July 12, 1979, 40 years ago: A promotion between intended games of a Chicago White Sox doubleheader proves to be great sentiment, but lousy execution.
Bill Veeck was the owner of the Chicago White Sox, and baseball's master promoter. At the time, the ChiSox were losing, and Veeck was a big believer in the idea that, "You can fill more seats with losing baseball and a circus than you can with losing baseball and a long silence."
He had scheduled Teen Night at Comiskey Park, once billed as "the Baseball Palace of the World," but now a crumbling relic that, unlike the crosstown Cubs with Wrigley Field, the owners of the Sox (including in two different regimes, Veeck himself) could never afford to keep in good condition. Unlike teams such as the Yankees, Red Sox, Orioles, Dodgers and Phillies, he couldn't "sell the team" to the local fans. Unlike the Cubs, Yankees, Red Sox and Dodgers, he couldn't "sell the ballpark." So he did the best he could: He sold fun.
Veeck's son, Mike Veeck, assisted him in his promotions, and had heard disc jockey Steve Dahl on WLUP, 97.9 FM (not to be confused with the former WLUP, AM 1000, now the ESPN station in Chicago), "blowing up" disco records on the air, because disco sucked. Actually, this was one of the first occasions where people could, instead of "stinks," say "sucks" openly, in public, without fear of being told, "How dare you say such a filthy word like that!"
Most of the songs I don't like are the monotonous ones, the really repetitive ones. I was just turning 8 when the film Saturday Night Fever and its repulsive, Bee Gees-led soundtrack were released in late 1977. Whatever else you might think about him, we must praise the late Michael Jackson for this: Thriller replaced the SNF soundtrack as the biggest-selling album of all time.
John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever,
which premiered December 14, 1977
"Well, you can tell by the way I use my walk, I'm a woman's man... " Are you sure, Barry Gibb? Because in the way you walk, the way you dress, the way you style your hair, and the way you sing, you seem more like a man's woman. Except for the beard: If Barry and his brothers, the twins Robin and Maurice Gibb, didn't have beards, they would have been the most effeminate act in rock history to this point -- and this was after David Bowie did Ziggy Stardust, and in his case the gender-confusion was intentional!
"Stayin' Alive," as bad as it was, wasn't the worst song on the album. That was the incredibly limp "How Deep Is Your Love." I have hated that song for almost 44 years now. There's only one song I have hated longer, and that's because of my name: It's "Michael, Row the Boat Ashore." I don't know how much you'd have to pay me to get me to sing that song, but you are welcome to place a bid.
The Bee Gees were actually really good from 1967 to about 1972, then disappeared, then came back in 1975 as a disco act. There was nothing holy about this second coming. To make matters worse, little brother Andy Gibb also got big at this point.
Anyway, by the Summer of '79, disco was still dominant. Something had to be done. So Mike Veeck and Steve Dahl got together and did something.
The White Sox have played, since their 1901 inception, on the South Side: First at South Side Park (1901-10), then at the old Comiskey Park (1910-90), and since 1991 at the new Comiskey Park, renamed U.S. Cellular Field in 2003 and Guaranteed Rate Field, in 2016.
The South Side is the home of the electric blues (Willie Dixon, Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf, Koko Taylor), the home of Chicago soul (Jerry Butler, Curtis Mayfield, their former group the Impressions, the Chi-Lites, Earth Wind & Fire), and the home of some progressive rockers (Doors keyboardist Ray Manzarek, the band Chicago, Styx). While Jim Croce was from the Philadelphia area, he taught us, "Now, the South Side of Chicago is the baddest part of town."
Comiskey, which had hosted the Beatles in 1965, and an annual "Summer Jam" concert since the Veecks came back to town for the 1976 season, seemed like the right place to make a stand for good music.
Comiskey Park, during the 1978 Summer Jam concert
July 12, 1979 was a Thursday, with a doubleheader scheduled, between the White Sox and the Detroit Tigers. Anyone who brought in a disco album into Comiskey would be let in for 98 cents. That's right, 98 cents, because of WLUP's FM frequency, 97.9. Between games of the twinbill, the records would be taken out onto the field and blown up by Dahl and his assistants.
Comiskey Park seated about 44,000 people. Apparently, disco sucked so much that 75,000 people showed up on the troubled South Side to get in and voice their displeasure at disco. The official attendance was 47,795, so there must have been standees.
Harry Caray and Jimmy Piersall, then broadcasting for the ChiSox, mentioned "strange people." Mike Veeck would say the air was heavy with marijuana smoke. (Right, as if disco fans didn't smoke pot. Or use worse drugs: The disco era was the beginning of mass cocaine use in America.)
The Tigers won the first game, 4-1. Pat Underwood outpitched Fred Howard. There were no home runs.
Then the "demolition" was set up. The crate Dahl would use to blow up the records could hold 20,000. That left quite a few others, and people started flinging them like frisbees. When the records were blown up, everyone cheered.
