June 2, 2022 • 50 mins
Cast your memory back to 1979. Tensions across the US are high, on multiple levels. Disco dominates the music scene, and, oh boy, rock fans are mad about it. Things come to a head at Comiskey Park, where White Sox owner Bill Veeck and a young anti-disco DJ named Steve Dahl decide to promote a doubleheader baseball event with a particular theme -- bring a disco record, and you get to watch it get blown up between games. Spoiler alert: things went wrong, almost immediately.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Ridiculous History is a production of I Heart Radio. Welcome
(00:27):
back to the show, Ridiculous Historians. Thank you, as always
so much for tuning in. Let's give a big, big
shout out to the one and only super producer, Mr
Max Williams. Yeah, you can tell the energy folks were
so stoked, so stoked. I've got no I've got to
stop saying that in meetings because I think people can
(00:47):
tell and being sarcastic. Know what, No, that was me
being sarcastic, but about you being I don't know, it's
too many layers of sarcasm here to wade through. Um,
you know what's I'm not being sarcastic at all when
I say that I love disco baby pretty on ironically.
(01:07):
And that's the thing about like a craze or everywhere,
like what something that could be seen as like a
fat or like a like a moment and an explosive
moment in pop culture that then starts to feel kind
of dated later if you live through it, it's gonna
temper the way you actually feel about it moving forward.
Like you know, a dear, dear, dear friend of mine
who was responsible for so much music that I was
(01:29):
turned onto. Um, he owned a record store. Harry, you've
met friend of the show, Harry grahams Um, he loves
Pink Floyd, as do I. But you know what he
hates by Pink Floyd The Wall. Well, the Wall is
an album he has a little overwrought and bloated, but
he specifically hates the song another Brick in the Wall
(01:50):
Part two. I think because it was such an inescapable,
ubiquitous smash hit, and it is, in fact a disco song.
It is and yeah, disco esque. If you were to
ask me, Ben, what would you be doing in the
nineties seventies. I don't know if I'd be partying at
Studio fifty four or anything, but I would definitely be
(02:12):
listening to disco because during that time it was the
biggest genre. Like it's it's hard to, as you said,
unless you lived during that era, during that craze, it
would be difficult to really understand just how popular disco was. Now.
I'm a lifelong ab A fan, for instance, I I
(02:34):
think some people just didn't like disco because they felt
it got overplayed, or maybe they were being a bit contrarian.
But today's story is it takes place kind of in
the context of disco, where you're gonna introduce you to
a DJ, we're gonna talk a little bit about the
White Sox, and you might be thinking, guys, how does
(02:54):
this all come together? You're promising me quite a bit
in today's podcast. Well, just you wait, fellow ridiculous historians.
We should maybe start with the name. It's called Disco
Demolition Night and shout out to our new researcher that
we teased earlier, Mr Zach Williams. Yeah, Zach Um did
(03:25):
a deep dive on a topic that I was pretty
familiar with because of a podcast that I worked on
called The Speed of Sound with the wonderful and talented
and storied Mr Steve Greenberg, who did He insisted on
doing a multipart episode. I think we talked him out
of four parts and al ended up down to three
on disco, and his argument was that it is a
(03:47):
cultural kind of high water mark, or the very least
represented a very important kind of crossroads in music, you know,
in the history of music and the history of genre,
in the history of fandom, and it all kind of
crested or you know, we can actually see the moment
that disco you know, or at least, the heyday of
(04:08):
disco essentially died. Uh, and it died in full view
of a a stadium full of around forty thousand baseball
fans at Kaminsky Park in Chicago. It essentially went up
in flames. Um demolition. Disco Demolition Night was a promotional
thing like sort of like you know, free bobble Head
(04:30):
Night or like two for one Beard night, you know,
at the ballpark. But this was a little more divisive,
and it was organized by a guy by the name
of Steve Dahl, who was on the forefront of a
movement that was happening at the time. Because any time
you have something as big as disco, something as big
(04:51):
as like, you know, let's say three D movies that
kind of came and went, but they were pretty popular
for a little bit, you're gonna have a backlash that
goes along with. Uh. And this backlash was collectively referred
to as the Disco Sucks movement right right, And uh, this,
you know, this is very common. I would say that
sort of mentioning contrarianism earlier, because if something reaches any
(05:15):
certain threshold of hype, then there will be people who
just say I'm not into it for one reason or another,
whether you're talking about star wars or a religious movement
or a genre of music. It's easy to understand, though,
why the Disco Sucks movement could have occurred, like why
people got less and less hyped about disco. It really
(05:40):
was ubiquitous. If you look at the first half of
nineteen seventy nine, then you'll see that of all the
top singles on the US charts, all sixteen we're disco
except for three. There were three non disco songs, which
is nuts. That means anywhere you go on the radio,
(06:00):
you're virtually guaranteed to hear a disco song. And if
you look at the year before that, disco songs had
been number one for thirty seven weeks out of fifty two.
That's where we go to. Alice eccles, who is a
cultural historian and author of Hot Stuff, Disco and the
Remaking of American Culture. Ecl says that disco had kind
(06:25):
of pushed out the old standby of album oriented rock,
which she refers to as a o R, and live venues,
not just nightclubs, but live venues in general, were increasingly
switching over to disco. And record labels were making a
lot of money, but they didn't particularly love it. A
(06:46):
lot of music fans, a lot of rock fans also thought,
you know, disco was just the worst thing ever, and
they started to fight back against it. And here's the thing.
I mean, you're a record executive, you know, an A
and R person whatever, like there's gonna be there's a
certain tastemaker quality to to being a record executive or
to running a record label, like you want to be
(07:07):
the ones responsible for the next big sound or whatever.
You know, even though disco was definitely super lucrative, it
was kind of starting to feel a little samy and
sort of like, well, it's all kind of bleeding into
one another, all these songs, and the executives and the
and R folks didn't really feel like they even had
a hand in it as much anymore. But of course
they're not going to turn off that money faucet. And
(07:29):
the way this fantastic article in The Guardian by Alex
Petro Titus puts it. The article, by the way, it's
called Disco Demolition, The night they tried to crush Black music.
That last part we're going to get into um in
a big way very soon. They make a really good point.
It's even the record labels were making a lot of
money off disco. They were holding their nose. They were
worried about it crashing, but they wanted it to crash
(07:49):
so they could go back to classic rock. There was
also a grassroots anti disco movement, a national effort on
the part of people involved, so that that's that disco
sucks movement. So Steve Dahl and the executives UH and
responsible for promotions at the ball field at Kamiskey Park
UH decided that this was something that could be capitalized on.
(08:11):
UM So Steve Dahl and Gary Meyer, who were both
disc jockeys, actually at the w l u p radio
station in Chicago called the Loop FM. If you ever
been in Chicago, you know there's a part of the
city called the Loop where you can take the L
train kind of orbits um different neighborhoods on the outskirts
of the city and then various points kind of take
you more into the city. Chicagoans tell me if I
(08:33):
even remotely got that right, I think I'm closed. But
Dall had moved to w l u P U from
a rival station called w d a I, and that
was because that station had switched to an all disco format,
which was something that was happening all across the country
in nineties seventy nine in particular. So a lot of
(08:54):
rock DJs, We're getting their lunch eaten by the this
this format change, by these disc a dj So there
was a lot of resentment. There was a lot of
simmering kind of you know, um bitterness toward this movement.
And again because this, you know, a city like Chicago
is like a rock city. You mean, there's a lot
of jazz there and stuff too, but you think of
(09:15):
chicagoan's kind of blue collar rock folks, and it's definitely
even still like that to this day. So this was
a place that made sense to be ground zero for
that's kind of like destruction of disco, because these these
concerns were very real, not to mention, like you said, Ben,
the the the move away from the album format to
(09:38):
the single format and away from the live music venue
to the club was also busy, and people off Zanna Do. Sorry, guys,
that's what I was trying to think of. Zanna Do.
The nineteen eight film Remember Zanna Do Do? You guys
remember they had Olivia Newton, John Electra Light Orchestra. No, yeah,
(10:00):
you're yeah. Yes, it's a roller skating movie. Um, and
it is not very good, but it is as an
artifact of a time and place. It's such a specific,
such a specific genre, that I think it naturally becomes
number one in the roller skating musicals of the nineteen eighties.
(10:21):
But yeah, this is the Disco is not for everyone.
And there's this great article and Rolling Stone where they
recount some of Steve Doll's statements two newscasters of the day,
and he says he's listing out the reasons that he
doesn't care for disco. He's pretty humorous. He says, I
hate the taste of pina coladas. I'm allergic to gold jewelry,
(10:44):
so there's nothing there for me. You have to spend
so much time blow dry in your hair. It's a
waste of energy. And uh you can tell. Of course,
radio station personalities tend to we tend to be big personalities.
So he is be and humorous, but he is also
not He's also trying to find a creative way to
(11:05):
protest against the dominance of disco, and he and his
buddy Gary, he just mentioned At first, they said, all right,
we're gonna just blow up a bunch of disco records
on the field between the games. And they also cooked
up this scheme with Bill Veeck, who was the owner
(11:26):
of White Sox at the time. And Bill had another problem.
The season wasn't going super well and he really wanted
to increase attendance. He wanted those butts in the seat. Uh.
And his son Michael, who was about twenty eight at
the time, was instrumental in talking his father into doing
(11:46):
this promotion because Michael, like Steve and like Gary, hated disco.
He thought it was a blight on the American music
scene and disco bashing, his mind, became a celebrity cause
just because there wasn't really anything else to do. And
you know, interestingly enough, the White Sox had experimented with
(12:10):
a themed disco night before. Two years before this event,
they had a disco night that was celebrating disco, so
this one would be dissing disco. It's a disco disc.
Disco dis disastrous, dystopia demolition. We have them, We're demolishing
(12:31):
this this series of alliteration, alliterateate of terms. Remember that
movie demolition man there was what were they for? Were
there for wiping? It was unclear. It was on the
back of a toilet. Sorry, it was just foolish to
(12:52):
not know. And uh, Sylvester Stalone was haunted. But this,
so this seems like it could be kind of fun.
