“Disco Demolition Night" turns violent at Comiskey Park in Chicago - July 12th, 1979

On this day in 1979, a promotional event at a Major League Baseball game devolved into a dangerous riot.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
This Day in History Class is a production of I
Heart Radio. Hello and Welcome to This Day in History Class,
a show that shines a light on the ups and
downs of everyday history. I'm Gay Bluesier, and in this episode,

(00:20):
we're talking about one of the most outrageous and controversial
baseball games of all time, one that had very little
to do with the sport itself. The day was July twelfth,
nineteen seventy nine, a promotional event at a Major League

(00:44):
baseball game devolved into a dangerous riot. The incident, known
as Disco Demolition Night, was held at Chicago's Comiskey Park
during a double header between the Chicago White Sox and
the Detroit Tigers. As the name suggests, the event was
a kind of anti disco demonstration. In exchange for a

(01:06):
heavily discounted ticket, attendees were encouraged to bring a disco album,
which would then be added to a pile and blown up.
After the first game. The rowdy crowd got so swept
up in the destructive spirit of the evening that thousands
of fans later stormed the field and began laying waste
to the stadium. The free for all led to at

(01:28):
least nine injuries, thirty nine arrests, and the cancelation and
forfeiture of the second scheduled game. Opinions vary on what
was the true cause of all the animosity on display
that night. Did baseball fans just really hate disco that much?
Or was their disapproval aimed not at the music itself

(01:49):
but at the minority groups who had popularized it. The
main drive behind Disco Demolition Night was said to be
the commercial dominance of disco music at the time. In
the late nineteen seventies, the popular dance music was inescapable.
In fact, in nineteen seventy eight, disco singles had claimed
the top spot on the Billboard Hot one hundred for

(02:12):
thirty seven weeks out of fifty two, and in the
first half of nineteen seventy nine it was on much
the same track. Thirteen out of the sixteen number one
singles were disco. The genre wasn't just the king of
the air waves and music charts either. Influential films like
Disco Godfather and Saturday Night Fever further extended the disco craze,

(02:35):
as did fashion trends like white three piece suits and big,
gaudy medallions. Not everyone was in on the fund, though
fans of traditional rock music were especially upset the disco
had usurped the cultural spotlight from their preferred genre. By
the end of the decade, dozens of radio stations across
the country had ditched their usual rock centric programming in

(03:00):
her of an all disco line up in Chicago's w
d a I FM followed suit, switching from rock to
disco and firing it's die hard DJ and the process
that DJ Steve Doll quickly found a new gig at
the city's rival rock station w l u P, but

(03:21):
he carried a grudge against disco with him. Doll would
often start a shift by playing a few seconds of
a disco track on the air, before dragging the needle
across the record and playing a bunch of explosion sound
effects to make it seem like he'd blown up the
offending album. Plenty of Dolls listeners shared his disdain for
the trendy genre, viewing disco as inauthentic and lacking in substance.

(03:46):
Doll felt emboldened by the feedback from his anti disco listeners,
a group he took to calling the Insane coho lips.
Soon he doubled down on his crusade against disco, calling
for quote the eradication and elimination of the dreaded musical disease.
The rise in both the love and hate of disco

(04:09):
happened to coincide with a sharp decline in Major League
Baseball attendance. Things were especially dire in Chicago, where in
nineteen seventy nine the underperforming White Sox typically played for
a crowd of just ten thousand or so fans, about
a quarter of the capacity of Comiskey Park. The team's owner,
Bill Veeck, and the promotions director, his son, Mike Vick,

(04:34):
tried all sorts of promotions to boost their low attendance,
but nothing seemed to work. They had seen modest success
when the team hosted a disco night two years earlier,
but if DJ Dolls tirades were indicative of Chicago residents,
it seemed like public opinion had shifted. With this in mind,
the vik's approached Doll with the idea of holding an

(04:56):
anti disco promotion at the ballpark, and of cour Or
Stall jumped at the chance. He and his team at
w l u P spent the next several weeks promoting
Disco Demolition Night all across the state of Illinois. The
promise of a fiery spectacle between games was enough to
peak many fans interest, but the real clincher was the

(05:17):
promise that anyone who brought a disco record to the
stadium would be admitted for just eight cents. The original
plan was to collect the records as fans entered the gates,
but when the turnout proved much larger than expected, the
collection bins filled up quickly. This resulted in many fans
taking their records with them to their seats, thus arming

(05:39):
them with the perfect projectile for when the evening's chaos began.
That didn't take long either. The first game had to
be stopped several times due to fans throwing their records
onto the field, along with empty bottles, firecrackers, cherry bombs,
and whatever else was handy. The distraction may have been
to the away team's advantage, as the Detroit Tigers beat

(06:02):
the White Sox four to one in the first game.
Once the players left the field, it was finally time
for what many in the crowd considered the main event.
An enormous dumpster full of thousands of Disco Records was
placed in the outfield and rigged with explosives. Steve Doll
stood next to it, wearing an army jacket and combat helmet,

(06:23):
a nod to the insane Coho Lips his army of
disco haters, Doll led the unruly crowd in chance of
Disco sucks and death to Disco, and then he blew
up the crate. The blast sent pieces of shattered vinyl
soaring high into the air and left a large crater
in the field. At that point all hell broke loose.

