This episode is brought to you by TaxACT. This tax season Tax Act has your back with their deduction maximizer and a hundred K accuracy guarantee. You can feel confident. You're getting the most out of tax season learn more about how to maximize your deductions and your refund and get 25% off federal and state filing attacks act.com gimlet. That's TaxACT.com gimlet for 25% sent off federal and state filing. Hi. I'm Pat Walters. And before we get started. I just wanted to tell you that the idea for the show came out of conversations with our friends at retro report the documentary film series that connects iconic news events of the past to today. You can check them out at retro report dot org from gimlet media. I'm Pat Walters and this is undone. I'm done is a show about how big news stories we thought were over often with the beginning of something else will go back to one of these stories each episode and tell you about the surprising things that happen when everybody stopped looking this is our first episode it starts on a hot summer night in Chicago, Illinois, July 12 1979. It's a makeup game. It rained earlier in the year and we lost the game with Detroit is some makeup game is the four games. We're at Comiskey Park on the south side of Chicago and the White Sox are playing a doubleheader against the Detroit Tigers. The place was packed. They completely sold out the stadium and there were another 20,000 people wandering around in the street trying to get in the way that many people who couldn't even get in. Yeah there wherever there are climbing the drain pipes. This is Paul napkin. He was there that night but he wasn't there for the baseball. Game, nobody was really there for the baseball game. They were there for this promotion that was being put on by a big rock radio station in town called The Loop. If you brought a disco record you got in for 98 cents. Now the thing you have to understand is Disco was everywhere that summer. The station said bring your knee toward your Sister Sledge your Donna Summer. Bring all the disco music you can find. So that we can destroy it. This was supposed to be a wacky stunts, but it ended up becoming something so much bigger than that. It became this huge thing front page of the Sun-Times front page of the Tribune. It made worldwide news. It's a Trivial Pursuit question. This week we're going back to this night. We're fifty thousand people showed up to a baseball game in Chicago to rage against disco music. We've spent the past several months sifting through the craziness of that night trying to make sense of what happened. We found out a lot and along the way we came across a guy named Vince Lawrence and Usher at the game whose Story shows how this night connects to so much of the music. We listen to today to get things going. Here's events the Usher. Well, when I got there, you know, we set up at the gates as usual and there were lines around the block and there's Vince was 15 that summer and he gotten a job with this company that provided Usher's to Big venues in Chicago. Take a guy to his seat. Watch the concert. Not a bad job. He'd gotten to see lots of shows Abba Michael Jackson kiss the Funk Fest at Soldier Field. I saw the Rolling Stones with this. Incredible guy Prince opening for him and this would have been amazing for any kid, but it was especially so for Vince because he decided recently that he was going to be a musician. It happened when his dad's friend took him to see this funk artist named captain Sky whose band had a synthesizer in it. And at that point that's what I was going to do. I was going to be the synthesizer guy which was a pretty new thing at the time and that's why he took this Usher job to save money to buy his first synthesizer. So on this night, it's not a concert. it's a baseball game or it was supposed to be anyway, Vince is out at the front gate taken tickets watching records pile up at the gate and I had strict intention of keeping disco records that I thought were good that I didn't have. So Vince is a disco fan taking tickets at an anti disco event, which sounds like it would be a real bummer, but then says he was actually really excited to be working that night because the DJ hosting the promotion was someone that he liked I knew about Steve Dahl and teenage radiation his band and I thought that they were pretty cool Steve Dahl is the DJ at the Loop the big rock radio station that was putting on this promotion at the baseball game. And then says he had this band that did parodies of disco songs. My name is Tony. Did this cover of do you think I'm sexy by Rod Stewart? Which Vince noticed had some synthesizer in it? So I was like wow, you know, he's cool. He's a futurist just like me, but unlike Vince Steve Dahl had been on this anti disco Crusade that summer making fun of disco on his radio show doing public appearances where he'd smashed disco records over his head and that night at the baseball game. His plan was to blow up all the Disco records people brought to the stadium. But as Vince was sifting through these records as he was collecting them at the gate. He noticed something strange. A lot of them weren't actually disco records. There's Marvin Gaye records and Stevie Wonder songs in the key of Life records that were black records and I was like, you can't get in to people who have tickets because I'm like, this record isn't a disco record. You have to have a disco record to get in for a dollar