You go to the show or you go to the game,
you bring a disco record with you, and you pay
cents to watch the album's all get blown up together.
So it's a little spectacle, you know what I mean.
(13:13):
No one's getting hurt. The record companies probably don't care
because you've already bought the record, the band already got
their money, right, or whichever artists were mentioning. But soon
enough it became clear that everybody, from the owner of
the White Sox to the DJs involved, had no idea
how popular this concept was. Especially you're only charging people cents.
(13:36):
Come on, that's like the cheapest day in town, and
I want to jump in here. It was ninety eight
cents for a double header two so you got eight
pmatings of baseball, so you could just it's like an
all day thing. You to go to a game, watch
the stuff get blow up, get another game. Well at
least in concept, and so it's just like that, that's
that's a really good deal. It's forty eight. It's like
(13:58):
less than fifty cents or game right, too good a deal.
In fact, they didn't expect the turnout they were going
to get because I think they were looking at this
whole disco sucks thing is sort of a novelty, sort
of a way to be a little contrarian, like you said, Ben,
to sort of like support that whole of Chicago, you know,
rock mentality or whatever, and sell a few extra tickets
(14:21):
in the meantime. But it was way more popular than
I think anybody planned. And part of that was that
people were bringing records right that they were wanted to
see blown up. But it wasn't really clear to the
people that were taking tickets, you know, which ones were
disco officially and which ones weren't. And to that end,
(14:44):
I want to bring up an interesting point the genre,
the idea of disco it is referring to. I mean,
think about it. It's like a club is called a disco.
Maybe I'm not getting the order of operations here, right,
but I mean a disc is a vinyl record, So
it's just referring to playing records, so disco songs, while
(15:05):
it ended up being associated with a genre and kind
of a four on the floor, you know, kick drum
kind of thing with percussion and stuff. A lot of
there's a lot of genre hopping within the supposed genre
that is disco. I would say the beat is a
disco beat, but then you can apply that to like techno,
you can apply that to toum house music or whatever.
(15:27):
But that's of course came came later, and we'll get
into that. Chicago played a big role in that as
well later down the line. But people were bringing all
kinds of records, but they were bringing like R and
B records music by black artists, and it became, you know,
a little bit clear that the whole disco sucks movement
some of the folks involved in that, we're using it
(15:49):
as a way of kind of participating in veiled racism,
not very veiled, not very veiled. But you mentioned abbas
about as white as you can get, you know, with
with a with a band. I mean, there are a
bunch of Swedes, you know, playing kind of disco music,
but a lot of the top hits, you know, of
the disco age were from black artists, and that was
(16:10):
not the case prior to that in terms of like
what was popular on the radio was a lot of
white you know, long hair kind of like rock and
rollers or whatever in the sixties and seventies. And of
course there was some you know, popular black sixties motown
of course and all of that stuff, but it wasn't
the same. This was very very mainstreaming, and I think
a lot of people resented that and used as an
(16:31):
opportunity to be nasty towards these these black artists. So
people were bringing all kinds of stuff that wasn't quote
unquote disco, and they were told when the people taking
tickets as their supervisors, I don't know, this is a
really disco. That doesn't matter if they brought a record,
give him a ticket. Yeah, And that still wasn't enough.
Fans were busting down the gates, they were climbing over
(16:56):
the walls. More than seventy five thousand people. We're filling
the stadium, not even a lot of them. Not not
so much for the games, even though, as you mentioned,
max is a doubleheader. They just wanted to see the
records explode. And the crowd was especially during the first game,
they were already rowdy. They were throwing records, you know,
(17:19):
supposedly disco records. They were throwing cherry bombs. They were
throwing like anything they had at the players on the field.
So this is, as you can imagine, kind of distracting
to the guys who are there to play baseball. The
Socks lose the first game to the Tigers, and it's
four to one, and then right the game's over. So
(17:41):
the part of the show everybody really wants to see
is about to begin. Our DJ Dall comes onto the field.
He's wearing camo and a helmet, and uh, everybody still
is throwing beer and vital records at him, and he's
cheering them on. He's like, this is the world largest
dance I Disco rally. We took the records you bought tonight.
(18:04):
We got him in a giant box. We're gonna blow
him up real good. And everyone's like, WHOA, yeah, how
do he blows them them up real good? Ye? Seeing
what this guy looked like at this time, I actually
haven't seen a photo of the guy describing to his max, Uh, he's, uh,
what you call it a military outfit? I mean it's
(18:25):
a it's a stretch. I would say, Uh, he's got
real big, like seventies early eighties glasses. The hair is
pretty scruffy to say the least. Um, it's an interesting
look to say the least, it looks like it looks
almost like a like a mix between a hippie and
a would be dictator. That's very appropriate given his you know,
(18:46):
what he's doing here is ultimately stirring up a mob
with rhetoric, you know, surrounding what is ultimately an ideological perspective.
You know, I mean it sounds silly now we think
about it, like dis go whatever. It seems so frivolous
and like this whole period of excess that was sort
of like an antithesis to this the free love of
the sixties and you know, psychedelics, it was more about
(19:09):
cocaine and like longevity and just like endurance. You know,
you would just you know, party boogie woogie woog until
you just can't book you no more and all that stuff.
But it was it was all kind of surfacy, like
all of the like meaning and counterculture that was wrapped
up in the sixties and seventies, all of that kind
of went out the window with disco because it was
just like all about looking good and like being hot
(19:32):
and having money, you know what I mean. It wasn't
that they didn't really have a cause it was it
was all just kind of this like vacuous surfacing stuff.
So this guy, who, like you said, represents you know,
the the antithity, the backlash to what I just described,
is up on a podium, you know, working this group
up into a froth and then exploding these records and
(19:56):
this symbolic act, you know, with shards of wreck. By
the way, this does not seem very safe. You ever
seen a shard of a vinyl record? I mean he
cut somebody with one of those. I mean, you got
like shrapnell of this stuff flying everywhere? Or were people
wearing safety goggles? I mean, I know it was a
different time, but come on, when when I was a kid,
this is a true story, I did not understand that
(20:18):
breaking a record was a figurative thing. I thought that
you became a record breaker by physically breaking records. Uh.
Apologies to my parents, because I got renaissance tasty vital
and it came in. I told my mom I was
a record breaker. I oddly enough to not get in trouble,
but I did. I did hurt myself, so I know
(20:39):
exactly what you're talking about. The Vinyl Shards don't try
it molten and sharp, and it's all just shooting out
of the crowd and people are just like losing their minds.
You know. It's like all over the field, people start
channing Disco sucks, school sucks, Disco sucks. And they're getting
out of their seats now and jumping over the barricade
(21:01):
down into the field and like cult like, you know,
dancing like around this this this dumpster fire literally while
being rained down, you know, by while the Vinyl Shards
are raining down from on high, they're stealing stuff. They're
starting to loot like bats and batting helmets and things
like that, and of course you know they're politely being
(21:22):
asked by the announcers to please return to their seats. Right, Yeah,
it's uh, it's increasingly ineffective that there's a there's an
interesting escalation here, like a back and forth, right, because
individual people are really really intelligent, but big groups of
people are really really dumb. So I learned about that
recently at a hot air balloon festival. But anyhow, so
(21:45):
we know we see these people trying to talk down
the crowd, like you said, noll the p A. Their
appeals are ignored. The owner of the White Sox gets
on the field, he grabs a microphone and it's like, hey,
come on, will you please sit down out and so
we can play play baseball. And then this goes on
for like forty minutes. The crowd in the stadium divides.
(22:07):
There's still some fans who are in the stands right
there in their seats, and they start a counter chant
and they're just yelling back to your seats, back to
your seats, and then they start playing take me out
to the ball game. None of this works to the
crowd is just even more adamant about this protest. So
(22:27):
the Chicago police show up in full riot gear and
start clearing the field while the crowd in the stands
is starting to sing in kind of a petty spiteful way.
Na na na na na na na na. Come on.
(22:50):
Every time I hear that, I always say. They're saying
gooden bye, like like a German like good bye, you
know not, So this becomes kind the rallying cry, right
because this is sort of like an anti disco anthem
sort of. I mean not not not because of the
content of the song. It's just saying like goodbye, ushering out,
you know, the age of discom But it also is
(23:12):
more of a more of a rock song. Yeah yeah,
by the band Steam, who has been described as pop
or psychedelic pop. But it's it's a good song. And
you know, in the three of us are big, big
fans of music across many genres. I don't know which,
I don't know which side we would be on in
this in this stadium. But here's the thing that's really interesting.
(23:34):
It's something we've alluded to through this episode. Right now,
A lot of people may think of Disco Demolition Night
as a marketing stunt gone wrong, right, be careful what
you wish for when you say you want more people
to come to your stadium. But in the larger context,
(23:55):
this shows us um. I think it's indicative of some
growing intensions in Chicago and in the rest of the
United States. Like you mentioned the idea that people were
picking records by black artists and then we say we're
going to destroy those. I want to go back to
(24:16):
that excellent Rolling Stone article that Zack pointed out, which
is watch disco demolition Night devolved into a fiery riot
by Andy Green, and Green points out that for a
lot of people, for a lot of non white people,
this incident was very disturbing because everybody was aware that,
(24:40):
you know, a lot of the guys who were doing
this were white dudes who are like burning records and
rioting and whatnot, and disco as a genre was incredibly
popular among many non white groups and people from different demographics,
you know, gay people. Oh not to mention people from
the gay community, right was a big part of it too,
And there was a sense you know, and again the
(25:02):
DJs responsible for this event would go on to say
like I'm no homophobe, I'm no racist. I was this
was more just like a tongue in cheek kind of
stunt to you know, sort of like pok the finger
in the eye would have become the kind of like
prevailing you know genre in almost like in a in
a an egregious way, in a way that was like
seeming seemingly wiping out other culture. But that doesn't just
(25:25):
because someone had doesn't have like an endgame in mind
that other people Glamanto as part of a movement doesn't
mean those other people aren't part of the movement too.