(06:47):
The official attendants that night was said to be just
under forty eight thousand, a complete sellout for the park,
but some estimate the true size of the crowd to
be about sixty thousand, as many people who had been
turned away wound up scaling the gates and running past
the ushers without a ticket. From that massive crowd, roughly

(07:07):
seven thousand fans swarmed the field after the explosion. They
destroyed the batting cage, stole all the bases, and even
tried to break into the sky box where the team
manager's family was sitting. Meanwhile, the bonfire continued burning and
was stoked higher and higher by fans who fed it
more records along with general debris. Officials from both teams

(07:30):
tried to calm the crowd, but to no avail. Shortly after,
Chicago police arrived on the scene in full riot gear
and began making arrests for disorderly conduct. They were able
to disperse the crowd eventually, but by that point the
field had been so badly damaged that it was impossible
for the second game to be played. As the home team,

(07:51):
the White Sox were forced to forfeit the second game
to the Tigers. It was the first forfeit by a
Major League team in five years, and only the fourth
in baseball's modern era. For many fans of rock and roll,
the incident was seen as no big deal. Sure things
had gotten out of hand, but they argued it was
just a case of drunken revelers letting off a bit

(08:14):
too much steam about the state of popular music. However,
several minority groups believed something far more insidious was at play.
To them, it was no coincidence that the early adopters
and main drivers behind the disco trend were African Americans, Latinos, women,
and gay people. They believe that the anger of the

(08:35):
mostly white crowd was really directed at them, and that
the disco albums they destroyed were a stand in for
their own bodies. Steve doll In White Sox officials rejected
that notion, and to this day they maintained that there
was no racial or social hostility behind the event, just
a simple disdain for disco. That said, some my witness

(08:58):
reports from that evening suggest otherwise. For example, stadium ushers
later told the press that many fans had turned in
albums that weren't disco. Jazz, soul, R and B and
other genres were popular targets that night, and what was
the one thing they all had in common? They were
the works of black artists. Vince Lawrence, a young black

(09:20):
usher at Comiskey Park, even became a target himself. In
in twenty nine interview, he recalled the scene saying, quote,
people started running up on me yelling disco sucks in
my face, getting in my face, confronting me as a
person that represents disco, and there were thousands of people
running around in this stadium. Buck wild I started going,

(09:42):
wait a minute, why am I disco? It's a valid question,
as there was nothing about Lawrence's appearance or behavior that
would suggest he listened to disco. In fact, he was
actually wearing a shirt promoting Dolls Radio station, the sponsor
of the Disco demolition. Regardless of the true motivation for

(10:02):
the event, Disco Demolition Nights sent a powerful message to
the public and is often described as the day the
disco died. That may be an exaggeration, but there was
a steep decline in the genre's popularity following that night.
Several radio stations that had made the jump to disco
transition back to rock and roll. Before the end of

(10:23):
the year, record companies began downplaying the term disco as well,
opting instead for the more generic label of dance music.
Disco's popularity continued to sink in the years that followed,
but the genre never truly died. Instead, it just went underground,
only to emerge a few years later under the name

(10:44):
of house music. One of the pioneers of that do
it yourself genre was none other than Vince Lawrence, the
usher turned DJ who had been accosted by rock fans
a Dolls event. He made a name for himself in
the Chicago music scene in the early nain teen eighties
and wound up co writing the hit song On and
On with fellow d J Jesse Saunders. Released in nine

(11:08):
that track became a staple of Chicago clubs and parties
and was the first recording officially classified this house music.
It's a nice reminder that although tastes may change as
years go by, no one can ever really stop the music,
not even with a riot. I'm gay, Bluesier and hopefully

(11:29):
you now know a little more about history today than
you did yesterday. If you'd like to keep up with
the show, consider following us on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram
at t d i HC Show, and if you have
any comments or suggestions, you can always send them my
way at this Day at I heeart media dot com.

(11:50):
Thanks to Chandler Mays for producing the show, and thanks
to you for listening. I'll see you back here again
tomorrow for another day in History class at the