but his boss came over and said no, he says look if they bring a record if it's in that area, you gotta let em in which Ben says he thought was weird, but at the time he really didn't think that much of it. So the first game starts, it's a double headers those two games. And that first one is pretty uneventful Diane white and other person who was in the crowd that night. I wouldn't say. It was like a mood of riotous nurse during you know the game, but after that first game ended things changed as big door open and center field and the Jeep rolled out. That's problematic get again like a World War II Jeep with the top down, you know where they had the canvas top. And Steve Dahl the anti disco DJ was standing in the back shouting into a megaphone. Hey, it's because of you. This is having a night. Okay, not because of us what she was wearing his Arrow to see jacket and Hawaiian shirt with the army helmet people are screaming and I go nuts Steve doll pulls the Jeep up at next to a dumpster give it any sense of how many were in there. A big dumpster and it was full that you brought tonight. We got him in a giant box. And we're gonna blow him up real good. And this was the big moment that all those people had come to see that night to all of a sudden. There's like stuffed shooting up in the air Crowd Goes out of their minds. I was working the Boxes along the third-base line. We were very quickly overrun because there just weren't enough of us. They're getting out of their seats and they're jumping onto the field thousands of people storming the field. And at first it all looks pretty fun. You see kids chasing each other around sliding in the grass climbing on each other's shoulders. I talked to this newspaper reporter Named Dave Hoekstra, who was there who told me the owner was out on the field and he was all in and he had a peg leg and their stories had a peg leg. Yeah, yeah, he lost his leg in the war and he kept getting stuck in the mud. The whole thing is like this zany real-life slapstick routine until all of a sudden. It's just not people start ripping Up The Bases the batting cages all hell broke loose all of a sudden you see a cloud of smoke, right? What happened was that a man stormed the field and they said a bonfire in center field and they also have dancing around it yelling. Disco songs. There's a sec. Behind the bullpen where some people lit the seats on fire the seats in the stands on fire. Yeah. Yeah. I was standing on the field with our camera crew shooting this and it was one of the most horrifying sights you can imagine Steve Dahl, the the disc jockey was nowhere to be found the game delayed over two hours. Yeah. Yes. What's what's the current situation Chief Usher came to me and says, hey, they're telling us that we have to go home. They're calling the police, too. protect the Park police have actually set up barricades now to keep people out of the area of the stadium Rosemary golly is there with so at this point Vince is just trying to get out of there and on my way to the locker room. They were just angry people running up to me getting in my face saying disco sucks. Disco sucks. And I remember saying hey look at my shirt. He's wearing a t-shirt with the logo of the loop the rock station that had put on the event that night and I had to show him like Hey, I'm not I'm hey. I'm I'm not, you know a bad. Person look at my shirt. Feeling like they thought I was disco. And a kid came up to me and took a 12 inch disk and broke it right in my face. It was like a Marvin Gaye 12 inch or something like that and I didn't understand it until much later that you know, that was just hate and that they were directing it at me because I was black in the record was black. I didn't get that at that time. By the end of the night 39 people had been arrested the cops even had to bring in horses and this became a huge news story and the pictures of it that went all around the world are disturbing. You see a crowd of thousands of white kids out on this field smashing and burning records by primarily black artists and to a lot of people who saw those images in the paper and watch them on television. The next day this didn't look like a wacky radio stunt. It looked really it looked a little scary to me. And actually it looked really frightening. This is Renee Graham. She's a columnist for the Boston Globe who writes about music and culture. But when all this happened she was a teenager what it reminded me of even then was I remember seeing films of these little white citizens councils in the 50s who disliked rock and roll now what they really disliked the fact that this was a music that was bringing together blacks and whites. Renee says the backlash against disko. Similar this wasn't just a we don't like this music. This was this wasn't just that this was we don't like these people who listen to this music and to understand that you really have to go back to the roots of disco to June of 1969 in New York City. Renee says it all started in the wake of the riot at the Stonewall Inn when the cops started scaling back their raids on gay bars in the city wasn't like the old days where the windows were blacked out and it was no name on the door and you had to know where it was suddenly. Lee places were quite open and I can remember going to one of the big big clubs in the 70s downtown. I was probably I don't know 16 years old. So I really had no business being in there anyway, and I wasn't I wasn't