And and there certainly were homophobes and racists involved. And
we'll get to a really fascinating story in a little
bit that Zach found as well, from the perspective of
of of of a black person who was actually working
(25:46):
at the field the day of of this of this riot,
and the way he was treated. Yeah, yeah, exactly. I
mean there's a guy named Nile Rogers speaking about this
incident who said that for his yeah, yeah, he said
that for this community felt like Nazi book burning. You know,
Roger said, quote, this is America, the home of jazz
(26:07):
and rock, and people are now afraid to even say
the word disco. And you know, I think we stumble
upon such an important thing about American culture here. Like
you said, nol Doll just said, Look, he said, we
were just kids who were basically taking the piss out
of a genre of music. We're not. It wasn't meant
(26:29):
to be racist, it wasn't meant to be homophobic. But
I think you make an excellent point that just because
that guy didn't intend to do this, it doesn't mean
that other people involved, We're also not being racist or homophobic,
because a couple definitely We're so there's this idea. It's
mentioned in that Guardian article we sided earlier that disco
(26:53):
is a threat to some kind of white status quo.
You know that there's a culture war brew Wing and
d J's in Detroit. I didn't know this week out
in the story, DJ's in Detroit formed a disco themed
vigilante group called, and this is true, folks, the Disco
Ducks Clan. Because Disco Duck was was kind of a
(27:16):
a lot of people point to Rick D's Disco Duck.
We should actually play a little clip of it. It's
it's too silly, down too essentially a Donald Duck kind
of voice over at disco beats. It really signaled like
(27:41):
this is a joke. This has become a joke. Quack quack,
you know it's I mean, it's just ridiculous. It's it's
it's just a total novelty song. And just showed that
this that bubble that the record labels were worried about,
it was. It was, it was there and and and
all it needed for it to burst was this moment
at com Ski Park. And that was literally like the
(28:01):
powder Keg moment that burst the disco bubble and then
made it just like straight up not cool because again,
it also represented kind of yuppie culture. It represented kind
of these like you know, but then then we're getting
into the eighties and then the disco kind of molds
into like, you know, eighties kind of like you know,
electronic music, like things like you know, Culture Club and
(28:23):
Human League, which I love all of that stuff. But
if you watch a movie like American Psycho and you see,
you know, the way the serial killer Patrick Bateman is
sort of um portrayed as this eighties music loving, you know,
suit wearing, fine business card having psychopath, you understand what
how it's parodying that kind of yuppy culture that sort
(28:45):
of began with disco and didn't really go away. It
just started calling it something else and the sound changed. Yeah,
and and music should always be evolving, right, I think
that's a very solid argument to make. But this is
a flashpoint for the American attitude about disco. And after
(29:08):
this moment, disco begins to encounter a really sharp decline.
And that doesn't mean that everybody all at once decided
they didn't like disco. It had just been so popular
that it was unsustainable, you know what I mean. So
if you go to that we mentioned the stat for
the first half of ninety nine, right, all but three
of the top hit songs or disco songs. But if
(29:31):
you go to the second part of nine, you'll see
there was only one disco song that made it to
the top of the charts, and it only did it
for a week. It was Michael Jackson's Don't Stop Till
You Get Enough. I'm falling into DJ voice, you know,
like we're back from the commercial for sure, which is
(29:51):
which is a stone called banger, and that song holds
up to this day despite you know, it is that
art from the artist the conversation, I think it's a
case by case basis. But for me, some of the
music of Michael jacks especially his classic error is unimpeachably great.
And don't Stop Till You Get Enough. Yes, it is
a disco song. It has a lot of hallmarks of
disco culture, those strings and that don't bank ant all
(30:15):
of the instrumentation of that, uh, is very much in
line with disco, but it also like what even is disco?
You know, I mean it really it was just it
just danceable music with like cool arrangements, with kind of
an airy uppeat quality to it. Like, I think that's
the issue here, is like it was more of a
culture than it was a genre, you know. Yeah. Denny Hilton,
(30:39):
writing Froxford University Press, he had this article called the
Birth of Disco and I learned some pretty interesting stuff
from that. I didn't know the etymology, you know, I
love etymology. Disco tech is a French word that just
means library of phonographic records, like tech. And I was,
I was, I was posing this question earlier, and a
(31:00):
conjectured that had to be disco is just the disc
and the disco is just a place where you go
to listen to the disc. Yeah. Yeah, it goes back
to it was a type of French nightclub emergent in Paris.
They had started playing these records during the Nazi occupation
in the nineteen forties, and eventually some clubs just started
(31:20):
calling themselves, you know, like the disco dick and and
uh then later it came over across the pond to
the US. But but yeah, it's tough to kind of
define it. And I like the point. I like the
supposition that it might simply be a matter of culture, right,
as much as a rigorously defined musical genre, which it
(31:43):
kind of isn't rigorously defined. And so now we know
there's this mainstream push against disco, but it doesn't go away.
It kind of goes back underground where it was in
the beginning. There's a pretty interesting thing that I wanted
(32:06):
to ask you guys about. There's this argument that when
it went back underground and it wasn't as mainstream as
it happened in years past, that the artists were able
to become even more adventurous and creative. You think, so
you agree with that, Oh well, nineteen seventy nine was
a really important year for music in the underground in
terms of like indie which you might call indie music.
(32:27):
Like nineteen seventy nine I believe was the year that
like David Bowie's Low came out, and and Bowie certainly
would dabble in, you know, dance dancing music with stuff
like literally let's dance and uh fashion on Scary Monsters,
But he took dance music and kind of like flipped
it on its head and made it like sort of
subversive dance music where it was like yeah, it has
(32:48):
a fun disco b but it also has like a
Japanese woman like screaming of the top for lungs and
Japanese and like the sounds of glass breaking, and you know,
like Robert Fripp's guitar sounded like a chainsaw cutting down
a forest, you know, and you can really I tried
to find a chronological list of of hit songs from
(33:08):
nineteen seventy nine, and it's true. It really does kind
of appear that the first part of it is a
lot of disco e type songs like Donna Summer, Herbie Man, Shalamar.
You know, I believe that's uh. I believe that's a
disco e type song. But then you have like, you know,
Blondie with Heart of Glass, which is a disco song
by Blondie. Because even artists that were more punk, we're
(33:32):
getting into disco, like we talked about with Pink Floyd
in the Wall. You know, they were like kind of
a psych band, punk you know, whatever you wanna call it,
experimental band, but they that song was a massive hit
for them, and even if it wasn't like anything else
they've ever done. And you know, Rod Stewart, if you
want my body and you think I'm sexy. Like his
earlier stuff was mega seventies and beautiful, like The Faces
was kind of you know, folky, punky kind of roots music,
(33:55):
you know. But then later when we get to that
second half, you have Blondie you with a hit with
the song Dreaming, just a disco song at all. It's
much more of like what we would think now is
like a proto kind of indie dream pop kind of song,
you know, like something that Beach House would do almost
you know. So it's a really interesting trajectory because then
(34:16):
you have like Brian Eno and these artists that are
helping some of these disco e type artists make more
interesting stuff or take pieces of the disco sound and
turn into something a little more interesting something. I'm a
fan of that in every in every genre. That's one
thing that I really love about hip hop as well,
is you can you can take pretty much any aspect
(34:39):
of any other genre of music and you can put
it into a beat and it'll sound really good right
with especially the hands of a talented producer. I think
that kind of evolution should be welcomed. You know. It's
always weird to me when I and I know, not
all music is for all people, but it's weird to
me when I hear someone say I disc like insert
(35:01):
genre here, whether that's like um marengue, or whether it's
you know, opera, or whether it's nineties alternative rock. The
question is have you heard every song in that genre?
Maybe you just haven't heard one that speaks to you.
So it's such a weird broad brush to say, you know,
I hate all disco. It seems like in this case,
(35:21):
these people were saying, I hate what disco in my
mind represents one million percents. Now that's that's that's why
I said it was much more of a a lifestyle
or like a brand than it was even a sound.
And you know, we we get into kind of more
modern times where now you know, like vapor wave for example,
(35:42):
which is like a really interesting mash up kind of
culture jamming sort of genre of music that will take
everything from like elevator music to like gum commercials from
the eighties to disco and like slow it down and
kind of chopp and screw it to make really interesting
subversive psychedelic dance music. You know Arthur Russell, for example,
(36:04):
who's like, you know, he's he's an artist that's all
over the place. He put out a kind of a
series of avant disco kind of records and that became
a thing too with DJs, and like, you know, then
you start getting into like the mainstreaming of Kraft work
and like German electronic or European electronic sounds, and that's
all kind of part and parcel with that Bowie era
(36:25):
that I was describing, because he went to Berlin to
get off of cocaine and other drugs and he ended
up making these three albums while he was there, produced
by Brian you know, Low Lodger and Heroes, which are
three of my favorite albums of all time and certainly
of of Bowie's career. And then you start getting into like,
you know, DJ's like Frankie Knuckles in Chicago who's using
(36:48):
edits of disco songs and changing the speed and mashing
them up with other sounds and synthesizers and stuff. So
it's like, this is the city that you know, burned
disco to the ground, became a really important city for
a burgeoning new kind of club sound, which is disco
in a way, like neo disco. Yeah, and this is
(37:10):
where we want. So I've been trying so hard not
to tell you guys bad disco jokes. But we're gonna get.
We're gonna get a few days. We'll save for the end.
