Prologue
1979-1982
Disco Crashes the Record Business, Michael Jackson Saves the Day, and MTV Really
Saves the Day
One man almost destroyed the music industry in the late ’70s.
His name was Steve Dahl, and he was a roundish Chicago rock disc jockey with
huge glasses and a shaggy bowl cut. In a maniacally nasal voice, he pioneered
shock radio with his outrageous stunts. Once, during the 1979 Iran hostage
crisis, he made random on-air calls to Iran and savagely mocked the first person
with a foreign accent to answer. But the WLUP-FM DJ didn’t find widespread
recognition until he started smashing Donna Summer records in the studio,
calling to arms a crazed group of followers he dubbed the Insane Coho Lips.
Dahl’s hatred for disco ran deep and personal. He had taken a long road to his
first Chicago job, dropping out of high school at age sixteen to work at an
underground station near his home in La Cañada, California. He scored a few DJ
gigs and married a young woman who’d called one night to request Leonard Cohen’s
“Suzanne.” Naturally, they divorced. But when he was nineteen, less than a year
after they’d split up, Dahl sat in his Subaru in front of her house, waiting all
night for her to come out. This was the 1970s, so rather than having him
arrested for stalking, she used personal connections to land him a morning-show
job at a struggling station as far away as possible, in Detroit.
Almost overnight, Dahl turned his new station’s ratings around. Big-time Chicago
rock stations came calling, and Dahl accepted a job at WDAI, where he worked
until it abruptly switched formats in 1978, dropping Led Zeppelin and the
Rolling Stones and transforming into “Disco ‘DAI.” Pictures of the Village
People started appearing in its promo ads. Dahl, a rock guy, had no choice but
to quit. He accepted a morning-show job at another Chicago rock station, WLUP.
“I was just mad at my previous employer,” the now-white-haired,
still-Hawaiian-shirt-wearing Dahl says. “And Midwesterners didn’t want that
intimidating [disco] lifestyle shoved down their throats.” The antidisco
campaign became the centerpiece of Dahl’s morning show with cohost Garry Meier.
They invited listeners to call in with their most hated disco songs; after
airing a snippet, Dahl and Meier would drag the needle across the record and
queue the sound of an explosion. The show was wildly popular. When the duo
offered membership cards to a kill-disco organization, ten thousand listeners
called the station within a week to sign up. Dahl took the show on the road,
packing a suburban Chicago nightclub with a “death to disco” rally. But what was
so intimidating about people dancing in nightclubs? Why did rock fans in Chicago
hate disco so much?
Because it sucked. That’s why.
The songs, the dancing, the roller-skating, the disco balls, the heavy makeup – it
was all so massive, so goofy, and over the top. Andy Warhol, Studio 54,
Skatetown, USA, “Disco Duck” – people were getting sick of this stuff. Besides,
in order to make it with a lady, during the disco craze, a guy had to learn how
to dance. And wear a fancy suit! It was an outrage. (It’s also possible these
rock fans hated disco because black and gay people liked it, although nobody
talked about that in public.) Whatever the reason, the backlash was inevitable.
Disco needed to be destroyed, and Dahl appointed himself the pied piper for this
enraged crowd. He found a compatriot in twenty-eight-year-old Mike Veeck, a
failed rock guitarist. “I loathed disco,” Veeck said later.
Veeck happened to have an excellent forum for what would become the decisive
event in Dahl’s campaign: Comiskey Park, home of the Chicago White Sox. He was
the son of then-Sox owner Bill Veeck, a seventy-five-year-old baseball legend.
(When he owned the Cleveland Indians, the elder Veeck made Larry Doby the first
black player in the American League.) With his father’s permission, Mike Veeck
and Dahl hatched a plan. On July 12, 1979, the White Sox were to play a night
doubleheader against the Detroit Tigers at Comiskey. In the days leading up to
the game, Dahl announced on the air that White Sox fans could enter the park for
just 98 cents if they brought a disco record. Sister Sledge, Bee Gees, “I Will
Survive” – it didn’t matter. Everything would be obliterated.
