What were people celebrating the 30th anniversary of at Comiskey Park?”
They arrived in Dodge Darts and Chevy Novas. They jammed the Dan Ryan Expressway and filled the side streets near Comiskey Park. They had disco records in their hands and half-pints hidden in their pockets. They were the Insane Coho Lips, and they were headed to Disco Demolition Night. It was July 12, 1979. The Cohos were fans of Steve Dahl, a 24-year-old disc jockey at WLUP-FM in Chicago. Their nickname referred to a local street gang, “The Insane Unknowns,” and a local fish, the coho salmon. Dahl and his wry, subordinate co-host, Garry Meier, organized the Cohos around a simple and surprisingly powerful idea: Disco Sucks. The Cohos scrawled it on the banners they brought with them to Comiskey. “Steve was really taking control of Chicago back then,” says Jeff Schwartz, former head of promotions at WLUP. “At the time, we didn’t really know how big he was. Disco Demolition If you were young and shiftless — and repulsed by Abba — Disco Demolition Night was for you. “After that night, w
t’s perhaps fitting that on the weekend Steve Dahl announces a return to the airwaves we “celebrate” the 30th anniversary of Disco Demolition Night The brainchild of the WLUP disc jockey Dahl and White Sox owner Bill Veeck’s son Mike, the idea was to have a death to disco movement between games of a Detroit Tigers-Sox doubleheader at Comiskey Park in 1979, but it quickly turned into what amounted to a mob scene, culminating in a bonfire of disco records and a canceled game. And here’s a clip of the live broadcast when Dahl blowed up disco, real good … http://blogs.suntimes.com/sportsprose/2009/07/disco_demoliton_30_years_after.html On Tuesday, Soundcheck looks at the fallout from “Disco Demolition Night,” held at Chicago’s Comiskey Park in 1979. Our guest, Steve Greenberg of S-Curve Records, joins us to talk about how one night of “disco sucks” revelry changed pop music. Her