You say that now, my friend. But uh, but we
we would be remiss if we did not follow up
on a very important story that we talked about just
(37:30):
a second ago. We said, we're gonna give you the
experience of someone who is a civilian not involved in
this riot. There's a guy named Vince Lawrence. It's the
summer of nineteen seventy nine. He has acquired a part
time job at Commitsky Park as an usher. And Vince,
you know, as a young black teenager, knew this wasn't
(37:52):
maybe the ideal job, but he like It was very
close to a neighborhood called Bridgeport, and at the time,
according to Vince, he said, quote, it was common knowledge
that you might not want to be hanging around after
dark because there were people there who for sure don't
like you based on your color. That's right, And just
just a little extra context, Vince Lawrence's father was a
(38:16):
guy named Eddie Thomas who worked, or believe founded or
managed several funk acts who were on the label Curdam
Records was the Chicago based like funk label artists like
Captain Sky who you know funk also was kind of
in the disco realmant times, but it was again it
was lumped in. I would not say that it absolutely
(38:37):
actually was that what you would associate with the disco sound.
It was the kind of artist that you'd see on
Soul Train. But Vince himself went on to become a
pioneering electronic music producer in the genre that I was
describing earlier, like the synth kind of like mash up,
you know, neo future disco and and and funk kind
of sounds. But yeah, so he's he's there, he's working
(38:59):
at the stadium while this event is taking place, and
um he sees some things that are pretty ugly. Mm hmmm, yeah,
he really does. And bridge Board itself could be could
be an episode you know, all its own. This area
was very, very notorious for racial tension. There was even
(39:20):
one white sox player, a guy named Thad Boseley, who
was surrounded while he was driving through town. He was
surrounded by a mob of people because he took a
wrong turn after going home from a game, and the
situation only ended, or like only diffused really when one
(39:40):
of the people in the mob recognized him and said, oh, hey,
you with the White Sox. We love that team, you
know what I mean, which is terrifying. Lawrence, though knew
that this job was an opportunity. He said, look, if
there are people who were wealthy enough to sit in
the stadium boxes, then they're probably gonna tip me. All right,
(40:02):
I can get a good view of the game. And
there are always these promo events, these theme nights, right
like Elvis Knights, Country Music Nights, etcetera. And Vince Lawrence
was aware of Steve Dahl. He liked them. He wanted
to see this band called Teenage Radiation. They had recorded
(40:24):
a parody single, I don't know if we mentioned this
yet called do you Think I'm Disco? Yeah, that led
up to this, you know, to this event. And when
you hear Lawrence's account of this, you can tell that
he quickly clocked something wasn't right. He noticed firsthand because
(40:46):
he was there. He noticed that people we're coming with
disco records, but a lot of people were, just as
we said earlier, picking any music that was made by
a black artist, and he told his boss. He said, look,
they're not These aren't all the disco records obviously, R
and B. I see funk. Should I make them go
home and come back with a disco record? And then
(41:07):
that's when the decision was made. Now they if they
have a record, take it, give them that, you know,
give them that ticket. And he says, quote, I want
to say, maybe the person bringing the record just made
a mistake. But given the amount of mistakes I witnessed,
why weren't there any cheap trick records or air supply right?
No Carpenters records. Yeah. I was talking to Zach um
(41:29):
or any researcher who whodug a lot of this stuff up,
who is a very thoughtful, smart and um have her
of great taste, And he pointed out this section we
were talking about in particular, like there are a lot
of like kind of um, I guess you could call
it easy listening or like kind of like you know,
maybe adult contemporary artists that you could potentially more easily
(41:53):
blur the line between what they are and what disco is.
But none of those were even making it. And like
things like air supply are things like you know, Hall
and Oates or something like that. Not that they're adult contemporary,
but like you know, they've got some songs that you
could construe with a discoe type vibe. So it started
to seem like there was intent. Yeah, I think it's
(42:13):
what we're getting now, absolutely, And Lawrence's account I think
is really important to keep in mind. He says, quote,
I was one of the few African American people in
the stadium. Steve Dahl said it wasn't discriminatory. He was
an equal opportunities offender or whatever. But Steve didn't invite
brothers to commit ski part. So once the scenes starts
(42:35):
kind of veering towards more like full blown riot, and
we've got estimates as high as fifty thousand people rushing
the field, absolutely more chaos than the meager, you know,
police presence that was there could deal with. Lawrence started
to feel really unsafe, like because he was being targeted
(42:55):
by these folks. What he did, according to him, how
he felt was because he was black, and he's he's
a black kid, you know, living in Chicago. He was
wearing a loop T shirt, so he was what's it
inter between me and the next usher trying to get
back to his locker. So at one point you have
a guy that walks up to him and looks him
right in the face and says, hey, you, disco sucks
(43:18):
and just snaps a record in his face, like in
his face. Well, now, of course, vinyls right, yet eye
level that could easily hurt you. We're not even, I'm
not even. It's more about the gesture. It's almost like
spitting at somebody, you know. It's like I'm targeting you
with this act of aggression. It's not like, hey, we're
on the same team. Disco sucks. It's like, hey, you
(43:41):
person who I associate with this what you represent sucks.
And in this situation, it's almost like disco is a
stand in for like being black or something or just
being different, you know, right exactly. And this also is
only one example of how things can go raw in
big sporting events. Uh, this is also, I would say,
(44:03):
even more importantly, it proves to us that there's always
more to the story behind the headline. And Max, we're
talking a little bit off air, you my friend, to
have your own first hand account of things going a
little south at a ballgame. Huh yeah, yeah, yeah. As
It's been noted multiple times here on the show. I
am a dispassionate sports fan on Dispassionate again, and I
(44:28):
went to the first ever and Al wild Card game
back in twelve between Atlanta and St. Louis. And for
people who know that, um Sam Holberg had one of
the most egregious calls in baseball history, called an infield
fly on a ball that was in the outfield. He
was the outfield umpire. It doesn't make any sense any
of it, and it very much changed the game. So
(44:48):
for nineteen minutes, Atlanta fans showered the field with beer bottles,
just screaming. It was very, very similar to this. There's
a million videos of it and stuff, and so we
were in it was I'm like, yeah, I've experienced this before.
I will say my one regret though, is I had
just turned twenty one at the time. I had finished
my beer already. I didn't have anything to throw. It's
(45:11):
like that old Mitch Hedberg joke where they say who
here's feels like a human being in he cheers, and
they say, who he feels like a monster. I did
not know there was another choice. Yeah, And I mean
I will say the one lucky thing for both teams
was that it happened in the eighth inning, and it
cut off selling beer at the seventh inning stretch, so
(45:32):
there was a finite amount you could have. Okay, this
this has nothing to do with anything, but I just
want to deliver on what we promised here. Towards the
end of the episode, what did the cops say when
he entered the disco club? Hold On, hold on, hold
on a good classy, cheesy joke, like this is almost
(45:56):
like a riddle. Um No, I don't what is he say?
Get down? So I didn't write that one. Yeah, I
will say though, I kind of miss the dance moves
of the disco era. You know, the one finger kind
(46:16):
of like cross chest thing, and then you alternate lots
of very big moves. I like the one where you
kind of get down. Well a lot of these were
James Brown moves to they were just slowed down and
made like palatable for people that weren't really that good
at dancing. But then you know, there was certainly it
was a big dance scene. There were a lot of
dance It was all about the dance moves and being
(46:36):
seen on the floor. There's a really cool movie that
a buddy of mine turned me onto called The Last
Days of Disco. I think it's what it's called. It's
a Slim Whitman movie. It's got Chloe Seve Agney in
it or set seventy. However you say that name, I
least get it wrong. And Um, who's the actor that
plays the vampire hunter in the Underworld movies? Who Kate Beckinsale?
(47:01):
Kate Beckinsal in it? No, it's just Kate beck and Stale.
Um what that Isaac's guy that Max Links. There's a
handful of other smaller bit part actors that are in
that I recognize, but I can tell you what their
names are. But it's it's a little bit stilted. It's
got this kind of like fly on the Wall kind
of perspective, and there's some definitely definite cringe moments. But
(47:24):
I believe there you'll see some parts where there's some
dudes roaming through the streets with leather jackets and there's
an altercation with them shouting disco sucks at some of
the main characters. So I think the movie is meant
to take place in nineteen seventy nine. So uh, if
you want to see kind of like a crystallization of
what the heyday of this whole would have been like.
And then um, I think even there's like a post
(47:46):
mortem thing where it's like, well, that was fine while
it lasted, and now we all have to go get
real jobs, like, you know, grow our hair out. I
think it was just such a creative time to musically.
There were these amazing salts that probably wouldn't have been
made in an any other environment or in any other
kind of cultural soil, you know. So we should all
(48:08):
be grateful for disco, even if it's not particularly your jam,
because it tells us a lot about American society. And
this is this was one heck of a story. I
know we went a little long today, but really enjoyed
this one. So thank you. Dear Ridiculous Historians were coming
(48:29):
on this journey with us. What's your favorite weird disco song?
Can't wait to hear tell us all about it on
our Facebook page Ridiculous Historians. You can also find us,
you know, just we're around. We're everywhere on the internet
these days. Big big thanks to our super producer, Mr
Max Disco Williams. You like that nickname, it's an acronym
(48:56):
though it's a it's a. It's an acronym that stands
for discover are of interesting curling organizations? There it is
well done. Now did we work on that a little
bit off air? We didn't. Yes, we didn't question about that.
Let's be behind the curtain peak, behind the v I P.
(49:17):
Discotheque curtain. No, I had a great time with this one.
I feel like we all did. Yeah. So also, as always,
thanks to Christ Frost you know it is Eves, Jeff Coche,
thanks to our research associates Zach Williams and Jeff Bartlett
and no thanks to you man. We are like, we
should go do a disco thing. Is is there any disco? Well,
(49:38):
nowadays they just call them dance parties, you know, and
you can certainly have themed ones or maybe there's ones
with We didn't even get into that. We believe we
briefly discussed the film Zanna Do. But like roller, disco
was a whole thing, you know, And that's hard, man,
that takes some stamina and um coordination and that is
not for me. But no, I would gladly attend a
night out dance party with that. With the two of
(50:00):
you find fellas leisure suits, need leisure suits. That game
leisure suit, Larry. Yeah, it was just I'm actually just Google. Yes. Yeah,
silly silly, silly game, silly character. See you next time, folks.
