Steve Dahl on the field during Disco Demolition
DAVE HOEKSTRA
Much gratitude to Janet and Steve Dahl for giving the freedom and latitude to share this story. No confines. Plenty of room to dance. And thanks to photographer Paul Natkin for his generosity of spirit.
My father died while I was working on this book. I thought of him a lot. He took me to my first baseball game, 1965, White Sox-Yankees at Comiskey Park. We sat in the right field upper deck and the players seemed so small.
It was a different world . . .
Steve Dahl addresses the crowd at Disco Demolition
“DISCO DEMOLITION,” BY BOB ODENKIRK
Fireworks. clouds of smoke, teenagers.
Beers in hand and the smell of beers a-wafting.
Levi’s, mullets, baseball jerseys,
disdain, grievance, and a hint of ultraviolence.
A dream fueled by Italian beef,
steak fries, sliders—
unsettling, with a weird joy coursing through it all.
So sorry they had to cancel game two—oops.
That is my poem about Disco Demolition. I hope you liked it. Nobody asks you to write poetry once you get out of grade school, because it tends to be annoying, but I thought I’d take a hack at it because I am moved by the memory of Disco Demolition Night. Also, I like to make fun of poetry.
MY INTRODUCTION
Disco Demolition was a hoot. It may have been intended as a lark but at some point, a point that no one saw coming, it snowballed into a hoot. From another point of view, it was most certainly a debacle.
Not for me, though. I was and am a big Steve Dahl fan. I lived in Naperville, a quiet and pleasant ‘burb. Too quiet and too pleasant, actually. I wanted to rebel against the general ease of it all. Growing up in the Catholic family with the alcoholic dad (yawn), I loved anyone who was saying, “This garbage you see all around you? You got it right, it’s all garbage.” When you’re a teenager, the bullshit detector is fresh out of the box and the batteries are charged full. Steve laughed at pop culture, and his favorite people were my favorite people: John Belushi, Bill Murray, Joe Walsh, funny people with one eyebrow raised at the world. Steve Dahl was anarchy in my UK.
When people ask me why so many funny people come from Chicago, I tell them it’s got to do with this chip-on-your-shoulder, eyes-on-the-ground-in-front-of-you, no-smoke-blowing-allowed, rotten attitude. I love it still. (Steve is from California, so I don’t know where he came to own his scoffing gaze, and I don’t care.) He was the voice inside us, and he did things we wished we could do, like the breakfast club, the parody songs, the prank calls. And he laughed, a lot. Listening to him was fun as hell.
Why did we hate disco? Well, I’d like to start by saying that I also hated Bob Hope and his smarmy double-entendre weirdness, Dean Martin and his phony “I’m a drunk and I don’t give a shit” act (believable though, on both counts), and all of that late seventies co-opted hippy culture (the show That’s Incredible!, the film Oh God, the Ford Pinto). It was awful, man. There was a lot to hate. But disco music and the culture around it really rose to the occasion. The over-processed sound! The lyrics! The mirrors! The mirror balls! A drug of self-obsession best imbibed off a mirror—what a duo! The seventies needed someone to officially ridicule it, and in Chicago, Steve was the man for the job.
Was it a “homophobic event” at it’s core? No. However, there were homophobes in any large group of twelve- to twenty-one-year-old males of that era; quite a few were likely homosexuals who hadn’t yet come to joyful acceptance of their true selves. The best argument against this politically-correct twisting of the movement: just listen to Steve’s song parody of disco culture “Do Ya Think I’m Disco?” The main character is heterosexual and working hard to let everyone know it. It’s a great parody, it tells a story, it’s mean-spirited, and it’s well-aimed.
Don’t trust a teenager who isn’t angry. Maybe being angry about the pop culture movement of the moment is an overreaction, but when I watch footage of Disco Demolition, I still feel a connection to that group of teenagers and what happened that night. It was bigger than anything my generation of Chicago kids had seen. And no one expected it. Even if you loved baseball, it was so fun to see something so big and official like a pro baseball game go off the rails. Steve in that army helmet, Jimmy Piersall losing his mind, and those kids—they looked like me and my friends—all those kids walking around in the clouds of lingering smoke, laughing, sliding into base, being stupid and reckless and wild. It still inspires me. I’m glad it happened, and that nobody got too hurt. Vietnam, voting rights, the Democratic [National] Convention [in Grant Park], something truly worthwhile to protest against—was either protested out or not within our limited field of vision. Punk rock had happened, somewhere else, and we were a few years from our Midwest version of it, distinguishable by more self-hatred than anger at the queen of England (I’m talkin’ about The Replacements). We worked with what we had.
‘Ya proud of yourself, Steve? You should be. This is a great story here: a great night of massive, principled stupidity. I can’t wait to read it myself. That’s all I can say.
Wait, no, there’s one more thing: disco sucks.
The front page of the Chicago Sun-Times on July 13, 1979, the day after Disco Demolition
STEVE DAHL
Steve Dahl was twenty-four years old on July 12, 1979, the night of Disco Demolition. This is his preface in his own words:
It was a very different time for Chicago than it was for London or New York City. This sturdy midwestern town was not hosting late night clubs with red ropes. It was only rock ‘n’ roll, and that’s the way the young kids liked it. They had their T-shirts and their ripped jeans, their long hair and their longneck beers. Their music heroes played rough and loud. These kids did not wish to be tamed or curated. Their parents had Paul Anka and Andy Williams; Mom and Dad had shaken their heads at Elvis and his gyrations. Loud anthemic music was functioning as a rite of passage: a sure way to push back from adults. Every generation has its rebellion, and rock ‘n’ roll was providing a soundtrack for the seventies.
Then Tony Manero was created. He was born from an article by a British writer who identified the disco world as the “new Saturday night in New York.” [Saturday Night Fever] was a smash, the soundtrack exploded. The principle of crossing from being a nobody to a somebody, as pictured in the film, seemed to demand a repudiation of all things rough—like rock ‘n’ roll and bar nights. Chicago kids liked their Saturday nights just as they had been experiencing them. Dress up? No. Dance lessons? No. Cover charge? Hell no. The Bee Gees had popped out a bouncy album, and the girls were ready to dress up, twirl,