Dahl and his people got off the field in a Jeep, and then fans rushed the field, chanting, "Disco sucks! Disco sucks! Disco sucks!" They tore up the field, as if the White Sox had just won the Pennant. Caray got on the public-address system and told everyone to get off the field. No one listened. The umpires decided the field was unplayable, and declared the 2nd game a forfeit to the Tigers -- after all, as the home team, the White Sox were responsible for making sure the field was playable.
Tiger outfielder Rusty Torres was a Yankee when fans rushed the field at Robert F. Kennedy Stadium in 1971, causing the Washington Senators' last home game to be forfeited to the Yanks. And he was a Cleveland Indian when Ten-Cent Beer Night turned out to be an even bigger disaster than this, resulting in an Indian forfeit to the Texas Rangers in 1974. This would be Torres' 3rd experience in a riot resulting in a forfeit. I seriously doubt anyone will break that record, even on steroids.
Arrests: 39. Injuries reported: 6. Deaths: None. In other words, despite everything, Comiskey Park may have been one of the safest spots in Chicago that night. Don't forget, the South Side was Al Capone's stomping grounds half a century earlier. And it could still be a shooting gallery at times.
No American League games have been forfeited since, and only one National League game has, at Dodger Stadium, when Dodger fans received free balls upon entry, and threw them onto the field to protest a bad call by an umpire. That's right, Walter O'Malley, your beloved Temple of Treason hosted baseball's last forfeit. Hot enough for ya down there, you slimy bastard?
Disco did turn out to be on the decline. "Disco Demolition Night" -- or "Disco Sucks Night," as some called it -- was a symptom of its demise, rather than the cause. After all, for those of us who loved baseball then (as well as for those of us who didn't), one of the big songs of the year was "We Are Family," by Sister Sledge. Although the group came out of Philadelphia, across the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, and sang about "all my sisters and me" with no mention of "brothers," Willie Stargell, the portly slugger and captain of the Pittsburgh Pirates, took the song to heart, played it in the clubhouse, and even convinced the scoreboard operator at Three Rivers Stadium to play it as the Pirates took the field.
By the time the Pirates reached the Playoffs, the top of the home dugout at Three Rivers Stadium, instead of reading "PITTSBURGH PIRATES," read "THE FAMILY." Wonder what the local mobsters thought about that? They probably liked it once the Buccos won the World Series in October.
But aside from a few more skyrockets like "Funkytown," the Disco Period was pretty much over in a year. The Bee Gees would have a few more hits after 1979, Donna Summer would have a couple of post-disco smashes, but that was it: The Village People became the joke they always should have been treated as; Harry Wayne Casey, leader of KC & the Sunshine Band, was in an awful auto accident, hurting him badly enough that the group's momentum was gone, though he recovered enough to make them a big fixture on the oldies circuit; and punk had evolved into new wave, which would lead to the synthesizer-driven 1980s.
No, it wasn't the people chanting "Disco Sucks!" at Comiskey Park, or the music they liked, that killed disco. The actual cause of death was burnout, like so many other fads before and since.
"We Are Family" was a fun record. In fact, there were quite a few fun disco records, including a comeback by my fellow Essex County natives, Frankie Valli & the Four Seasons: "Who Loves You," "Swearin' to God," and "December 1963 (Oh What a Night)." Not to mention that when the musical Grease was turned into a film in 1978, Frankie sang a theme song written just for the film -- by Barry Gibb! It's disco, obviously not reflective of the late 1950s when Grease takes place, and Gibb clearly sings backup on it, by Frankie showed that a man can sing falsetto and still be masculine.
On the one hand, the vast majority of disco was terrible, and deserved a public demonstration against it.
On the other hand, disco was very inclusive, catering to a multiracial and gay-friendly clientele. In disco, all you had to do was be able to fool someone into thinking you were good-looking and able to dance. And, with all the booze and cocaine flying around in the discos, that wasn't that hard.
And at least going out to discos meant that you had to dress up. Unless you were going to a gay disco, in which case you would wear hardly anything. Not that I would know...
Anyway, if you look at most of the guys running onto the field that night, they were longhaired hard rock fans, probably stoners. "Ginkers," we called them in New Jersey. You know, like Kelso on "That '70s Show," Bender in "The Breakfast Club," and Jon Bon Jovi was before he realized that wearing a shirt was good. I think there was a racist aspect to the backlash against disco.
Throw in the fact that the '70s had seen some nasty fan-induced moments on ballfields -- the New York clinchers of 1969 to 1978, the tearing apart of Forbes Field in Pittsburgh and Connie Mack Stadium in Philadelphia after their last games, Ten Cent Beer Night in Cleveland -- and this was a disaster waiting to happen. It's a wonder more people didn't get hurt.
The sentiment of "Disco Sucks" was right, but the way it was carried out was awful.
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