For more podcasts for my Heart Radio, visit the I
(50:22):
Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to
your favorite shows
Ridiculous History is a production of I Heart Radio. Welcome
(00:27):
back to the show, Ridiculous Historians. Thank you, as always
so much for tuning in. Let's give a big, big
shout out to the one and only super producer, Mr
Max Williams. Yeah, you can tell the energy folks were
so stoked, so stoked. I've got no I've got to
stop saying that in meetings because I think people can
(00:47):
tell and being sarcastic. Know what, No, that was me
being sarcastic, but about you being I don't know, it's
too many layers of sarcasm here to wade through. Um,
you know what's I'm not being sarcastic at all when
I say that I love disco baby pretty on ironically.
(01:07):
And that's the thing about like a craze or everywhere,
like what something that could be seen as like a
fat or like a like a moment and an explosive
moment in pop culture that then starts to feel kind
of dated later if you live through it, it's gonna
temper the way you actually feel about it moving forward.
Like you know, a dear, dear, dear friend of mine
who was responsible for so much music that I was
(01:29):
turned onto. Um, he owned a record store. Harry, you've
met friend of the show, Harry grahams Um, he loves
Pink Floyd, as do I. But you know what he
hates by Pink Floyd The Wall. Well, the Wall is
an album he has a little overwrought and bloated, but
he specifically hates the song another Brick in the Wall
(01:50):
Part two. I think because it was such an inescapable,
ubiquitous smash hit, and it is, in fact a disco song.
It is and yeah, disco esque. If you were to
ask me, Ben, what would you be doing in the
nineties seventies. I don't know if I'd be partying at
Studio fifty four or anything, but I would definitely be
(02:12):
listening to disco because during that time it was the
biggest genre. Like it's it's hard to, as you said,
unless you lived during that era, during that craze, it
would be difficult to really understand just how popular disco was. Now.
I'm a lifelong ab A fan, for instance, I I
(02:34):
think some people just didn't like disco because they felt
it got overplayed, or maybe they were being a bit contrarian.
But today's story is it takes place kind of in
the context of disco, where you're gonna introduce you to
a DJ, we're gonna talk a little bit about the
White Sox, and you might be thinking, guys, how does
(02:54):
this all come together? You're promising me quite a bit
in today's podcast. Well, just you wait, fellow ridiculous historians.
We should maybe start with the name. It's called Disco
Demolition Night and shout out to our new researcher that
we teased earlier, Mr Zach Williams. Yeah, Zach Um did
(03:25):
a deep dive on a topic that I was pretty
familiar with because of a podcast that I worked on
called The Speed of Sound with the wonderful and talented
and storied Mr Steve Greenberg, who did He insisted on
doing a multipart episode. I think we talked him out
of four parts and al ended up down to three
on disco, and his argument was that it is a
(03:47):
cultural kind of high water mark, or the very least
represented a very important kind of crossroads in music, you know,
in the history of music and the history of genre,
in the history of fandom, and it all kind of
crested or you know, we can actually see the moment
that disco you know, or at least, the heyday of
(04:08):
disco essentially died. Uh, and it died in full view
of a a stadium full of around forty thousand baseball
fans at Kaminsky Park in Chicago. It essentially went up
in flames. Um demolition. Disco Demolition Night was a promotional
thing like sort of like you know, free bobble Head
(04:30):
Night or like two for one Beard night, you know,
at the ballpark. But this was a little more divisive,
and it was organized by a guy by the name
of Steve Dahl, who was on the forefront of a
movement that was happening at the time. Because any time
you have something as big as disco, something as big
(04:51):
as like, you know, let's say three D movies that
kind of came and went, but they were pretty popular
for a little bit, you're gonna have a backlash that
goes along with. Uh. And this backlash was collectively referred
to as the Disco Sucks movement right right, And uh, this,
you know, this is very common. I would say that
sort of mentioning contrarianism earlier, because if something reaches any
(05:15):
certain threshold of hype, then there will be people who
just say I'm not into it for one reason or another,
whether you're talking about star wars or a religious movement
or a genre of music. It's easy to understand, though,
why the Disco Sucks movement could have occurred, like why
people got less and less hyped about disco. It really
(05:40):
was ubiquitous. If you look at the first half of
nineteen seventy nine, then you'll see that of all the
top singles on the US charts, all sixteen we're disco
except for three. There were three non disco songs, which
is nuts. That means anywhere you go on the radio,
(06:00):
you're virtually guaranteed to hear a disco song. And if
you look at the year before that, disco songs had
been number one for thirty seven weeks out of fifty two.
That's where we go to. Alice eccles, who is a
cultural historian and author of Hot Stuff, Disco and the
Remaking of American Culture. Ecl says that disco had kind
(06:25):
of pushed out the old standby of album oriented rock,
which she refers to as a o R, and live venues,
not just nightclubs, but live venues in general, were increasingly
switching over to disco. And record labels were making a
lot of money, but they didn't particularly love it. A
(06:46):
lot of music fans, a lot of rock fans also thought,
you know, disco was just the worst thing ever, and
they started to fight back against it. And here's the thing.
I mean, you're a record executive, you know, an A
and R person whatever, like there's gonna be there's a
certain tastemaker quality to to being a record executive or
to running a record label, like you want to be
(07:07):
the ones responsible for the next big sound or whatever.
You know, even though disco was definitely super lucrative, it
was kind of starting to feel a little samy and
sort of like, well, it's all kind of bleeding into
one another, all these songs, and the executives and the
and R folks didn't really feel like they even had
a hand in it as much anymore. But of course
they're not going to turn off that money faucet. And
(07:29):
the way this fantastic article in The Guardian by Alex
Petro Titus puts it. The article, by the way, it's
called Disco Demolition, The night they tried to crush Black music.
That last part we're going to get into um in
a big way very soon. They make a really good point.
It's even the record labels were making a lot of
money off disco. They were holding their nose. They were
worried about it crashing, but they wanted it to crash
(07:49):
so they could go back to classic rock. There was
also a grassroots anti disco movement, a national effort on
the part of people involved, so that that's that disco
sucks movement. So Steve Dahl and the executives UH and
responsible for promotions at the ball field at Kamiskey Park
UH decided that this was something that could be capitalized on.
(08:11):
UM So Steve Dahl and Gary Meyer, who were both
disc jockeys, actually at the w l u p radio
station in Chicago called the Loop FM. If you ever
been in Chicago, you know there's a part of the
city called the Loop where you can take the L
train kind of orbits um different neighborhoods on the outskirts
of the city and then various points kind of take
you more into the city. Chicagoans tell me if I
(08:33):
even remotely got that right, I think I'm closed. But
Dall had moved to w l u P U from
a rival station called w d a I, and that
was because that station had switched to an all disco format,
which was something that was happening all across the country
in nineties seventy nine in particular. So a lot of
(08:54):
rock DJs, We're getting their lunch eaten by the this
this format change, by these disc a dj So there
was a lot of resentment. There was a lot of
simmering kind of you know, um bitterness toward this movement.
And again because this, you know, a city like Chicago
is like a rock city. You mean, there's a lot
of jazz there and stuff too, but you think of
(09:15):
chicagoan's kind of blue collar rock folks, and it's definitely
even still like that to this day. So this was
a place that made sense to be ground zero for
that's kind of like destruction of disco, because these these
concerns were very real, not to mention, like you said, Ben,
the the the move away from the album format to
(09:38):
the single format and away from the live music venue
to the club was also busy, and people off Zanna Do. Sorry, guys,
that's what I was trying to think of. Zanna Do.
The nineteen eight film Remember Zanna Do Do? You guys
remember they had Olivia Newton, John Electra Light Orchestra. No, yeah,
(10:00):
you're yeah. Yes, it's a roller skating movie. Um, and
it is not very good, but it is as an
artifact of a time and place. It's such a specific,
such a specific genre, that I think it naturally becomes
number one in the roller skating musicals of the nineteen eighties.
(10:21):
But yeah, this is the Disco is not for everyone.
And there's this great article and Rolling Stone where they
recount some of Steve Doll's statements two newscasters of the day,
and he says he's listing out the reasons that he
doesn't care for disco. He's pretty humorous. He says, I
hate the taste of pina coladas. I'm allergic to gold jewelry,
(10:44):
so there's nothing there for me. You have to spend
so much time blow dry in your hair. It's a
waste of energy. And uh you can tell. Of course,
radio station personalities tend to we tend to be big personalities.
So he is be and humorous, but he is also
not He's also trying to find a creative way to
(11:05):
protest against the dominance of disco, and he and his
buddy Gary, he just mentioned At first, they said, all right,
we're gonna just blow up a bunch of disco records
on the field between the games. And they also cooked
up this scheme with Bill Veeck, who was the owner
(11:26):
of White Sox at the time. And Bill had another problem.
The season wasn't going super well and he really wanted
to increase attendance. He wanted those butts in the seat. Uh.
And his son Michael, who was about twenty eight at
the time, was instrumental in talking his father into doing
(11:46):
this promotion because Michael, like Steve and like Gary, hated disco.
He thought it was a blight on the American music
scene and disco bashing, his mind, became a celebrity cause
just because there wasn't really anything else to do. And
you know, interestingly enough, the White Sox had experimented with
(12:10):
a themed disco night before. Two years before this event,
they had a disco night that was celebrating disco, so
this one would be dissing disco. It's a disco disc.
Disco dis disastrous, dystopia demolition. We have them, We're demolishing
(12:31):
this this series of alliteration, alliterateate of terms. Remember that
movie demolition man there was what were they for? Were
there for wiping? It was unclear. It was on the
back of a toilet. Sorry, it was just foolish to
(12:52):
not know. And uh, Sylvester Stalone was haunted. But this,
so this seems like it could be kind of fun.