The Sox averaged sixteen thousand fans at their home games that year, and they
expected a few thousand people more than usual because of Dahl’s stunt. They
were completely unprepared for the army of fiftynine thousand fans who showed up
at the first game, carrying stacks of Bee Gees albums in their arms. Another
fifteen thousand spilled along the surrounding South Side streets. They wore Led
Zeppelin and Black Sabbath T-shirts, smashed bottles on the ground, smoked
Godknows-what and chanted their almighty rallying cry: “Disco sucks!” In the
stands, sharp-edged records flew like Frisbees. The players were clearly
unsettled. The Tigers’ Ron LeFlore wore his batting helmet in center field
during the first game.
Dahl was surprised. And nervous. He had prepared for a monumental failure, not
thousands of minions waiting for him to lead. Wearing a green army helmet the
size of a fishbowl and a matching jacket with wide lapels, looking like a hippie
Colonel Klink, Dahl arrived in center field in a military Jeep between the two
games.
“I didn’t think that anyone would even show up,” Dahl says today. The Sox
fireworks crew had rigged crates of records to explode with dynamite. He managed
a few incomprehensible screams and his best anti-disco catchphrase from the
radio (borrowed from a popular Second City TV sketch of the time): “That blowed
up real good!” It worked. Unwittingly, he rallied ten thousand fans to storm the
field, climbing down the foul poles and turning the record explosion in center
field into a raging bonfire. Sox officials hesitated to call in the cops for
fear of stirring things up even further. They allowed fans to linger, shredding
the dirt and turf beyond recognition. The senior Veeck and legendary baseball
announcer Harry Caray impotently attempted to exhort people back to their seats
over the loudspeaker. For thirty-seven minutes, Sox fans, disco haters, and
all-purpose rabble-rousers united in a massive jamboree of public destruction.
One such Sox fan was a twenty-one-year-old South Sider who’d been sitting in the
upper deck with six or seven of his friends from the neighborhood. One by one,
they jumped over the barrier, then climbed fifteen feet down to the field. They
were delighted to discover they could slide unmolested into third base and
casually pick up bats and other paraphernalia their favorite players had left
behind. The man was Michael Clarke Duncan, a stockroom employee at the Carson
Pirie Scott department store downtown. You may recognize the name: He later
broke into Hollywood and earned an Oscar nomination for his work as the hulking,
doomed prisoner in The Green Mile, costarring Tom Hanks. None of the many TV
newsclips of the scene captures Duncan, which is surprising, given that he stood
6’5″, wore a huge Afro, and was one of the few black people on the field.
Duncan was also perhaps the only disco fan on the Comiskey field that night. “I
loved disco music back then!” recalls Duncan, now fiftyone, a veteran of more
than seventy movies, including The Island and Sin City. “I had the
four-inch-wide shoes, the belt buckle, the tight pants with no pockets.” He’d
been to tons of all-night-dancing clubs, and his sister often let him borrow her
stacks of Donna Summer records.
“After Steve Dahl did that, nobody wanted to wear the platform shoes in the
following weeks. Nobody wanted to wear the bellbottoms,” Duncan says. “People
were like, ‘Ah, that’s getting kind of old now, things are kind of changing.'”
Dahl, who went to work the next morning expecting to be fired, wound up a bigger
celebrity than ever. The week of the demolition, July 8 to 14, Chic’s “Good
Times” hit the Top 10 – one of six disco songs to do so. On August 18, three
disco singles were in the Top 10. By September 22, the number dropped to zero.
“It seemed pretty immediate. Bars that had gone disco immediately seemed to turn
back into rock ‘n’ roll clubs. Live music began to thrive again,” Dahl says.
“All I know is that the Bee Gees and KC, of KC and the Sunshine Band, are still
mad at me.”
Disco sucks! Disco sucks!
