“Holy cow!”The words were as iconic in Chicago as the Sears Tower and deep-dish pizza; Harry Caray, the broadcaster who made them famous, even more so. But the atmosphere in the Windy City was wholly unfamiliar to Chicagoans on the night of July 12, 1979, as Caray leaned out from the press box at Comiskey Park brandishing his catchphrase, not in celebration of a great baseball play, but rather as part of a desperate plea to the 20,000 fans illegally converging on the field in between games of a doubleheader that was never finished. In what was originally an effort to draw a few more fans to an otherwise half-empty stadium, the Chicago White Sox had stumbled into one of the most bizarre and memorable moments in the history of sports: Disco Demolition Night.The 1979 White Sox were nothing short of uninspiring-a mediocre team with no star players, playing second fiddle, as always, to the lovable losers across town, the Cubs. Though on the field they lacked both the talent and verve to draw crowds, the Sox still had colorful owner Bill Veeck, baseball’s master of publicity stunts.Part pioneer and part huckster, Veeck never doubted the power of eccentricity when it came to filling the stands. In 1951, while owner of the St. Louis Browns, Veeck signed 3’7” midget Eddie Gaedel for a day. (Whoever inscribed Veeck’s plaque in the Baseball Hall of Fame clearly appreciated his sense of humor, describing him as “a champion of the little guy.”) Later that season, he organized Grandstand Manager’s Day, where thousands of fans in the stands were given placards by which they could vote on managerial decisions (Incidentally, the Browns won the game.) After buying the White Sox in 1959, Veeck had Comiskey Park retrofitted with an exploding scoreboard, the first of its kind. In 1975, he hired his son Mike as marketing director, further ingraining the unconventional Veeck wisdom into the team’s off-the-field operations.The first seeds of Disco Demolition Night began to grow in 1977 after a game in which the White Sox drew 5,000 more fans than usual thanks to a promotion featuring a disco dancing competition. As Mike Veeck and some colleagues sat in a downtown bar following the game, someone suggested that the Sox stage an exact opposite promotion: next time, instead of celebrating disco, why not slam it? “It sounded like a terrific idea at four in the morning in Miller’s Pub,” Veeck recalls, “but it got even funnier the more we thought about it.” Yet, like so many drunken ideas, the notion of an anti-disco promotion evaporated, lying dormant for nearly two years.In the spring of 1979, Chicago radio station WLUP, better known as The Loop (”Where Chicago Rocks”), hired a 24-year-old DJ named Steve Dahl, formerly of rival station WDAI. Dahl had recently quit his WDAI gig after the station switched to an all-disco format, and the rocker arrived at The Loop intent on sticking it to his former bosses. He and co-host Garry Meier immediately started a “disco sucks” campaign that quickly became the focal point of their daily show. Listeners would call in to request their most hated disco songs, to be played on the air briefly before one of the hosts swung the record needle screeching across the record, followed by an explosion sound effect and a quote borrowed from a popular SCTV skit: “That blowed up real good.”Dahl quickly developed a rabid following, anointing himself the field general in the war against disco. He nicknamed his troops the Insane Coho Lips-part street gang, part non sequitur-and had the station issue free ID cards to fans who wanted to enlist in Steve Dahl’s Disco Army “dedicated to the eradication and elimination of the dreaded musical disease known as disco.” Within a week, the station received over 10,000 requests. Dahl even penned his own theme song, “Do Ya Think I’m Disco?”, parodying Rod Stewart and other sellouts who had suddenly caught disco fever.While Dahl was leading his charge, WLUP Promotions Director Jeff Schwartz was brainstorming cross-promotion ideas with Mike Veeck. Schwartz had a DJ pretending to blow up disco records on the air; Veeck had an exploding scoreboard and full-time pyrotechnist at his disposal. The marriage was obvious. Disco: prepare to be demolished.The plan for Disco Demolition Night was thus: All fans bringing a disco record to the stadium would be charged 98 cents admission (as in 98.3 FM, The Loop’s radio frequency) for the doubleheader against the Detroit Tigers. The records would be collected in a large trash dumpster by the main gate, and the dumpster would be relocated to center field after the first game of the doubleheader, to be blown into smithereens by the commander himself, Steve Dahl. “Stayin’ Alive” and “I Will Survive” would do neither-this was to be the death of disco.On July 11th, Disco Demolition Eve, the White Sox drew just over 15,000 fans to Comiskey Park, filling less than a third of the roughly 52,000 seats in Comiskey Park. By all accounts, the hope was that the promotion the next day would draw an additional 5,000 to 10,000 