Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - Disco Demolition Night

Episode Date: July 12, 2020

Major League Baseball has a long history of bad marketing ideas. From 10 cent beer night to baseball bat night, to giving fans balls they can throw on to the field as they entered the stadium, baseball has a long list of horrible ideas to bring people into the stadium. However, the absolute worst idea, by far, occurred on July 12, 1979, when the Chicago White Sox decided to blow up a crate of disco records on an evening which would forever be known as Disco Demolition Night. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Major League Baseball has a long history of bad marketing ideas. From Tencent Beer Night to Baseball Bat Night to giving fans balls they could throw onto the field as they entered the stadium, baseball has a long list of horrible ideas to bring people into the game. However, the absolute worst idea, by far, occurred on July 12, 1979, when the Chicago White Sox decided to blow up a creative disco records on an evening which would forever be known as Disco Demolition Night. Learn all about the disaster, which was Disco Demolition Night on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. What if your perceptions about the past were wrong? ThruLine is a podcast that takes you back in time to uncover the parts of the story that may have gone unnoticed.

It effectively turned day into night. And how it shaped the world now. Time travel with us every week on the ThruLine podcast from NPR. This episode is brought to you by the Travel Photography Academy. Have you ever been on a trip and wondered why your photos don't turn out like the images you see in travel magazines? If you're going to spend thousands of dollars on a trip and hundreds to thousands of dollars on a camera, you owe it to yourself to get the highest quality images from your trip. That's why I created the Travel Photography Academy.

I set out to travel around the world in 2007 with an expensive camera, and I had no idea how to use it. As I traveled around the world, I taught myself the art of travel photography, eventually mastering it to a point where I was named Travel Photographer of the Year three times in North America. The Travel Photography Academy is an online course that teaches you everything you need to know to master your camera and to take better photos on your next trip. To improve your photography and to get better images on your next trip, visit Travel Photographyacademy.com or click in the link in the show notes. To understand how Disco Demolition Night came to be, you have to understand the backstory. Disco was very popular in the late 1970s. The movie Saturday Night Fever in 1977 popularized disco, and the movie's soundtrack by the Bee Gees was the biggest selling album in history up to that point.

Artists like Donna Summers, Casey and the Sunshine Band, and Gloria Gaynor were topping the charts. Discos like Studio 54 in New York became the most popular nightclubs in the country. Radio stations started to change their formats to meet the growing demand for disco. Station WKTU in New York went from a mid-level rock and roll station to the most popular radio station in the country, when they switched to disco. In 1977, the White Sox even held a disco night where people could come and listen to disco music at the ballpark. It drew an attendance of over 20,000 people. But by 1979, there was a backlash developing against disco. One Chicago DJ was particularly down on disco. The 24-year-old Steve Dahl was fired by station WDAI on Christmas Eve, 1978, when the station changed its format from rock to disco. Fresh off being fired and looking to pick up.

publicity for the event, Dahl was hired by competitor WLUP and started an anti-disco crusade. Mike Vec, son of White Sox owner Bill Vec, and head of marketing for the team, thought it might be a good idea to have an anti-disco night at the stadium, just like they had a disco night a few years before. The team wasn't doing very well and had been averaging 15,500 fans per game. Vec figured if the promotion could draw the 20,000 people disco night did, it would be a moderate its success. The team partnered up with WLUP to promote the event which was to be held on July 12th, a doubleheader against the Detroit Tigers. The gimmick was going to be that people would be allowed to enter the stadium for only 98 cents if they brought a disco record with them. The records

would be collected, put in a large crate, and then blown up in the outfield between games. It all sounded simple on paper. As the gates opened, the team expected 20,000 fans, but hired security for 35,000 just in case. 55,000 people actually entered the stadium. It was the largest crowd in Comiskey Park in years. The off-ramps from the Dan Ryan Expressway were eventually closed off by police because there were so many people. It was estimated there were 20,000 people

outside of the stadium who couldn't get in. The collection bins for disco records quickly filled up so many people just brought their records with them into the stands. And for those of you not old enough to remember vinyl records, note that they can actually be thrown quite far if you toss it like a frisbee. Most of the people who were coming to the game were not there for baseball. They were bringing signs saying disco sucks and hanging them off the railings of the stands. As the game began, there were reports of people trying to get into the stadium for free,

so Vex sent all the security guards to the entrances, leaving the field unattended. During the first game, fans began throwing records into the field. The players on each team began wearing batting helmets on the field to protect themselves from flying discs. The game was stopped several times because of debris on the field. The first game ended at 8.16 p.m. At 8. Steve Dahl entered the field in a Jeep, egging on the crowd with chance of disco sucks. The crate of disco records was in center field, wired with explosives, and the crowd was going nuts. It was here that the lack of foresight really became apparent.

First, when the records were detonated, it left a huge hole in the outfield. Explosions tend to do that. Then, after having been egged on and amped up, the fans started streaming on to the field. All of the extra security which had been hired, of which there was enough for a crowd of 35,000 people, not 55,000, were all at the entrances. Nobody was there to stop the people from going on to the field. And go on to the field, they did. Between 5,000 and 7,000 people swarmed the playing area, and it was pandemonium. Bonfires were lit on the grass from the debris of the record explosion.

People were climbing the foul poles. The batting cage was torn apart. The bases were stolen. Literally. People swarmed in the dugouts and started taking bats and balls. By 9.10 p.m., the Chicago police arrived in riot gear to clean out the crowd from the field. The field was quickly clear to fans, and after an hour of groundskeepers trying to clean up the field, the Tigers' manager, Spikey Anderson, refused to let his team out of the field due to safety concerns.

American League President Lee McPhail was called, and he declared game two of the double-header, a forfeit. and awarded the win to the Tigers. It was only one of five games forfeited in Major League Baseball in the last 50 years. The evening probably hastened the demise of disco. Many stations and record labels began calling it dance music instead of disco. Disco texts closed, and eventually the 70s morphed into the 80s. Bill Vec was pushed out of baseball the next year and sold the team. Mike Vec resigned the following year, and he could only find work in minor league baseball after that.

He later became the president of the minor league Charleston River Dogs, and in 2014 held a similar event where they blew up Justin Bieber and Miley Cyrus merchandise after a game. As for the White Sox, they actually held a promotion in 2019 celebrating the 40th anniversary of Disco Demolition Night. However, this time, the fans only came away with a T-shirt. This is a brand new podcast, and as such, it can really use your support. If you know someone who is curious and you think would like the show, please share it with them. And if you've enjoyed this show, please subscribe on Apple Podcasts or Google. podcast where you'll get new content for curious people every day in your podcast player.

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