out so going to those those clouds was I felt like I had I'd come home as a gay woman of color. These clubs became a safe place for an A and for lots of people they called the clubs discos because everybody was dancing to records instead of a band. And at first they were dancing to all different kinds of music Funk Soul R&B. But then in the early 1970s a new style of music started coming out. This is Love Train came out in 1972 by a band called The O'Jays it's one of the first disco songs and Renee says she remembers hearing disco music and thinking it was clearly different from all the RMB and so live in listing to up to that point. It had some elements of that other music, you know, the bulk of the artists who were out there got their start singing in church. So these would Church trained voices big gospel trained, you know black voices. But it also pulled in all this other stuff salsa, which was really big in New York in the 1970s put behind it. Usually, you know, an orchestra a lot of percussion but the drums is like that hissing sound that's but the most defining element the thing that was new and really set disco apart from the things before it was the beat you have to have say 120 beats per minute. It was just a lot faster than music before that little like R&B but on steroids, they called it four on the floor which just means that the music was written in 4/4 time for beats per measure and where the drummer would hit the bass drum on every single downbeat. It was something about the propulsion of that sound that was really intoxicating. This beat was brand new even though it's such a simple idea. And the thing about this beat is that they just made you dance. That was the thing different from Lodi of the music. You can sing along to other things you could dance but this school was built to be dance to and because of that disco took over the gay dance clubs that were flourishing in New York and other big cities across the country like San Francisco, Los. Angela's Chicago and as it spread the music got woven together with the movement for gay rights for openness for inclusivity. The music became the culture and by the mid 70s disco had made it out of the gay clubs and into the homes of teenagers like Vince the Usher we talked to before there was disco on the radio and just go in my house. This is bring my belt by Anita Ward and it would later become one of Vince's favorite songs. The reason I remember that record so much at that time was because it had that one syndrome sound. And I learned how to make that sound at Captain Skies rehearsals. Through 73 74 and 75 the scene kept growing but it didn't quite go mainstream. If you want to hit disco you listening to the black radio stations. Nobody else is playing it and then in 1977. Saturday Night Fever comes out and disco is everywhere. Everyone was wearing polyester white suits and the Bee Gees were all you hurt. Nothing is to be more and more Americans are getting more and more into the disco scene was this trendy thing and suddenly people started flooding into discos who had never gone to discos before was the scene outside our New York. Disco called Studio 54. This is almost like musical gentrification. If you will kind of pushing, you know, the Pioneer is the original Is out of the way and letting it all these new people who then decide it's their thing and that they created it and not only was everybody listening to disco music. Everybody seemed to be making it to this is the Rolling Stones. Rod Stewart had a disco song By the spring of 1979 there were 20,000 disco clubs in America nearly half the Grammy Awards that year went to disco music and dozens of huge mainstream radio station Stations that previously played rock music switched formats to play Disco 24 hours a day. So this is what's happening in 1979 and just a couple months later the loop and Steve Dahl hold their big event at Comiskey Park to destroy disco records. And Renee says that nights impact wasn't just about how scary it looked to her on TV. It was bigger than that. Well, I mean, you know after that just go kind of becomes a four letter word people weren't getting played people weren't getting booked the records weren't selling as well. Renee says, it happened shockingly fast in 1979. Disco was everywhere. And by late 1980 disco dies that night at the baseball game became known as disco demolition night and over the years. A lot of people have said it's the Night disco died. It's like pulling the rug out from under you you have to kind of rebalance. Okay. What are we going to do? Now? How do I stay afloat? This is Janice Marie Johnson, and she had this band called Taste of Honey that had a big disco hit boogie-oogie-oogie in 1978. The song had gone to Number one on the pop R&B and disco charts sold two million copies that summer they were playing stadiums 80,000 people outdoor concert Chicago a singing my song. They won a Grammy award for best new artist 1978 was a great year for them. Our second album was released in 1979. And I think it was July 12 1979 where they were burning disco records. And we had just had a new release categorized as this goal. So how does that work for you girls not well, but the end of that summer. I'm noticing that the radio stations that I used to listen to have changed formats and it turned out this was happening all across the country just like that. Disco is dying overnight Taste of Honey broke up in 1983 and Janice Maria