It was the new mantra of white America. As a thirteen-year-old suburbanWho fan,
I myself carried a gold D.R.E.A.D. card, which stoodfor Detroit Rock-and-rollers
Engaged in the Abolition of Disco. Thelocal rock station, WRIF-FM, gave them out
at concerts. My olderbrother, a station intern, brought them home by the
boxload. Backthen, they were hard-to-find totems of coolness. I must have
ownedthree hundred of the damn things, not counting the fifty or so I gave outto
kids on the block who suddenly wanted to be my best friends.
Almost thirty years later, the idea of furiously hating disco seems ridiculous.
I dumped my D.R.E.A.D. cards in the trash during college, and I now hear Donna
Summer and Chic as links in the musical chain between early-’70s funk and soul
and the beginnings of rap music. Vicki Sue Robinson’s “Turn the Beat Around”?
Hot Chocolate’s “You Sexy Thing”? It’s incredible to me that rock fans would
actually riot for the right to hear REO Speedwagon and Foreigner on their local
airwaves instead. Anyway, disco’s grooves never really died, they just went
underground, in the form of house music and other big-city warehouse happenings
of the early ’80s. (That’s not to mention every wedding in the universe,
including my own, where the Village People’s “Y.M.C.A.” has been a dance-floor
prerequisite.) Steve “Silk” Hurley, who as a high school DJ was souping up
Chicago dances at the time of Dahl’s demolition, remembers wanting to track down
the records that hadn’t blown up real good. “Most DJs never stopped,” says
Hurley, a Grammywinning remixer and veteran DJ. “It didn’t affect me at all. I
thought it was a joke.”
But in 1979, disco had rammed headlong into the wall of the brick house. “People
were trying to murder it,” says Gloria Gaynor, who had the misfortune of
peaking, with “I Will Survive,” in the year of the backlash. “Someone was
saying, ‘I’m bringing in rock acts and every time I try to promote my record
they’re putting Gloria Gaynor or Donna Summer in my slot. And this sucks. Disco
sucks.’ I began to think it was an economic decision.”
The reason disco died was economic, but it wasn’t really a decision. As always,
record labels went where the sales were, and for much of the late 1970s, that
was disco. Soon, the boom made executives complacent when they should have been
scouting for new talent. “The labels should have lost more money. They should
have fucking closed for what they did,” says Nicky Siano, who used to DJ in drag
as two thousand dancers writhed all night at his influential The Gallery club in
New York City. “Between 1974 and 1977, any record that had the word disco on it
would just sell. People didn’t have to hear it. They just took it and bought it.
When the record companies saw that happening, they put any old piece of garbage
in that wrapper. People started getting burnt, and they got really pissed off.
And they stopped buying.”
When disco fans stopped buying, record stores around the United States suddenly
found themselves inundated with millions of unwanted LPs. The stores had to
return them to the labels. It was a recipe for music-business disaster, and in
1979, labels started to crash. Sales plummeted that year by almost 11 percent
after more than a decade of growth. The first to go down, in spectacular
fashion, was over-the-top Casablanca Records.
Casablanca had been founded six years earlier by Neil Bogart, who had an ear for
fads and a gift for burning through a lot of money. Born Neil Bogatz, he was a
postal worker’s son who learned show business by singing and dancing in the
Catskills. His first industry job was ad salesman for the trade journal Cash
Box, and by the end of the ’60s, he’d worked his way up to president of a new
label, Buddah Records. In its first year, Buddah made $5.6 million, thanks to
bubblegum hits like the Ohio Express’s “Yummy, Yummy, Yummy” and the 1910 Fruit
Gum Company’s “Indian Giver.”
Bogart’s specialty was elaborate, shameless promotions – some worked and some
imploded. While at Buddah, he tailed a prominent radio program director through
the streets of New York City in a rented limousine, using a loudspeaker on top
of the car to blast the names of his acts. He also signed one of the most unique
recording acts of 1969, the New York Mets, and dragged the entire team, many of
them drunk, into the studio for an all-night session after they won the World
Series. Buddah managed to release this album the day of the city’s ticker-tape
parade for the Miracle Mets, and an album of gimmick songs like a version of the
Damn Yankees show tune “You Gotta Have Heart” sold nearly 1.3 million copies.
