (29:05):
Becoming a culture war.
Speaker 1 (29:13):
We know that disco, being the new kid on the
block genre wise, was clearly going to be vulnerable to
attack and criticism and mockery. And this is what leads
folks like Nile Rogers, co founder of a band called
Sheik the Disco Band.
Speaker 3 (29:32):
Uh.
Speaker 1 (29:32):
He looked at the footage the day after this happened
in Kmisky Park and he said to us, it felt
like a Nazi book burning. Thank goodness they didn't burn
all the disco records, because I unreservedly love a lot
of disco. I'm stupid super into it.
Speaker 4 (29:52):
See, I love it very much as well. I love
the hypnotic kind of repulsiveness of it. I love a
lot of the arrangements.
Speaker 3 (30:00):
Fun are you kiddy? Yeah?
Speaker 4 (30:02):
Absolutely, And I mean I really love a lot of
electronic music as well, and a lot of that was
begat from disco culture, like techno and house music and
four on the Floor that beats that is so propulsive
and hypnotics Kroud rock over in Germany, things like craft
work and can and things like that. While they were
pre disco, there is a similar hypnotic kind of what's
(30:26):
the word that Alex Williams likes to use a lot
motoric beat quality that is sort of this trance inducing
sort of type of music.
Speaker 3 (30:33):
So red meat for me.
Speaker 1 (30:35):
That's our composer, Alex Williams. You'll recognize them at the
beginning and end of every episode.
Speaker 3 (30:40):
Mm hmm, you sure will. But I guess we can
wrap this episode.
Speaker 4 (30:43):
I'm just kind of bringing it back to what we
talked about at the top, this idea of disco balls.
Disco has been having a resurgeon since the early two thousands, man.
I mean, like a lot of that New York sleeze
kind of music like the Yeah Yeah yeahs, and a
lot of that dance punk kind of stuff like The
Rapture and Phoenix even and you know, a lot of
(31:04):
bands have been truly honoring that four on the floor
and kind of disco quality LCD sound system as we mentioned.
But as a art object, disco balls have really kind
of come back in a big way since.
Speaker 1 (31:19):
COVID right, yeah, yeah, and I think this is something
a lot of us have encountered in our own neck
of the Global Woods. The lockdown, Max, give me dramatic
music here in a word where you can't go outside.
What do you do to make your home more interesting?
(31:42):
Disco ball?
Speaker 3 (31:44):
That's right.
Speaker 1 (31:44):
People are buying disco balls for their own homes, which
I love. And nol, I believe that you are the
proud owner of a couple of myriad reflectors.
Speaker 4 (31:54):
Yeah, I got one upstairs as small. I got ones
downstairs at my studio this medium, and I have like
a couple of sort of artsy stized one.
Speaker 3 (32:00):
They have one that looks like it's melting. I just
it's fun.
Speaker 4 (32:04):
And a YouTuber that I was watching, I'm sorry I
didn't copy the link, but just look up history of
disco balls on YouTube and.
Speaker 3 (32:12):
You'll find this video. It's like nine minutes.
Speaker 4 (32:14):
She pointed out that I think a lot of people
really started getting into disco balls and they realized that
it would also reflect daylight. So you just hanging in
your living room and you have really nice natural light
coming in. You wake up in the morning to a sparkly, dancy, twinkly.
Speaker 3 (32:29):
Light show and it roles. It just feels good, you know.
Speaker 1 (32:32):
Okay, Yeah, I could see that. We know that one
producer of disco balls not related to Omega, a person
named Libby Rasmussen, talked to The New York Times and
said that during her first year of disco ball production,
during the COVID lockdown, she got over five thousand orders
(32:55):
and further demand seemed to be increasing. You also so
found a stat from Etsy that appears to confirm this trend.
Speaker 4 (33:05):
Yeah, from that same New York Times piece that the
vine Pair article referenced, Etsy searches for disco ball increased
nearly four hundred percent in twenty twenty two during the
past three months and when that article was released compared
to that same time period the previous year. Another person
that they spoke to, a let's see Sophie Peoples and
(33:26):
artists from Oakland, California, talks about the kind of inseparability
from gay nightlife and culture. They say, being in the
queer community, disco balls have kind of always been a
part of that culture and a part of nightlife, and
tucked inside of our apartments and hanging from our windows
and sitting in the soil of our houseplants. Oftentimes, queer
and trans people are kind of the creative pavers of
(33:48):
what's on trend, and it just sometimes takes everyone else
a little bit longer to catch up. And that's absolutely
true of a lot of slang, of a lot of
cultural things, trends, clothing, fashion, etc. You can trace a
lot of that back to the queer community, and you know,
like drag culture and things like that.