switch careers, I drove a limo would you believe? People think you can't drive a little more I said, why not? What are you talking about? After a quick break? We talked to Steve Dahl the radio DJ Behind disco demolition night. And Vince Lauren's the Usher. We heard from earlier explains how the place that killed disco accidentally helped give birth to a whole new kind of music. This episode is brought to you by TaxACT. This tax season Tax Act has your back with their deduction maximizer and a hundred K accuracy guarantee. You can feel confident. You're getting the most out of tax season learn more about how to maximize your deductions and your refund and get 25% off federal and state filing a tax act.com gimlet. That's TaxACT.com gimlets 425 Sent off federal and state filing. Well, it was December 24th 1978. This is Steve Dahl the DJ who some people say killed disco music. He's in his 60s now still making radio in Chicago and he says disco demolition night all got started because of this crappy thing that happened to him the Christmas before that summer. I had been down on Wacker Drive dressed as Santa live broadcasting from down the street. We had a studio on the third floor so we would just drop a mic. Out the window end of the day came back upstairs and they said hey, Jack wants to see a Jack was the general manager of the station Jackman cow walked into his office and he had an automatic door closer. Apparently this used to be a thing. He hit the hit the automatic door closer when that happened when the door closed behind you automatically you knew something bad was going to happen to you. So he informed me that the station was changing their format to disco effective that night so I kinda drove home. My Santa suit and walked in and told my wife that you know, I didn't have a job. Steve had actually just moved to Chicago and now he was fired and he blamed it on Disco Steve says before that Christmas Eve firing. He didn't have any strong feelings about the music at all. He wasn't even really that into music. He was a talk guy ranted about the news told stories about his life and he was kind of a shock jock he made fun of stuff in pop culture, but after Steve got fired from a station that had turned to disco the music became one of his main targets Steve. Hey, Hated that rock artists like Rod Stewart were making disco songs. He thought it was phony like start was just cashing in on a trend. So he started that band teenage radiation to make fun of disco. I kind of made fun of the Tony Manero in the Saturday Night Fever lifestyle with the white three-piece suit and all that and when he got a new job on the radio, which happened very quickly. He kept making fun of the music and also started talking about destroying it. So what we do every morning as Blow up a disco record that we hate. This is Steve on the radio in 1979 ready to go in there shorty. Why don't you go ahead and start it up. He started doing this thing where every morning he would play a disco records and then blow it up and Steve says his intention with all this was just to be absurd he get dressed up in funny outfits when he played shows with his band. I used to wear Hawaiian shirts. And some at some point that just switched over to me wearing this uniform and a helmet which he says was not intended to seem violent or militaristic. He says a veteran just handed it to him to show Once none of this is there's no master plan behind any of this is just all like, you know me just try to make a living and its fans loved it. The crowds just started to get bigger. He held anti disco events all over the city all leading up to that White Sox game on July 12th. And when Steve looks back on that night when he sees isn't a racist and homophobic Riot the way lots of people have in years since then but rather a big crowd of middle-class Rock Fans reacting against the phony Studio 54 Saturday Night Fever seen saying, hey, we want to wear our t-shirts in our genes and we don't want to have to we don't have to wear white three-piece suits to get laid and he says he didn't see the whole thing as a very big deal there happened to be smoke and fire because they put too much of a charge in the in the box that blew up the records and they had Too many records in there. But you know, I don't really think that it was anything other than youthful exuberance. It feels hard for me to imagine that like people are going that crazy just because they don't like disco music like what what was going on. Do you think I get what burning you know things looks like, you know burning records burning books, whatever it looks I understand how in hindsight people say that it was racist and homophobic, especially Based on the identity politics of the you know, the present day but at the time I never occurred to me because that was really not the intent of it. You really didn't see that that didn't sort of cross your mind like, oh this might look like that. No, but absolutely it did not if anyone and it most of the people who make that statement weren't around for the run up to it, and it was essentially just a harmless, you know. We were having some fun. Now Vince Lawrence the I should we talked to earlier was there for the run-up to that night and to him it was not fun and the people that broke a Marvin Gaye record in his face didn't seem harmless, but Vince doesn't blame Steve doll for what happened to him that night. He even still listen to The Loop. He