“I lost that gig, too.”
Longtime Chicago sportscaster Les Grobstein replaced Mike Veeck. In May, 1979 WLS News Director Reed Pence asked Grobstein for an audition tape. “Reed said I had the inside track,” Grobstein said. “I called back in June and he said they were getting close. Eventually he called back and said, ‘We have our sportscaster.’ I thought it was me. He said, ‘Are you sitting down?”
It was Mike Veeck.
Grobstein was incredulous. “I said, Mike Veeck knows as much about doing a sportscast as I know about owning a baseball team. Mike did a handful of shows. He never mentioned the Cubs or Bears training camp. All he did was a commercial for the White Sox. Then Disco Demolition happened and he disappeared.” Grobstein finally debuted on Larry Lujack and Bob Sirott’s shows in October 1979 and remained at WLS-AM until December 1989.
Jeff Schwartz had been at WLUP for a year by the time Disco Demolition rolled around. Schwartz is a native of the Albany Park neighborhood of Chicago, where he went to elementary school with Bob Sirott. During the mid-1980s, Schwartz was an advertising consultant of the now defunct Flipside Records and was the cartoon character “Mr. Cheap” in the chain’s advertising campaign.
“We had the hottest station in town,” Schwartz said in a summer 2015 interview in Los Angeles. At the time, he was Vice President of Strategic Corporate Marketing for Yahoo! Sports Radio. “I get a call from Mike Veeck. The team was struggling. We met at Yes Sir, Senator (the now defunct Barney’s Market Place restaurant in the West Loop). I was a big fan of reefer and a couple of other light substances. So I’m smoking a reefer on the way to the restaurant and Mike Veeck was there with (Bill Veeck’s assistant and idea man) Rudie Schaffer’s son David, who was head of security. They’re drinking. I never drank but I was pretty stoned. They said, ‘We gotta do a promotion together.’ I really liked Mike and Schaffer’s kid. We were having a nice steak dinner. True, and no disrespect to anybody, the exact words I said [were], ‘You have the exploding scoreboard, right? And I’ve got Dahl in the morning blowing up disco records. Is there any way we could take that to the field as a promotion?’ And I left the rest of the thinking up to them. Dahl and I did not have the greatest relationship.
“Dahl and I had as good a relationship as you could with Steve.”
Sirott said, “I was well aware of Jeff’s involvement with Disco Demolition. I think Jeff was stoned in the third grade. I remember he had one of the first head shops with the blue light in the neighborhood. He’s always been someone who was into analyzing show business. When we were in grade school, maybe it was after Jack Parr left The Tonight Show and before Johnny Carson became host, they had guest hosts take over The Tonight Show. At recess Jeff would be holding court analyzing the pros and cons of how this person did as host of The Tonight Show. He was into show business.”
But it was Mike Veeck who took the heat, as he continued to reminisce at U.S. Cellular Field.
“It was all my fault,” Veeck said. “I knew there was going to be 35,000 people. That was the number I gave the police. The morning of the game I said to security, ‘We’re going to have 35,000.’ They thought that was the funniest thing, when the club is averaging 21,000.” (According to Major League Baseball, the average was 20,458.)
“The mistake came with Old Comiskey: portable ticket booths out front. Guys who are in their [mid-sixties] now are in portable ticket booths. The security guys call me and say the kids outside trying to get in [the park] are rattling the portable ticket booths. The old guys are worried and anxious. So we moved fifteen [security guards] from the field out there. Crowd control is a misnomer. You rely on the idea that the crowd never thinks as one. Our crowd was already stirred up. The place was packed. They see fifteen yellow jackets leave the field and this was one time they thought as one: ‘That idiot Veeck moved security out, let’s go on the field.’ It was perfectly logical. It was my mistake.
“The next day the commissioner’s office, the Bowie of Kuhn sends out a memo about ‘no negative promotions’ because it was anti-disco.”
It took Veeck a decade to move in a positive direction.
In November 1989, he joined The Goldklang Group (including Marv Goldklang and actor Bill Murray) and in 1990 became team president of the Miami Miracle, helping relocate the team to Fort Myers, Florida, in 1992. Today the Goldkang Group owns and operates the minor league Charleston RiverDogs (Veeck is president, although he does not have ownership), the St. Paul Saints, and the collegiate baseball team Pittsfield Suns. Veeck also has an interest in the Normal, Illinois CornBelters and the River City Rascals, outside of St. Louis and separate from the Goldklang group.
In 2005, Veeck wrote a book, Fun is Good: How to Create Joy and Passion in Your Workplace & Career. Wilmette, Illinois born Bill Murray contributed the blurb, “Fun should be the driving force behind most any decision.”
Veeck arrived in Charleston in 1997, and staged “Bill Murray Night,” “Drag Queen Night,” and “Nobody Night,” which insisted no fans were allowed to enter the padlocked ballpark, at Joseph P. Riley, Jr. Park. And now his son, Mike “Night Train” Veeck, named after the late Detroit Lions linebacker Dick “Night Train” Lane, is a White Sox executive in charge of fan engagement.
Veeck used to receive roughly twenty-five requests a year to stage Disco Demolition II. He consistently declined, but on July 19, 2014, after a RiverDogs game at Joseph P. Riley, Jr. Park, he blew up Justin Bieber and Miley Cyrus records on the field. Grainy footage of the original Disco Demolition was shown on the center field scoreboard. In a heartfelt speech after the game, Veeck thanked the sold out crowd of more than 6,000 fans for giving him a new start in life.
During the summer of 2015, Veeck reflected, “Disco Demolition made me great at what I did the rest of my life. Until then I really believed that you can control something. That taught me the greatest lesson. It made me relax and made me take chances. Control anything? I don’t think so.
“In the late 1980s they had a twenty-five-year retrospective on rock ‘n’ roll. They used Disco Demolition to end the first half of this look back. I’m laying on a couch at a place I’m renting. I had my son Wednesday night and Saturday. Never missed a day. I had a sodie pop with my landlord. She was rough. Finally I looked around and said, ‘Disco Demolition was a cultural event.’”
One sunny day in early May 2015, Omar Vizquel, coach of the Detroit Tigers and former White Sox shortstop, hailed a cab with his wife from their downtown hotel and headed to the Northwest Side to visit Paul Natkin. Vizquel wanted to see Natkin’s photographs of Disco Demolition.
Vizquel played in the major leagues for twenty-four years but had seen nothing like this. “I’m interested in this from a historical point of view,” Vizquel said, flipping through more than fifty black and white Disco Demolition photographs. “I’ve never heard of anything like this at a baseball game. I never heard of such a commotion where you bring your LP, throw it in a box and blow it up. Obviously the whole thing went crazy.
“I was twelve years old in 1979. I lived in Venezuela, but I didn’t know about [Disco Demolition] until [2014] when I saw the ESPN special. I saw Paul [in the Commando Jeep], holding on and snapping pictures. I thought, ‘How cool would it be if I can get ahold of this guy and he can show me some of the stuff he shot that day? He was right in the middle of the action. So I called (White Sox photographer) Ron [Vesley] to help me find Paul.”
Omar Vizquel
Vizquel played more games as shortstop than anyone in baseball history. He is an eclectic athlete in the manner of