You go to the show or you go to the game,
you bring a disco record with you, and you pay
cents to watch the album's all get blown up together.
So it's a little spectacle, you know what I mean.
(13:13):
No one's getting hurt. The record companies probably don't care
because you've already bought the record, the band already got
their money, right, or whichever artists were mentioning. But soon
enough it became clear that everybody, from the owner of
the White Sox to the DJs involved, had no idea
how popular this concept was. Especially you're only charging people cents.
(13:36):
Come on, that's like the cheapest day in town, and
I want to jump in here. It was ninety eight
cents for a double header two so you got eight
pmatings of baseball, so you could just it's like an
all day thing. You to go to a game, watch
the stuff get blow up, get another game. Well at
least in concept, and so it's just like that, that's
that's a really good deal. It's forty eight. It's like
(13:58):
less than fifty cents or game right, too good a deal.
In fact, they didn't expect the turnout they were going
to get because I think they were looking at this
whole disco sucks thing is sort of a novelty, sort
of a way to be a little contrarian, like you said, Ben,
to sort of like support that whole of Chicago, you know,
rock mentality or whatever, and sell a few extra tickets
(14:21):
in the meantime. But it was way more popular than
I think anybody planned. And part of that was that
people were bringing records right that they were wanted to
see blown up. But it wasn't really clear to the
people that were taking tickets, you know, which ones were
disco officially and which ones weren't. And to that end,
(14:44):
I want to bring up an interesting point the genre,
the idea of disco it is referring to. I mean,
think about it. It's like a club is called a disco.
Maybe I'm not getting the order of operations here, right,
but I mean a disc is a vinyl record, So
it's just referring to playing records, so disco songs, while
(15:05):
it ended up being associated with a genre and kind
of a four on the floor, you know, kick drum
kind of thing with percussion and stuff. A lot of
there's a lot of genre hopping within the supposed genre
that is disco. I would say the beat is a
disco beat, but then you can apply that to like techno,
you can apply that to toum house music or whatever.
(15:27):
But that's of course came came later, and we'll get
into that. Chicago played a big role in that as
well later down the line. But people were bringing all
kinds of records, but they were bringing like R and
B records music by black artists, and it became, you know,
a little bit clear that the whole disco sucks movement
some of the folks involved in that, we're using it
(15:49):
as a way of kind of participating in veiled racism,
not very veiled, not very veiled. But you mentioned abbas
about as white as you can get, you know, with
with a with a band. I mean, there are a
bunch of Swedes, you know, playing kind of disco music,
but a lot of the top hits, you know, of
the disco age were from black artists, and that was
(16:10):
not the case prior to that in terms of like
what was popular on the radio was a lot of
white you know, long hair kind of like rock and
rollers or whatever in the sixties and seventies. And of
course there was some you know, popular black sixties motown
of course and all of that stuff, but it wasn't
the same. This was very very mainstreaming, and I think
a lot of people resented that and used as an
(16:31):
opportunity to be nasty towards these these black artists. So
people were bringing all kinds of stuff that wasn't quote
unquote disco, and they were told when the people taking
tickets as their supervisors, I don't know, this is a
really disco. That doesn't matter if they brought a record,
give him a ticket. Yeah, And that still wasn't enough.
Fans were busting down the gates, they were climbing over
(16:56):
the walls. More than seventy five thousand people. We're filling
the stadium, not even a lot of them. Not not
so much for the games, even though, as you mentioned,
max is a doubleheader. They just wanted to see the
records explode. And the crowd was especially during the first game,
they were already rowdy. They were throwing records, you know,
(17:19):
supposedly disco records. They were throwing cherry bombs. They were
throwing like anything they had at the players on the field.
So this is, as you can imagine, kind of distracting
to the guys who are there to play baseball. The
Socks lose the first game to the Tigers, and it's
four to one, and then right the game's over. So
(17:41):
the part of the show everybody really wants to see
is about to begin. Our DJ Dall comes onto the field.
He's wearing camo and a helmet, and uh, everybody still
is throwing beer and vital records at him, and he's
cheering them on. He's like, this is the world largest
dance I Disco rally. We took the records you bought tonight.
(18:04):
We got him in a giant box. We're gonna blow
him up real good. And everyone's like, WHOA, yeah, how
do he blows them them up real good? Ye? Seeing
what this guy looked like at this time, I actually
haven't seen a photo of the guy describing to his max, Uh, he's, uh,
what you call it a military outfit? I mean it's
(18:25):
a it's a stretch. I would say, Uh, he's got
real big, like seventies early eighties glasses. The hair is
pretty scruffy to say the least. Um, it's an interesting
look to say the least, it looks like it looks
almost like a like a mix between a hippie and
a would be dictator. That's very appropriate given his you know,
(18:46):
what he's doing here is ultimately stirring up a mob
with rhetoric, you know, surrounding what is ultimately an ideological perspective.
You know, I mean it sounds silly now we think
about it, like dis go whatever. It seems so frivolous
and like this whole period of excess that was sort
of like an antithesis to this the free love of
the sixties and you know, psychedelics, it was more about
(19:09):
cocaine and like longevity and just like endurance. You know,
you would just you know, party boogie woogie woog until
you just can't book you no more and all that stuff.
But it was it was all kind of surfacy, like
all of the like meaning and counterculture that was wrapped
up in the sixties and seventies, all of that kind
of went out the window with disco because it was
just like all about looking good and like being hot
(19:32):
and having money, you know what I mean. It wasn't
that they didn't really have a cause it was it
was all just kind of this like vacuous surfacing stuff.
So this guy, who, like you said, represents you know,
the the antithity, the backlash to what I just described,
is up on a podium, you know, working this group
up into a froth and then exploding these records and
(19:56):
this symbolic act, you know, with shards of wreck. By
the way, this does not seem very safe. You ever
seen a shard of a vinyl record? I mean he
cut somebody with one of those. I mean, you got
like shrapnell of this stuff flying everywhere? Or were people
wearing safety goggles? I mean, I know it was a
different time, but come on, when when I was a kid,
this is a true story, I did not understand that
(20:18):
breaking a record was a figurative thing. I thought that
you became a record breaker by physically breaking records. Uh.
Apologies to my parents, because I got renaissance tasty vital
and it came in. I told my mom I was
a record breaker. I oddly enough to not get in trouble,
but I did. I did hurt myself, so I know
(20:39):
exactly what you're talking about. The Vinyl Shards don't try
it molten and sharp, and it's all just shooting out
of the crowd and people are just like losing their minds.
You know. It's like all over the field, people start
channing Disco sucks, school sucks, Disco sucks. And they're getting
out of their seats now and jumping over the barricade
(21:01):
down into the field and like cult like, you know,
dancing like around this this this dumpster fire literally while
being rained down, you know, by while the Vinyl Shards
are raining down from on high, they're stealing stuff. They're
starting to loot like bats and batting helmets and things
like that, and of course you know they're politely being
(21:22):
asked by the announcers to please return to their seats. Right, Yeah,
it's uh, it's increasingly ineffective that there's a there's an
interesting escalation here, like a back and forth, right, because
individual people are really really intelligent, but big groups of
people are really really dumb. So I learned about that
recently at a hot air balloon festival. But anyhow, so
(21:45):
we know we see these people trying to talk down
the crowd, like you said, noll the p A. Their
appeals are ignored. The owner of the White Sox gets
on the field, he grabs a microphone and it's like, hey,
come on, will you please sit down out and so
we can play play baseball. And then this goes on
for like forty minutes. The crowd in the stadium divides.
(22:07):
There's still some fans who are in the stands right
there in their seats, and they start a counter chant
and they're just yelling back to your seats, back to
your seats, and then they start playing take me out
to the ball game. None of this works to the
crowd is just even more adamant about this protest. So
(22:27):
the Chicago police show up in full riot gear and
start clearing the field while the crowd in the stands
is starting to sing in kind of a petty spiteful way.
Na na na na na na na na. Come on.
(22:50):
Every time I hear that, I always say. They're saying
gooden bye, like like a German like good bye, you
know not, So this becomes kind the rallying cry, right
because this is sort of like an anti disco anthem
sort of. I mean not not not because of the
content of the song. It's just saying like goodbye, ushering out,
you know, the age of discom But it also is
(23:12):
more of a more of a rock song. Yeah yeah,
by the band Steam, who has been described as pop
or psychedelic pop. But it's it's a good song. And
you know, in the three of us are big, big
fans of music across many genres. I don't know which,
I don't know which side we would be on in
this in this stadium. But here's the thing that's really interesting.
(23:34):
It's something we've alluded to through this episode. Right now,
A lot of people may think of Disco Demolition Night
as a marketing stunt gone wrong, right, be careful what
you wish for when you say you want more people
to come to your stadium. But in the larger context,
(23:55):
this shows us um. I think it's indicative of some
growing intensions in Chicago and in the rest of the
United States. Like you mentioned the idea that people were
picking records by black artists and then we say we're
going to destroy those. I want to go back to
(24:16):
that excellent Rolling Stone article that Zack pointed out, which
is watch disco demolition Night devolved into a fiery riot
by Andy Green, and Green points out that for a
lot of people, for a lot of non white people,
this incident was very disturbing because everybody was aware that,
(24:40):
you know, a lot of the guys who were doing
this were white dudes who are like burning records and
rioting and whatnot, and disco as a genre was incredibly
popular among many non white groups and people from different demographics,
you know, gay people. Oh not to mention people from
the gay community, right was a big part of it too,
And there was a sense you know, and again the
(25:02):
DJs responsible for this event would go on to say
like I'm no homophobe, I'm no racist. I was this
was more just like a tongue in cheek kind of
stunt to you know, sort of like pok the finger
in the eye would have become the kind of like
prevailing you know genre in almost like in a in
a an egregious way, in a way that was like
seeming seemingly wiping out other culture. But that doesn't just
(25:25):
because someone had doesn't have like an endgame in mind
that other people Glamanto as part of a movement doesn't
mean those other people aren't part of the movement too.