Bogart also botched a new act, Elephant’s Memory, a rock band that would later
back John Lennon during his politically active phase in the early 1970s. Bogart
surrounded the band at one showcase with inflatable elephants and various
barnyard animals, and was surprised when they drew derision from the crowd.
Bogart flirted with bankruptcy until the mid-1970s, when he met Italian producer
Giorgio Moroder, who introduced him to a gospelturned-disco singer named Donna
Summer. With singles like Summer’s “Love to Love You Baby,” Casablanca rode the
disco boom hard, going platinum on just about every record it threw into the
marketplace. But more than songs or sales, Casablanca was legendary for its
excesses. Quaalude dealing was rampant, as were elaborate food fights at the
fancy restaurant across the street. Bogart equipped all fourteen of its
executives with brand-new Mercedeses. He presented Donna Summer, when she flew
from Germany to New York to promote her Love to Love You Baby album, with a
life-size cake that looked exactly like her. It was even the same size. The
cake, according to Fredric Dannen’s book Hit Men, took two seats in a
cross-country airplane and a freezer ambulance to get to Summer’s performance at
the Penta discotheque in New York. The company’s executives were out of their
minds. Promo man Danny Davis, who didn’t do drugs of any kind, famously recalled
talking to a radio programmer on the phone while a colleague trashed the stuff
on his desk with a golf club, then lit the desk on fire.
“Almost anything could have happened at Casablanca,” says Bill Aucoin, who
managed Casablanca’s most famous rock act, Kis, in those early days. “The first
offices were a converted home with a pool house. If you went to the pool house
at any time, day or night, as a record promoter or a DJ, you probably could get
laid at any moment.”
“[The office] was being used for nonsocial purposes,” is David Braun’s euphemism
of choice. He would know. A veteran music business attorney who represented Bob
Dylan and Michael Jackson, Braun moved from Los Angeles to New York to become
president of PolyGram Records in 1981. PolyGram had purchased half of Casablanca
for $10 million in 1977, thinking the disco hits would continue. Unfortunately
for the label, Summer broke her contract and fled to industry mogul David
Geffen’s new record company. KISS’s hits dried up – for a while. New acts like
over-the-top rock band Angel, whose members would emerge from pods on stage,
possibly inspiring a key scene in This Is Spinal Tap, never caught on. Then
there was the tricky little matter of Casablanca executives shipping hundreds of
thousands of records at a time, with little regard for public demand, and being
unprepared when stores returned them. (This problem was common in the industry.)
And as Steve Dahl’s demolition suggested, the public suddenly wasn’t quite as
enamored of disco as it used to be. Braun had to clean up Bogart’s $30 million
mess. These missteps almost killed PolyGram Records, whose market share had
jumped from 5 percent to 20 percent in the disco era. For a few years, it had
been the world’s largest record label.
Casablanca imploded, and so did the industry. (And so did Bogart, who died in
1982 at age 38 of cancer.) Although record companies’ sales had climbed from
just under $1 billion a year in 1959 to a Saturday Night Fever-fueled record of
$4.1 billion in 1978, the antidisco backlash lingered from 1979 to 1982. CBS
Records laid off two thousand employees and drastically cut its artist roster
and budgets. Susan Blond, a publicity executive at CBS-owned Epic Records, says
the company lost three hundred employees on her first day. Her staff eventually
disappeared entirely. Blond’s boss, CBS’ flamboyant attack-dog chairman, Walter
Yetnikoff, declared the industry “in the intensive care ward.”
(Continues…)
Excerpted from Appetite for Self-Destruction
by Steve Knopper
Copyright © 2009 by Steve Knopper.
Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Free Press
Copyright © 2009
Steve Knopper
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4165-5215-4
