He would regularly play black music and then rip the record off the turntable with a scrape sound and add an explosion sound effect. “Steve Dahl went on a popular rock radio station at a time when rock radio in Chicago had a probably predominately white listenership. But he wasn’t a fan of Dahl’s new shtick of trashing disco records on the air. He even wore a Loop T-shirt under his usher uniform. Lawrence describes himself as a lover of all types of music, and he says when he went to work at the ballpark that day, knowing that Dahl would be there, he hoped Teenage Radiation would be performing. I tapped into it, both as a response to being canned to make room for the disco format, and to build a community so I could keep my job.” Update your settings here to see it.ĭahl had recently been fired from 94.7 WDAI after that station had switched to an all-disco format, and he’d become a “Disco Sucks!” crusader at his new gig at rock station WLUP, aka “The Loop.” Dahl’s band, Teenage Radiation, had even recorded the novelty single “ Do You Think I’m Disco,” a parody of Rod Stewart’s disco-crossover hit “Do Ya Think I’m Sexy.” Dahl did not respond to Yahoo Entertainment’s multiple requests to be interviewed for this article, but in a 2016 essay for Medium titled “Disco Demolition Night Was Not Racist, Not Anti-Gay” (excerpted from the book Disco Demolition: The Night Disco Died, in which he exasperatedly wrote, “I’m worn out from defending myself this event was just kids pissing on a musical genre”), he explained that his listeners “were passionate about their music and their lifestyles. ![]() This content is not available due to your privacy preferences. So to me, it's not surprising what happened.” To be occasionally called ‘n****r’ to your face was part of that culture. It was widely known in the black community, and you can quote me on this: ‘Don't have your black ass caught in Bridgeport after dark.’ Young guys knew they could catch a beatdown easily that way. “At that time, you couldn't be a black guy walking in the neighborhood of that baseball field after dark. I say, OK, if you want to look at this through the lens of 1979, of the time, let’s do that,” Lawrence, who is black, tells Yahoo Entertainment. ![]() “Steve has used the words ‘revisionist history’ countless times. Chicago house music pioneer Vince Lawrence, who was only 15 years old in 1979 and was at Comiskey Park that crazy day working as an usher to buy his first synthesizer, is one of those people. Dahl has always vehemently denied that 98.7FM WLUP’s infamous “Disco Demolition Night” had any racist or homophobic undertones or intentions, arguing that “annexing this event to today’s advocacy is lazy academically and inappropriate geographically” and that what happened should be “viewed in the 1979 lens.”īut many people claim that Dahl was, at the very least, naïve and irresponsible to stage what Chic’s Nile Rodgers once likened to a “Nazi book-burning” in the tense, segregated climate of ‘70s Chicago. ![]() ![]() Forty years ago, on July 12, 1979, what was supposed to be a wacky promotional stunt by shock-rock DJ Steve Dahl to sell tickets to a double-header White Sox baseball game at Chicago’s Comiskey Park turned ugly - when piles of vinyl records, many by artists of color, were destroyed as thousands of anti-disco rioters, 39 of whom were eventually arrested for disorderly conduct, stormed the field.
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