Disco Demolition. Steve Dahl

an extremist. When he was good, I don’t know if I’ve known anybody more generous. But I don’t know if I worked with anybody that’s been more of a jerk. Now I imagine it’s not as much up and down. We were doing cool gigs with Teenage Radiation, and we’d do two hours. One time at the Park West I think we played three songs. He’d start drinking and going off on tangents. Then when we got to the song, we’d have to stop and start because he forgot the words. We’d stand there and go, ‘Is this any fun anymore?’ And it wasn’t. But I have no hard feelings on Steve about anything. I’m more grateful and thankful than ever.

      “And disco still sucks.”

      Darlene Jackson, known internationally as DJ Lady D, is considered a house music pioneer. She also happens to be a producer, owner of the D’lectable Music label, and a single mother. She has played Lollapalloza in Chicago and performed disco and techno sets in Asia and Europe.

      In the mid-1990s, Jackson was working as a suite attendant for a Ringling Brothers Barnum & Bailey Circus performance where Dahl and his family were guests. “I was thinking I wasn’t going to like him,” Jackson told me at a coffee shop in Chicago’s Ukrainian Village. “He was actually really nice. He mellowed [after he quit drinking]. Looking back, the emotional arc of Disco Demolition is that you had this outward moment of hate, highly focused onto a specific thing: disco music. After closer examination, it revealed itself to have racist and homophobic aspects. That may have not been Steve Dahl’s mind frame at the time, but it came from somewhere. And it reverberated. Energy in, energy out.”

      When Dahl lost his job at JACK-FM in Chicago in December 2010, his wife was concerned. Joe Walsh’s “Life’s Been Good” was the final song he played before he signed off the air. “That was his life work, he was repudiated; time had passed him by,” she reflected. “And that was at Christmas. He was devastated but resolved. He really likes communicating. He likes being the guy in the car. If there was a moment, I would think that’s the moment he would have said, ‘I’ll just have one drink; it’s Christmas.’ But he is very determined.

      “He realizes he is a better man.”

      Steve Dahl promotional items

      Steve Dahl at a promotional appearance for The Loop