were 41-44 in fifth place in the Eastern Division.
About 70,000 people showed up for the game.
Security quickly got out of hand as the audience discovered vinyl records made great Frisbees. Several players rightly remarked they were afraid of getting hurt by a Commodores single. After the White Sox lost the first game 4-1, the promotion took place in center field. WLUP morning personality General Steve Dahl and his sidekick Garry Meier led their Insane Coho Lips Army to center field to blow up a large box of disco records. They were assisted by WLUP’s provocative “Goddess of Fire” Lorelei Shark as General Dahl led the crowd in chants of “disco sucks!”
When the records blew up, the audience flooded the field. Fans tore out seats. Bonfires were lit with pocket lighters. Chicago police arrived at White Sox Park on horseback. The second game was canceled. Disco Demolition became the first and only event other than an act of God to cause the cancellation of a Major League Baseball game. (The Cleveland Indians’ “Ten Cent Beer Night” in June of 1974 also resulted in a riot; the game was forfeited in the ninth inning.)
White Sox president Bill Veeck was the king of baseball promotions. In 1976, the White Sox were ready to move to Seattle, until Veeck bought the team from John Allyn. One of Veeck’s promotions during his inaugural year was outfitting his players in clam diggers and hot pants. No trend was too small for Veeck. And in 1979, there was Disco Demolition. “I was amazed,” Veeck said afterwards. “We had anticipated 32,000 to 35,000. We had more security than we ever had before. But we had as many people in here as we ever had.” The security at Disco Demolition was as innocent as a Dan Fogelberg song compared to that of U.S. Cellular Field in the summer of 2015.
The passage of time has shed a different light on Disco Demolition; the events can be refitted to today’s values. Dahl told me, “Most of the people calling it racist and homophobic are younger and have come out of college predisposed to think that thanks to identity politics.”
The front page headline of the July 13, 1979 Chicago Tribune sports section read, “When fans wanted to rock, the baseball stopped,” and columnist David Israel wrote, “Ten years after Woodstock, there was Veeckstock . . . As far as riots go, this one was fairly lovely. I mean, it isn’t going to make anyone forget Grant Park or the Days of Rage. It was a lot of sliding into second base and ‘Look-at-me-Ma’ jumping around for the benefit of the television camera.” After all, the Sister Sledge disco tune “We Are Family,” co-written by Nile Rodgers, was one of the hits of the summer of 1979. (It even became the theme song for the Pittsburgh Pirates.)
On the flip side, in December 1979, rock critic Dave Marsh wrote of Disco Demolition in Rolling Stone, “White males eighteen to thirty-four are the most likely to see disco as the product of homosexuals, blacks, and Latins and therefore they’re the most likely to respond to appeals to wipe out such threats to their security.”
Veeck was a pioneer in the civil rights movement. He joined the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) not long after he purchased the Cleveland Indians in 1946. He hired African Americans to work in all parts of Cleveland Municipal Stadium, from beer vendors up through the front office. In 1947, he made Larry Doby the first African American baseball player in the American League, and in 1948, Veeck signed Negro League-legend Satchel Paige. New York’s New Amsterdam News called Veeck “The Abe Lincoln of Baseball.”
Disco Demolition was about class structure and music. At one time, disco was full of adventure and risk, like its offspring house music. Disco’s roots are full of integrity, ranging from the breathy raps of Isaac Hayes to the lean uptempo arrangements of Kenneth Gamble and Leon Huff. The 1974 Gamble-Huff MFSB instrumental “TSOP (The Sound of Philadelphia)” is regarded as one of the primal disco hits. But by 1979, much of disco was defined by excess.
That summer, disco was dancing in an air of testosterone. John Wayne, America’s cowboy, died that June, and Ronald Reagan was in the bullpen for the 1980 election. Burt Reynolds had been named the best box office attraction in the country (1977 through 1981) in a poll of movie exhibitors.
During the summer of 1979, I was writing for a suburban Chicago newspaper while exploring the periphery of urban music. I loved the reggae-punk sound of The Clash and discovered the electric funkateer who called himself Prince. I was a huge Faces fan and was repulsed with the Rod Stewart hit “Do Ya’ Think I’m Sexy?”
That’s what led me to Disco Demolition.
I liked the Latin-tinged “disco” music of Tavares, the soul of the Ohio Players and the best orgasmic stuff from Donna Summer. But rock ‘n’ rollers crossing over into disco was wrong. Much later I would find out “Do Ya’ Think I’m Sexy” lifted the melody from the composition “Taj Mahal” by Brazilian artist Jorge Ben Jor. Jor filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against Stewart and the case was settled amicably.
I love baseball more than Faces and the Stones, so it was easy to fork over ninety-eight cents on July 12, 1979, to catch the White Sox play a double-header with the Detroit Tigers. I liked Steve Dahl and Garry Meier. Their candor and real life approach is what made them appealing to an army of seekers and dissenters.
In 1979 I was living in an apartment a block east of Wrigley Field and dating a woman called Miller. She was from the far South Side neighborhood of Beverly and had eight sisters and one brother, a full starting line up of Sox fans. I was a Cubs fan. Miller and I took the El down from the North Side and got to the park early. I don’t recall seeing the thousands of people who later gathered on the outskirts of Old Comiskey Park. It was a hot, steamy night. We sat in the upper deck in right field. I behaved myself, likely because I didn’t drink Schlitz or Stroh’s, the Comiskey house beers.
The dimly lit upper cavern at Comiskey invited anarchy even on the quietest of nights. It was a good place to make out, guzzle from open bottles of Jack Daniel’s, and ignore the game. My father, who worked in the nearby Union Stockyards as a young man, took me to my first Major League Baseball game at Comiskey: White Sox-Yankees, 1965, with Mickey Mantle stumbling around on his last, weary legs.
The White Sox had a 40-46 record on July 12, 1979, and were not a very notable team. Disco Demolition may never have happened had the White Sox been compelling to watch.
Left fielder Ralph “Roadrunner” Garr had seen his best days with the Atlanta Braves and no longer deserved the nickname. Right fielder Claudell Washington became a punch line of a bad joke. (But he hit three home runs in a game on July 14, perhaps inspired by Disco Demolition). With such a blank canvas, WMAQ-AM radio announcers Harry Caray and former major leaguer Jimmy Piersall became the life of the party.
Owner Veeck would do anything to bring fans into the park to see his mundane cast of characters. Only a month before Disco Demolition, Veeck presented “Disco Night,” holding a dance contest before a game against the Seattle Mariners (according to a 1979 White Sox program I saved). June 23 was Lithuanian Day and August 20 was “Beer Case Stacking” Day. Veeck knew his South Side audience.
Former White Sox pitcher Ken Kravec said, “We had a good year in 1977, and Veeck was promoting. I was warming up in the bullpen when it was ‘Belly Dancer Night.’ There were thousands of belly dancers. They opened up the center field gates and here they come. As they come through the gate, some belly dancers go left and some go right. You had to track around the field. I’m warming up, no big deal. All of a sudden they walk between me and the catcher. I asked security, ‘Can you get them to walk over by the side so I can keep warming up?’ Something was happening almost every night.”
The White Sox lost the first game of the Disco Demolition double-header 4-1 on a nifty five-hitter from the Tigers’ Pat Underwood, a native of Kokomo (not the Beach Boys city) Indiana. Between games, Dahl entered the field