fans. Three hours before the first game, it became astonishingly clear that all expectations would be exceeded.Masses of teenagers came streaming onto Shields Ave. outside the stadium; nearly all of them carried records, in some cases stacks of them. Most were looking for tickets and consuming whatever contraband they could find. “It was the ultimate tailgate party,” says Paul Natkin, The Loop’s event photographer at the time, “and I don’t think anyone was there to see the game.” The disco dumpster filled up much sooner than expected, and fans brought their surplus records into the stadium to be destroyed one way or another. By game time, every seat was filled-and a crowd of about 40,000 remained lingering outside the park, desperate to join the party.Nobody at Comiskey Park that night (at least nobody who had ever been to a baseball game before) saw anything normal about what was transpiring. Harry Caray commented on the air that there were “a lot of funny-looking people in the stadium” (this from a man who wore glasses bigger than his head), and they were doing some funny things. For one, there were the chants and homemade banners: “Disco sucks!” It might not seem like such a big deal if it were heard today, but back in 1979 it was the equivalent of yelling “Fuck disco!” in front of children, old folks, and a broadcast TV audience; and in fact the chanting got so loud and so unmistakably clear at times that the TV station airing the game had to mute its broadcast.Then there was the unmistakable smell and the cloud of smoke floating above the outfield bleachers. After the game, when asked about the intoxication in the stands, Tigers manager Sparky Anderson told a reporter from the Chicago Tribune, “Beer and baseball go together, they have for years. But I think those kids were doing things other than beer.” If there was any doubt, the giant banner in center field with a leaf symbol should have been a clue.And then there were the projectiles. If there is one cardinal rule of sports promotions, it is this: do not, under any circumstances, give fans anything they can throw on the field. The Sox followed the rule, but left a huge loophole. Fans had brought their disco records to the game to destroy them, or at the very least dispose of them. When they reached the upper deck with records still in hand, it seemed like the fun-and very, very popular-thing to do was to fling the records like Frisbees onto the field. The players and team officials were terrified. No one wanted to witness the first instance of a baseball player being guillotined by “Love to Love You Baby,” and certainly no one wanted to be its victim. Some fans had also brought cherry bombs and golf balls with “disco sucks” painted on, and started chucking those on the field as well. Beer cups and hot dogs joined the rain of debris. “After a while, it was just a fiasco,” remarked Tigers catcher Lance Parrish, who was fortunate enough to be the only player on his team wearing a helmet and mask on the field. “I didn’t even know if we’d ever get through the first game.”While the players were anxious to get off the field as soon as possible, fans outside the stadium were dying to get in, and approximately 10,000 did, filling the stadium 20 percent beyond its capacity. Some snuck onto the external fire escapes and climbed to the upper deck, while others tied their shirts together as makeshift ropes to scale the walls and climb through the arches on the mezzanine concourse. Security was a nightmare. “We had a lot to deal with,” says Mike Veeck. “We were confiscating grappling hooks.”The first game finished with little fanfare -no one was really there to see baseball anyway. The ruckus erupted as Dahl and his crew were escorted onto the field via jeep. Dahl arrived in uniform: army helmet, olive drab pants, and an officer’s jacket adorned with medals, with a butterfly-collar aloha shirt underneath. Meier introduced Dahl as the “supreme commander,” and handed over the microphone to the despot of disco. Nervous and unprepared, Dahl took a cue from his friend John Belushi, screaming “PARTY!” ala Animal House. The crowd ate it up. He welcomed fans to “officially the world’s largest anti-disco rally,” and turned the stage over to the pyrotechnist.With a roaring boom, thousands of disco records went flying 200 feet in the air. No one heard the Gibb brothers’ falsetto screams of anguish. Disco had been destroyed. Rock ‘n’ roll and the Coho Lips had won. Dahl led the chorus in a victory cheer: “Disco sucks! Disco sucks! Disco sucks!” The scene was unbelievable, says Natkin. “I was standing there watching blown-up disco records fall from the sky, and I thought to myself, ‘This is the greatest promotion in radio history.’”After Dahl and co. took another lap around the field, the grounds crew came onto the field to clean up, and White Sox pitcher Ken Kravec began to warm up for the second game. Meanwhile outside the stadium, a mob of disgruntled teens had begun to shake the portable ticket booths. Apprised of the situation, Mike Veeck