Last month, when the White Sox commemorated its anniversary, it attracted widespread criticism from Billboard to Vice and the Economist, of a kind that was absent in 1979. Steve Dahl said it wasn’t discriminatory, he was an equal opportunities offender or whatever, but Steve didn’t invite no brothers to Comiskey Park.”įorty years on, Disco Demolition Night remains one of the most controversial events in pop history. “That’s when I started feeling like: ‘OK, they’re just targeting me because I’m black.’ I’ve got a Loop T-shirt on – what’s the difference between me and the next usher trying to get back to his locker? I was one of the few African American people in the stadium. “Someone walked up to me said: ‘Hey you – disco sucks!’ and snapped a 12in in half in my face,” Lawrence says. Unable to cope with the surge of people the ushers were told to go home and that the police would have to deal with what was degenerating into a riot. Things turned uglier after Dahl’s demolition took place and the crowd – estimated at 50,000 – rushed the field. Steve Dahl says he is ‘worn out from defending myself as a racist homophobe’. Dahl planned to fill a dumpster with the records and blow them up as a publicity stunt. He had worked out a promotion with the White Sox: turn up at Comiskey Park on 12 July with a disco record and you would get in for 98¢. Embittered by the fact that he had been fired by a station called WDAI when it switched formats from AOR to disco, Dahl had been endlessly mouthing off on air at his new station, WLUP, also known as The Loop: snapping disco records or dragging the needle across them, encouraging people to join his anti-disco organisation, the Insane Coho Lips. Tonight, he was looking forward to seeing a band called Teenage Radiation, fronted by loudmouth local radio DJ Steve Dahl: they had recorded a parody single called Do Ya Think I’m Disco, part of Dahl’s ongoing campaign against the commercially dominant genre in late 70s America. Punters rich enough to sit in the stadium’s boxes would tip well, you could get a good view of the game and there were regular special promotional events, often with music: country nights, Elvis nights.
The area was so notorious for racism that even one of the White Sox’s star players, Thad Bosley, had found his car surrounded by a mob after taking a wrong turning driving home after a game, the situation only defused when one of them recognised him. Comiskey Park was next door to Bridgeport, a neighbourhood of the city where, as Lawrence puts it, “it was common knowledge that you might not want to be hanging around after dark, because there were people there who for sure don’t like you based on your colour”. It wasn’t an ideal job for a black teenager.
In the summer of 1979, Vince Lawrence had got himself a part-time job as an usher at Comiskey Park baseball stadium, home to the Chicago White Sox.
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