thinks what happened probably had as much to do with the place where the event was held as the event itself. Ben says the neighborhood around there had a certain reputation there were stories that you better not get caught in Bridgeport after. Dark Bridgeport is where the stadium was. There was a sandwich place called riccobene. He's and I was like, you know, you better not be running or going to riccobene. He's after dark because that's on the edge of Bridgeport and you could get your ass whooped and this neighborhood is what brings us to the last turn in the story where the place that killed disco helps give birth to this whole other kind of music just a quick warning this next part contains some strong language. Not long after that night at the stadium something awful happened to Vince in Bridgeport on my birthday. I was coming home from school. I went to Lakeview High School and occasionally, I would end up taking the Wentworth bus Which put me in the neighborhood of Bridgeport and a teenage boy driving a I don't know pickup truck some sort pulled up next to me and said hey, The fuck are you doing here? And I said I'm just I'm walking home. They said no Coons live in this neighborhood and you ready get the fuck out of here nigger, and I just took off running. And they drove and they caught up with me and beat my face to look like a potato. I went back to my friends house and they called the police and the police came and said well, let's drive around and see if we can find them and funny enough first gas station. There's the truck and there's the guy who beat me up and they arrested him. My mother got a call from this kids lawyer. Saying hey, we've got a court date that's going to come and we don't want to ruin this kid's life. We were hoping that you could forgive this guy. You made a mistake. He's really sorry. Can we work something out and get you guys to drop the charges? And I said, you know, I have photographs of what my face look like that day. He didn't seem at all. Sorry, I think that I should go to the news and I should tell the news that what happened in the south is still happening in Chicago in your neighborhood. He said no no. No, we don't we try to make peace with this. I understand that, you know, you were hurt and we want to maybe pay you for your trouble and the light bulb. My head just went off because remember I was saving up for my first synthesizer. I knew the price list at be Osco music by heart and I very quickly added up what it was going to cost me to get my three favorite synthesizers and I'm like, okay. Well if he doesn't want me to show up at court, it's going to cost them $6,500 and we settled we settled for five right then and there. First I had, you know actually needed to heal physically and then after that I wanted to get my mind, right? I was so eager to put it behind me. And I thought that one way to forget about it would be to get on with my music making which was the only thing I thought about all the time. So that's what Vince did he bought two synthesizers and he started writing songs. I made a record not too long after that with my banzi Factor all made with synthesizers with those very synthesizers those very same synthesizers. I went on to make on and on that's this song Vince made it with his friend Jesse Saunders and it Is widely recognized as one of the very first songs in a whole new genre of music called house. House is a lot like disco but stripped down. So everything is good about disco the driving beat the passion and energy. It's all there like get rid of the big bands the storing lyrics the string sections. We just like the part that was posed to break down. Skip all that drama at the beginning all the foreplay. I guess I would say that house is to disco as Tang is to orange juice. It's got the Flavor of orange is just intensified and crammed into a little space. It's the sort of evolution of disco Renee Graham again as she started writing about music professionally. She watched this Evolution from disco to house unfold the great late. Great DJ Frankie Knuckles, you know called house music, you know discos Revenge Frankie Knuckles is known as The Godfather of house music hit DJ data black gay club in Chicago called the warehouse, which is why it's called house music. And as more and more artists started making this new music you could see how start to fill in the space disco once occupied Vince was too young to get into the warehouse. So he and his friends started throwing their own parties. These semi-legal all ages DJ parties at warehouses. The energy was insane. It was incredible, you know, just imagine just imagine you put fifteen hundred seventeen year old kids in a room unattended with music and these party started. Finally crazy in Chicago and other cities across the country. This is Love Can't Turn Around by Farley Jack Master Funk, which is a really famous house song but you probably haven't heard of it because house kind of stayed underground in the US but by the mid 80s, it started its own disco like Crescendo into the mainstream you start hearing stuff like this your rhythmic song on the radio, you never call It Disco or house, but it's built on both of them and through the 80s and 90s. You hear the This music Vince helped create and the Disco that inspired it in pop music everywhere. This is Bowie in 1983. Janet Jackson and 86. Vogue by Madonna Bill to Make You Dance It's got the four on the floor beat from disco