And and there certainly were homophobes and racists involved. And
we'll get to a really fascinating story in a little
bit that Zach found as well, from the perspective of
of of of a black person who was actually working
(25:46):
at the field the day of of this of this riot,
and the way he was treated. Yeah, yeah, exactly. I
mean there's a guy named Nile Rogers speaking about this
incident who said that for his yeah, yeah, he said
that for this community felt like Nazi book burning. You know,
Roger said, quote, this is America, the home of jazz
(26:07):
and rock, and people are now afraid to even say
the word disco. And you know, I think we stumble
upon such an important thing about American culture here. Like
you said, nol Doll just said, Look, he said, we
were just kids who were basically taking the piss out
of a genre of music. We're not. It wasn't meant
(26:29):
to be racist, it wasn't meant to be homophobic. But
I think you make an excellent point that just because
that guy didn't intend to do this, it doesn't mean
that other people involved, We're also not being racist or homophobic,
because a couple definitely We're so there's this idea. It's
mentioned in that Guardian article we sided earlier that disco
(26:53):
is a threat to some kind of white status quo.
You know that there's a culture war brew Wing and
d J's in Detroit. I didn't know this week out
in the story, DJ's in Detroit formed a disco themed
vigilante group called, and this is true, folks, the Disco
Ducks Clan. Because Disco Duck was was kind of a
(27:16):
a lot of people point to Rick D's Disco Duck.
We should actually play a little clip of it. It's
it's too silly, down too essentially a Donald Duck kind
of voice over at disco beats. It really signaled like
(27:41):
this is a joke. This has become a joke. Quack quack,
you know it's I mean, it's just ridiculous. It's it's
it's just a total novelty song. And just showed that
this that bubble that the record labels were worried about,
it was. It was, it was there and and and
all it needed for it to burst was this moment
at com Ski Park. And that was literally like the
(28:01):
powder Keg moment that burst the disco bubble and then
made it just like straight up not cool because again,
it also represented kind of yuppie culture. It represented kind
of these like you know, but then then we're getting
into the eighties and then the disco kind of molds
into like, you know, eighties kind of like you know,
electronic music, like things like you know, Culture Club and
(28:23):
Human League, which I love all of that stuff. But
if you watch a movie like American Psycho and you see,
you know, the way the serial killer Patrick Bateman is
sort of um portrayed as this eighties music loving, you know,
suit wearing, fine business card having psychopath, you understand what
how it's parodying that kind of yuppy culture that sort
(28:45):
of began with disco and didn't really go away. It
just started calling it something else and the sound changed. Yeah,
and and music should always be evolving, right, I think
that's a very solid argument to make. But this is
a flashpoint for the American attitude about disco. And after
(29:08):
this moment, disco begins to encounter a really sharp decline.
And that doesn't mean that everybody all at once decided
they didn't like disco. It had just been so popular
that it was unsustainable, you know what I mean. So
if you go to that we mentioned the stat for
the first half of ninety nine, right, all but three
of the top hit songs or disco songs. But if
(29:31):
you go to the second part of nine, you'll see
there was only one disco song that made it to
the top of the charts, and it only did it
for a week. It was Michael Jackson's Don't Stop Till
You Get Enough. I'm falling into DJ voice, you know,
like we're back from the commercial for sure, which is
(29:51):
which is a stone called banger, and that song holds
up to this day despite you know, it is that
art from the artist the conversation, I think it's a
case by case basis. But for me, some of the
music of Michael jacks especially his classic error is unimpeachably great.
And don't Stop Till You Get Enough. Yes, it is
a disco song. It has a lot of hallmarks of
disco culture, those strings and that don't bank ant all
(30:15):
of the instrumentation of that, uh, is very much in
line with disco, but it also like what even is disco?
You know, I mean it really it was just it
just danceable music with like cool arrangements, with kind of
an airy uppeat quality to it. Like, I think that's
the issue here, is like it was more of a
culture than it was a genre, you know. Yeah. Denny Hilton,
(30:39):
writing Froxford University Press, he had this article called the
Birth of Disco and I learned some pretty interesting stuff
from that. I didn't know the etymology, you know, I
love etymology. Disco tech is a French word that just
means library of phonographic records, like tech. And I was,
I was, I was posing this question earlier, and a
(31:00):
conjectured that had to be disco is just the disc
and the disco is just a place where you go
to listen to the disc. Yeah. Yeah, it goes back
to it was a type of French nightclub emergent in Paris.
They had started playing these records during the Nazi occupation
in the nineteen forties, and eventually some clubs just started
(31:20):
calling themselves, you know, like the disco dick and and
uh then later it came over across the pond to
the US. But but yeah, it's tough to kind of
define it. And I like the point. I like the
supposition that it might simply be a matter of culture, right,
as much as a rigorously defined musical genre, which it
(31:43):
kind of isn't rigorously defined. And so now we know
there's this mainstream push against disco, but it doesn't go away.
It kind of goes back underground where it was in
the beginning. There's a pretty interesting thing that I wanted
(32:06):
to ask you guys about. There's this argument that when
it went back underground and it wasn't as mainstream as
it happened in years past, that the artists were able
to become even more adventurous and creative. You think, so
you agree with that, Oh well, nineteen seventy nine was
a really important year for music in the underground in
terms of like indie which you might call indie music.
(32:27):
Like nineteen seventy nine I believe was the year that
like David Bowie's Low came out, and and Bowie certainly
would dabble in, you know, dance dancing music with stuff
like literally let's dance and uh fashion on Scary Monsters,
But he took dance music and kind of like flipped
it on its head and made it like sort of
subversive dance music where it was like yeah, it has
(32:48):
a fun disco b but it also has like a
Japanese woman like screaming of the top for lungs and
Japanese and like the sounds of glass breaking, and you know,
like Robert Fripp's guitar sounded like a chainsaw cutting down
a forest, you know, and you can really I tried
to find a chronological list of of hit songs from
(33:08):
nineteen seventy nine, and it's true. It really does kind
of appear that the first part of it is a
lot of disco e type songs like Donna Summer, Herbie Man, Shalamar.
You know, I believe that's uh. I believe that's a
disco e type song. But then you have like, you know,
Blondie with Heart of Glass, which is a disco song
by Blondie. Because even artists that were more punk, we're
(33:32):
getting into disco, like we talked about with Pink Floyd
in the Wall. You know, they were like kind of
a psych band, punk you know, whatever you wanna call it,
experimental band, but they that song was a massive hit
for them, and even if it wasn't like anything else
they've ever done. And you know, Rod Stewart, if you
want my body and you think I'm sexy. Like his
earlier stuff was mega seventies and beautiful, like The Faces
was kind of you know, folky, punky kind of roots music,
(33:55):
you know. But then later when we get to that
second half, you have Blondie you with a hit with
the song Dreaming, just a disco song at all. It's
much more of like what we would think now is
like a proto kind of indie dream pop kind of song,
you know, like something that Beach House would do almost
you know. So it's a really interesting trajectory because then
(34:16):
you have like Brian Eno and these artists that are
helping some of these disco e type artists make more
interesting stuff or take pieces of the disco sound and
turn into something a little more interesting something. I'm a
fan of that in every in every genre. That's one
thing that I really love about hip hop as well,
is you can you can take pretty much any aspect
(34:39):
of any other genre of music and you can put
it into a beat and it'll sound really good right
with especially the hands of a talented producer. I think
that kind of evolution should be welcomed. You know. It's
always weird to me when I and I know, not
all music is for all people, but it's weird to
me when I hear someone say I disc like insert
(35:01):
genre here, whether that's like um marengue, or whether it's
you know, opera, or whether it's nineties alternative rock. The
question is have you heard every song in that genre?
Maybe you just haven't heard one that speaks to you.
So it's such a weird broad brush to say, you know,
I hate all disco. It seems like in this case,
(35:21):
these people were saying, I hate what disco in my
mind represents one million percents. Now that's that's that's why
I said it was much more of a a lifestyle
or like a brand than it was even a sound.
And you know, we we get into kind of more
modern times where now you know, like vapor wave for example,
(35:42):
which is like a really interesting mash up kind of
culture jamming sort of genre of music that will take
everything from like elevator music to like gum commercials from
the eighties to disco and like slow it down and
kind of chopp and screw it to make really interesting
subversive psychedelic dance music. You know Arthur Russell, for example,
(36:04):
who's like, you know, he's he's an artist that's all
over the place. He put out a kind of a
series of avant disco kind of records and that became
a thing too with DJs, and like, you know, then
you start getting into like the mainstreaming of Kraft work
and like German electronic or European electronic sounds, and that's
all kind of part and parcel with that Bowie era
(36:25):
that I was describing, because he went to Berlin to
get off of cocaine and other drugs and he ended
up making these three albums while he was there, produced
by Brian you know, Low Lodger and Heroes, which are
three of my favorite albums of all time and certainly
of of Bowie's career. And then you start getting into like,
you know, DJ's like Frankie Knuckles in Chicago who's using
(36:48):
edits of disco songs and changing the speed and mashing
them up with other sounds and synthesizers and stuff. So
it's like, this is the city that you know, burned
disco to the ground, became a really important city for
a burgeoning new kind of club sound, which is disco
in a way, like neo disco. Yeah, and this is
(37:10):
where we want. So I've been trying so hard not
to tell you guys bad disco jokes. But we're gonna get.
We're gonna get a few days. We'll save for the end.
You say that now, my friend. But uh, but we
we would be remiss if we did not follow up
on a very important story that we talked about just
(37:30):
a second ago. We said, we're gonna give you the
experience of someone who is a civilian not involved in
this riot. There's a guy named Vince Lawrence. It's the
summer of nineteen seventy nine. He has acquired a part
time job at Commitsky Park as an usher. And Vince,
you know, as a young black teenager, knew this wasn't
(37:52):
maybe the ideal job, but he like It was very
close to a neighborhood called Bridgeport, and at the time,
according to Vince, he said, quote, it was common knowledge
that you might not want to be hanging around after
dark because there were people there who for sure don't
like you based on your color. That's right, And just
just a little extra context, Vince Lawrence's father was a
(38:16):
guy named Eddie Thomas who worked, or believe founded or
managed several funk acts who were on the label Curdam
Records was the Chicago based like funk label artists like
Captain Sky who you know funk also was kind of
in the disco realmant times, but it was again it
was lumped in. I would not say that it absolutely
(38:37):
actually was that what you would associate with the disco sound.