asked the deputy in charge of the 40 or so police officers on the field to send some of his men out to deal with the delinquents. A couple fans interpreted the departure of the officers as a gift of carte blanche, and ran onto the field to steal second base-first symbolically, then literally. That was all the spark the crowd needed. Pandemonium. Fans came pouring out over the outfield fence almost immediately, while others sprinted down the ramps from the upper deck to join the bedlam. The scene was typical of a World Series celebration (in that era of Chicago sports, the destruction of disco records was the biggest victory imaginable), and with no regard for the game still to be played, people started plucking grass from the field (an anonymous plucker recalls being told, “Hey man, you can’t smoke that!”). They climbed the foul poles, knocked over the batting cage, and started bonfires around the smoldering record sleeves lying on the field. Most of the people on the field were just running every which way, with no idea what to do but too excited to leave the scene. The players stood on the steps of their dugouts watching the chaos, wearing helmets and wielding bats to protect themselves. “I was shocked and amazed,” says Dahl. “And I knew I was in trouble.”No one in the stadium had any idea how to get 20,000 people off a baseball field, at least not without guns and tear gas. Bill Veeck went down onto the field and took the mic. “This is Bill Veeck. Please clear the park, or we’ll have to call off the game and close the park.” No luck. The scoreboard operator put up a message reading: “Please return to your seats.” Nobody did. Then the fans started chanting for Harry, and he gave them what they wanted.”Holy cow” was right, although perhaps “holy shit” would have been more appropriate. Caray was a gentleman, though, and he took the high road. “To make it an absolutely perfect evening,” he began, “what say we all regain our seats so we can play baseball again?” It wasn’t working. The fans still in the stands, many of whom were bigger fans of the Sox than enemies of disco, started chanting, “Back to your seats!” Stadium organist Nancy Faust gave them some chord accompaniment, but the people on the field and on Shields Ave. just beyond the bleachers took it as a cue to start in again with “Disco sucks!” Desperately, almost comically, she launched into “Take Me Out to the Ballgame,” with Bill Veeck on vocals. Dahl offered to go back down on the field and give it his best shot. “They told me, ‘No. You’ve already done enough.’” After nearly 37 minutes of mayhem, Chicago Police arrived on the scene and sent the revelers running off, to the delight of the fans in the stands.Once the field was cleared, Bill Veeck and the Tigers’ Anderson heatedly pleaded their respective cases with head umpire Dave Phillips to either start the second game or force the Sox to forfeit. Veeck claimed that it was “a happy crowd, not a mean crowd,” while Anderson argued that there was no way his team could play baseball in what had become a war zone. Anderson ultimately prevailed. “He gave the performance of a lifetime,” says Mike Veeck. “He won that game for the Tigers.”The next day, the story was on the front page of every newspaper in Chicago. “The Horror at Comiskey” read one headline. The writers reported it as a riot: “the most dangerous promotion in the history of sports.” To this day, Mike Veeck still completely disagrees with the description. “I take great exception when people say it was a riot,” he asserts. “I’ve been in a few riots, and [Disco Demolition] was just playful. If they’d been drunks running around on the field, we’d still be in court today. But the fact that a tremendous amount of the crowd was very stoned, that made them very manageable.” Nevertheless, despite the fact that none of the 90,000 fans who showed up sustained any kind of injury, Mike resigned his position with the team, to the chagrin of his father. “I was devastated by this,” says Mike. “He was the one person that understood. He said, ‘You know, Miguel, sometimes they work too well.’”The Bee Gees later called Disco Demolition Night “the death of disco.” Harry Wayne Casey of KC and the Sunshine Band denounced it as a racist, homophobic attack on a positive, multicultural style of music. Dahl and colleagues, who had been ordered not to discuss Disco Demolition on the air but did so anyway, shrugged off the rebukes, saying they had no ill will towards minorities or gays-they just thought the music and the lifestyle were lame.Despite all the negative press that followed, fans still cherished the night as a great moment in rock ‘n’ roll and the most fun they’d ever had at a ballpark. In 2004, on the eve of the 25th anniversary, PBS in Chicago aired a documentary on Disco Demolition featuring nearly everyone involved in the event, from Dahl and Mike Veeck to fans who shared their experiences in the stands.No one in Chicago has forgotten. Now they’re just dying to tell their grandkids about the night that they blew up disco.