the synthesizers from house and it sounds more like those two genres of music than anything else that came before disco did and then says if you look at the songs the top the charts now, it's still going all of these new pop mainstream songs that are favorites of the world over are built on Disco records are built on house. Music Kylie Minogue can't get you out of my head. What? Justin Bieber, what do you mean? In We Found Love by Rihanna, and now some of the most popular artists in the world are DJs and producers Calvin Harris Diplo Skrillex, Daft Punk, you can hear house and disco in all their music as they play stadiums in front of tens of thousands of people. So when Vince thinks back on what happened that night in July of 1979, I would say if someone say disco died that night. Wow, it's like okay dance music culture is big. Than it ever was at one point. It was the favorite of a very small group of people which Steve Dahl Drew affectionate little circles around and scorned and ridiculed. And now it's the music that Everyone likes the music of Our Generation. Hearing then say all this I found myself thinking like dance music is kind of right where disco was in 1979. So I asked for named Graham the music writer from before are we like are we going to have another disco demolition night? Is that it? Are we coming up on that? You know, it's not like, you know in the 70s you had only so many radio stations. So that's when it became a problem when people felt like, you know, they weren't hearing this song because they were again playing, you know casing the Sunshine Band. You know, you're not going to have that now because people just don't get music from a single Source anymore because of spotify and iTunes and Pandora and all the other ways you can get music, you know, you can listen to music all day and never ever hear Taylor Swift, you know, I mean, so I don't think there's going to be that kind of an issue where people feel like this thing has kind of taken over. You know, I don't necessarily think the world is more accepting of dance music, you know, I just think that there's a kind of you know for lack of a better term the way music is now kind of segregated, you know, we won't I don't think we're going to have a you know a dance. music demolition night Undone is hosted and produced by me Pat Walters along with Julia do it and manual bury. Our senior producer is Larissa Anderson. We are edited by Alan Burdick and Kaitlyn Kenny special. Thanks to Alice Echols Sasha frere-jones. AJ Cervantes Giorgio moroder Bob SC and Jesse rude wife for putting us on to this story in the first place special. Thanks to Renee Graham and Vince Lawrence who both made spot. Playlist for us up their favorite dance tracks inspired by house and disco check it out at gimlet media.com undone undone was conceived in collaboration with our friends at retro report the documentary film series that connects iconic news events of the past to today. You can find them at retro report dot org. This episode of undone was mixed and scored by Bobby Lord with additional music by Matt Bowl. Our fact Checker is Michelle Harris if you want to get in touch follow us on Twitter at undone show or email us at undone at gimlet media.com subscribe to undone on iTunes or wherever you get your podcasts and if you like what you heard, please write a review. It really helps out will have a new episode next week. See you then. Hi, Matt. Hi, Julia producer at undone. I have one last song. I want to play for you because I was really bummed that we couldn't get in the story great and it's called Disco Duck. Oh, this is terrible. I was ahead top of the charts for a whole week in 1976. Why were you sad weren't able to include this. So like we just told the story about you know, how disco died. In like kind of people killed it, but the other part of it is that when this code gotten really popular it also like you know, that kind of bad. Disco Duck was like the original Terrible pop song Maybe. I think so. You have a different idea of what was the patient zero of horrible pop culture and music. Send us an email or write it in a review on iTunes. That's the best way to get in contact with us. Actually. We're shutting down our email. The only way to contact us is via iTunes review. All right. Well, thanks Julia. Thanks Pat. Bye.
One summer night in 1979, 50,000 people got together at a baseball stadium to kill disco. And it worked. Kind of. In this first episode of "Undone" we meet someone who worked as an usher at Disco Demolition Night and played a vital role in keeping the spirit of disco alive today. Our Sponsors Autotrader – To start searching for your new car go to autotrader.com/undone  Squarespace - Go to squarespace.com and use the offer code UNDONE at checkout to get 10% off your first purchase  Credits  Undone is hosted by Pat Walters. Our senior producer is Larissa Anderson. Editing by Alan Burdick and Catlin Kenney. Fact checking by Michelle Harris. This episode of Undone was mixed and scored by Bobby Lord. With additional music by Matt Boll. Thanks also to Renee Graham and Vince Lawrence  … who made a Spotify playlist to go along with this episode. We also have a playlist with disco songs and disco inspired tunes that were used in this episode. Undone was conceived in collaboration with our friends at Retro Report, the documentary film series that connects iconic news events of the past ... to today. You can find them here. 