It was the kind of artist that you'd see on
Soul Train. But Vince himself went on to become a
pioneering electronic music producer in the genre that I was
describing earlier, like the synth kind of like mash up,
you know, neo future disco and and and funk kind
of sounds. But yeah, so he's he's there, he's working
(38:59):
at the stadium while this event is taking place, and
um he sees some things that are pretty ugly. Mm hmmm, yeah,
he really does. And bridge Board itself could be could
be an episode you know, all its own. This area
was very, very notorious for racial tension. There was even
(39:20):
one white sox player, a guy named Thad Boseley, who
was surrounded while he was driving through town. He was
surrounded by a mob of people because he took a
wrong turn after going home from a game, and the
situation only ended, or like only diffused really when one
(39:40):
of the people in the mob recognized him and said, oh, hey,
you with the White Sox. We love that team, you
know what I mean, which is terrifying. Lawrence, though knew
that this job was an opportunity. He said, look, if
there are people who were wealthy enough to sit in
the stadium boxes, then they're probably gonna tip me. All right,
(40:02):
I can get a good view of the game. And
there are always these promo events, these theme nights, right
like Elvis Knights, Country Music Nights, etcetera. And Vince Lawrence
was aware of Steve Dahl. He liked them. He wanted
to see this band called Teenage Radiation. They had recorded
(40:24):
a parody single, I don't know if we mentioned this
yet called do you Think I'm Disco? Yeah, that led
up to this, you know, to this event. And when
you hear Lawrence's account of this, you can tell that
he quickly clocked something wasn't right. He noticed firsthand because
(40:46):
he was there. He noticed that people we're coming with
disco records, but a lot of people were, just as
we said earlier, picking any music that was made by
a black artist, and he told his boss. He said, look,
they're not These aren't all the disco records obviously, R
and B. I see funk. Should I make them go
home and come back with a disco record? And then
(41:07):
that's when the decision was made. Now they if they
have a record, take it, give them that, you know,
give them that ticket. And he says, quote, I want
to say, maybe the person bringing the record just made
a mistake. But given the amount of mistakes I witnessed,
why weren't there any cheap trick records or air supply right?
No Carpenters records. Yeah. I was talking to Zach um
(41:29):
or any researcher who whodug a lot of this stuff up,
who is a very thoughtful, smart and um have her
of great taste, And he pointed out this section we
were talking about in particular, like there are a lot
of like kind of um, I guess you could call
it easy listening or like kind of like you know,
maybe adult contemporary artists that you could potentially more easily
(41:53):
blur the line between what they are and what disco is.
But none of those were even making it. And like
things like air supply are things like you know, Hall
and Oates or something like that. Not that they're adult contemporary,
but like you know, they've got some songs that you
could construe with a discoe type vibe. So it started
to seem like there was intent. Yeah, I think it's
(42:13):
what we're getting now, absolutely, And Lawrence's account I think
is really important to keep in mind. He says, quote,
I was one of the few African American people in
the stadium. Steve Dahl said it wasn't discriminatory. He was
an equal opportunities offender or whatever. But Steve didn't invite
brothers to commit ski part. So once the scenes starts
(42:35):
kind of veering towards more like full blown riot, and
we've got estimates as high as fifty thousand people rushing
the field, absolutely more chaos than the meager, you know,
police presence that was there could deal with. Lawrence started
to feel really unsafe, like because he was being targeted
(42:55):
by these folks. What he did, according to him, how
he felt was because he was black, and he's he's
a black kid, you know, living in Chicago. He was
wearing a loop T shirt, so he was what's it
inter between me and the next usher trying to get
back to his locker. So at one point you have
a guy that walks up to him and looks him
right in the face and says, hey, you, disco sucks
(43:18):
and just snaps a record in his face, like in
his face. Well, now, of course, vinyls right, yet eye
level that could easily hurt you. We're not even, I'm
not even. It's more about the gesture. It's almost like
spitting at somebody, you know. It's like I'm targeting you
with this act of aggression. It's not like, hey, we're
on the same team. Disco sucks. It's like, hey, you
(43:41):
person who I associate with this what you represent sucks.
And in this situation, it's almost like disco is a
stand in for like being black or something or just
being different, you know, right exactly. And this also is
only one example of how things can go raw in
big sporting events. Uh, this is also, I would say,
(44:03):
even more importantly, it proves to us that there's always
more to the story behind the headline. And Max, we're
talking a little bit off air, you my friend, to
have your own first hand account of things going a
little south at a ballgame. Huh yeah, yeah, yeah. As
It's been noted multiple times here on the show. I
am a dispassionate sports fan on Dispassionate again, and I
(44:28):
went to the first ever and Al wild Card game
back in twelve between Atlanta and St. Louis. And for
people who know that, um Sam Holberg had one of
the most egregious calls in baseball history, called an infield
fly on a ball that was in the outfield. He
was the outfield umpire. It doesn't make any sense any
of it, and it very much changed the game. So
(44:48):
for nineteen minutes, Atlanta fans showered the field with beer bottles,
just screaming. It was very, very similar to this. There's
a million videos of it and stuff, and so we
were in it was I'm like, yeah, I've experienced this before.
I will say my one regret though, is I had
just turned twenty one at the time. I had finished
my beer already. I didn't have anything to throw. It's
(45:11):
like that old Mitch Hedberg joke where they say who
here's feels like a human being in he cheers, and
they say, who he feels like a monster. I did
not know there was another choice. Yeah, And I mean
I will say the one lucky thing for both teams
was that it happened in the eighth inning, and it
cut off selling beer at the seventh inning stretch, so
(45:32):
there was a finite amount you could have. Okay, this
this has nothing to do with anything, but I just
want to deliver on what we promised here. Towards the
end of the episode, what did the cops say when
he entered the disco club? Hold On, hold on, hold
on a good classy, cheesy joke, like this is almost
(45:56):
like a riddle. Um No, I don't what is he say?
Get down? So I didn't write that one. Yeah, I
will say though, I kind of miss the dance moves
of the disco era. You know, the one finger kind
(46:16):
of like cross chest thing, and then you alternate lots
of very big moves. I like the one where you
kind of get down. Well a lot of these were
James Brown moves to they were just slowed down and
made like palatable for people that weren't really that good
at dancing. But then you know, there was certainly it
was a big dance scene. There were a lot of
dance It was all about the dance moves and being
(46:36):
seen on the floor. There's a really cool movie that
a buddy of mine turned me onto called The Last
Days of Disco. I think it's what it's called. It's
a Slim Whitman movie. It's got Chloe Seve Agney in
it or set seventy. However you say that name, I
least get it wrong. And Um, who's the actor that
plays the vampire hunter in the Underworld movies? Who Kate Beckinsale?
(47:01):
Kate Beckinsal in it? No, it's just Kate beck and Stale.
Um what that Isaac's guy that Max Links. There's a
handful of other smaller bit part actors that are in
that I recognize, but I can tell you what their
names are. But it's it's a little bit stilted. It's
got this kind of like fly on the Wall kind
of perspective, and there's some definitely definite cringe moments. But
(47:24):
I believe there you'll see some parts where there's some
dudes roaming through the streets with leather jackets and there's
an altercation with them shouting disco sucks at some of
the main characters. So I think the movie is meant
to take place in nineteen seventy nine. So uh, if
you want to see kind of like a crystallization of
what the heyday of this whole would have been like.
And then um, I think even there's like a post
(47:46):
mortem thing where it's like, well, that was fine while
it lasted, and now we all have to go get
real jobs, like, you know, grow our hair out. I
think it was just such a creative time to musically.
There were these amazing salts that probably wouldn't have been
made in an any other environment or in any other
kind of cultural soil, you know. So we should all
(48:08):
be grateful for disco, even if it's not particularly your jam,
because it tells us a lot about American society. And
this is this was one heck of a story. I
know we went a little long today, but really enjoyed
this one. So thank you. Dear Ridiculous Historians were coming
(48:29):
on this journey with us. What's your favorite weird disco song?
Can't wait to hear tell us all about it on
our Facebook page Ridiculous Historians. You can also find us,
you know, just we're around. We're everywhere on the internet
these days. Big big thanks to our super producer, Mr
Max Disco Williams. You like that nickname, it's an acronym
(48:56):
though it's a it's a. It's an acronym that stands
for discover are of interesting curling organizations? There it is
well done. Now did we work on that a little
bit off air? We didn't. Yes, we didn't question about that.
Let's be behind the curtain peak, behind the v I P.
(49:17):
Discotheque curtain. No, I had a great time with this one.
I feel like we all did. Yeah. So also, as always,
thanks to Christ Frost you know it is Eves, Jeff Coche,
thanks to our research associates Zach Williams and Jeff Bartlett
and no thanks to you man. We are like, we
should go do a disco thing. Is is there any disco? Well,
(49:38):
nowadays they just call them dance parties, you know, and
you can certainly have themed ones or maybe there's ones
with We didn't even get into that. We believe we
briefly discussed the film Zanna Do. But like roller, disco
was a whole thing, you know, And that's hard, man,
that takes some stamina and um coordination and that is
not for me. But no, I would gladly attend a
night out dance party with that. With the two of
(50:00):
you find fellas leisure suits, need leisure suits. That game
leisure suit, Larry. Yeah, it was just I'm actually just Google. Yes. Yeah,
silly silly, silly game, silly character. See you next time, folks.
For more podcasts for my Heart Radio, visit the I
(50:22):
Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to
your favorite shows
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