pjmedia.com By GREG BYRNES
July 12, 1979, is a date that lives in baseball infamy. It is also a turning point in modern music history. That the two converged on the ball field on the Southwest side of Chicago is strange indeed. When you think of landmarks in pop music, the now-demolished Comiskey Park, home of the Chicago White Sox, doesn’t come quickly to mind.
But could the “happening” on that day give us a window into one of the strangest cultural oddities of our day, Trump Derangement Syndrome? You could define TDS as a disagreement or disapproval that clouds the speculative intellect to the point it leads a person’s will to believe the worst and hate disproportionately.
It all began when a Rock DJ who hated disco music joined forces with the White Sox’s promotions manager Mike Veeck, son of owner Bill Veeck. The Veecks were famous in baseball for oddball promotions. In the 1950s, baseball changed one of its rules to counteract a Bill Veeck stunt of sending a midget up in a major league game so pitchers couldn’t strike him out.
When programmers gave DJ Steve Dahl a disco record to play at WLUP, he would put it on the turntable and run the needle across it to scratch it, making it no longer playable. His radio station then teamed up with the White Sox on a promotion campaign; they called it Disco Demolition Night. Admission to the ballpark would be only one dollar if you came with a disco record. The promoters would then put the records in a box and blow the box up on the field between games of this twi-night doubleheader.
Instead of the expected 12,000 additional fans, the game was sold out, and 20,000 more rushed the gates. Besides blowing a hole in the outfield with the planned detonation, mobs of rock fans flooded the field, throwing records everywhere and taking divots out of the field. It took a call to riot police to clear the field. Umpires eventually called the game because of damage to the playing field…
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