Speaker 1 (34:06):
Sure, the recursive property of esthetics, right, million we talked
about the nineties with nineteen nineties. Sorry, I have to
date myself and specify with our pal Ross Bettisch, who
is going to be returning for a conversation about wrestling.
We're really excited there. We know that, look, everything that
(34:28):
is cool at some point will become uncool and it
will become cool again. Society is a lot of things,
but not particularly original, right.
Speaker 4 (34:42):
I want to know it's cyclical for sure. And in
fact that a vine Pear article that we've been referencing
the headline of it is the Spinning, Shimmering History of
the Disco Ball and begins with the line everything old
is new again, And that comes from the very pithy
singer songwriter Peter Allen who's more of a musical theater guy.
Speaker 1 (35:05):
Big fan of musical theater. I dig it, I have
a pitch for you guys, just thinking out loud here.
You know, I'm a damn peer. I'm not a sunlight entity.
Is there a way to make it like a dark
disco ball, like something that will reflect darkness.
Speaker 4 (35:22):
It's a good question. That would be really cool. Maybe
like if you cover it with tiny black holes.
Speaker 1 (35:26):
Okay, there we go, or like the you know, now
my head's in hot topic and dad zooks gosh, speaking
a date in yourself. I wonder about a black light
disco ball. I feel like there are so many directions
people can take the concept of myriad reflectors too. You know,
this is just a brilliant invention and I can't thank
(35:50):
you enough, Nol. I love learning about inventions.
Speaker 3 (35:53):
No man, we all do, and thank you as well. Ben.
And if you want on your own melted disco ball,
look no further than melteddisco ball dot com, where you
two can have one of any number of melti diisco
ball arrangements.
Speaker 4 (36:07):
And they're super affordable and super fun. Not sponsored by them,
but I asked. I was tickled that they have their
own domain, and I believe they were featured in Vogue
and trend Book according to their own website that claims
that they are the new trends.
Speaker 3 (36:26):
Take that for what it's worth. Amazing.
Speaker 1 (36:28):
I want one. This is the next gift for your
loved one. This is a great way to surprise people.
By the way, totally the the idea of like Okay.
So recently I received a very thoughtful gift from a
friend of the show. I've been thinking a lot about
how astonishing and profound a thoughtful gift can be, you know,
(36:53):
not a gift card, not a Hallmark card, just something
that means I know who you are and I think
about you. Gosh, yes, and a disco ball you have
persuaded me knowl absolutely fits that criteria.
Speaker 4 (37:09):
Well, I think so too, and Kate Regev, an architect
and historian at Zubatkan owner representation in New York City, agrees,
And I think we'll close out the episode with a
quote from them from that New York Times piece. I
do think that there are cultural shifts that are going
on that also play into the return of nineteen seventies design.
There's a decadence and exuberance and shapes and materials, shiny
(37:32):
metals like brass and chrome, bright patterns and bold tones
like orange and avocado green. That speaks to people's interests
today in moving away from the cozy, homey, comforting spaces
we craved during the heat of the pandemic. I think
people are looking for ways to celebrate again. They're looking
for moments of joy.
Speaker 1 (37:50):
And with that, thank you so much for tuning in,
fellow disco fans, fellow fans of Stay It Alive, Stay
In All Live. Big, big thanks to our super producer,
mister Max Williams, our research associate for today's episode.
Speaker 3 (38:07):
Noel Brown m M.
Speaker 4 (38:08):
Thanks too, Alex Williams who composed our theme, the Disco
Boy himself, the Disco Duck, and Christ Frasciotis and Nieves
Jeff CODs here in spear.
Speaker 1 (38:18):
Also big thanks to our pals that Ridiculous Crime. If
you dig us, you will love them. Take our word
for it. They're very much disco people, and I think
it's time to let the ball drop.
Speaker 3 (38:30):
Yeah, let's go take a little disco now. We'll see
you next time, folks. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit
the iHeartRadio app Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to
your favorite shows.
Ridiculous History News
Hosts And Creators
Ben Bowlin
Noel Brown
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