In the 1989 film Dead
Poets’ Society, English teacher John Keating, played by Robin Williams,
utters the line, “How can you describe poetry like American Bandstand”?
‘I like Byron. I give him a 42 but I can’t dance to it.’” The film
was set in 1959, when American Bandstand was where many teenagers of the
day tuned in to catch the newest musicians and records. The “I give him a
42” line referred to the show’s vaunted Rate-a-Record segment, when host Dick
Clark would ask two teenagers in the audience to rate two records on a scale of
35 to 98, and to then justify the ratings they gave. Clark would then
average the scores. When the teenagers
gave their justifications for the scores, they would try to sum things up
neatly for the TV cameras, so there was a tendency to give stock phrases. “It’s got a good beat and you can dance to
it” became one of the famous phrases associated with the show. (It’s
likely that no teenager ever said such a thing on American Bandstand,
but it sounded like something one might say, so what’s likely an apocryphal
comment acquired its dubious infamy.)
Williams’ Keating was
making an analogy: literature is going to touch you or it isn’t, and you can’t
give a simple ranking system that will apply to everyone equally. Byron
might stir one person’s soul, and it might fall flat for someone else. Bandstand’s Rate-a-Record system does
not apply to the Romantic poets. But Keating does something else that
might be easier to miss. By dredging up
that “I can’t dance to it” line, he trivializes music with a rapid, danceable
beat, suggesting that it’s ephemeral, that it’s insufficiently weighty. Dead
Poets’ Society doesn’t focus on this, but this sentiment was very real, and
a growing one.
American Bandstand, circa 1960.
What that line refers to
is the growing desire for music to mean something. There was a desire for
authenticity, for songs to tell a story, to express something important.
Such songs were not new. Brother, Can
You Spare a Dime? taps into the desperation people felt during the Great
Depression; John Brown’s Body is a powerful anthem celebrating the cause
of the Abolitionists in the 1850s. And throughout much of the 20th
century, Woody Guthrie sang folk songs celebrating the American worker and
exploring the hard times that many people struggled through from the Dust Bowl
into the Cold War. Bob Dylan intended to pick up where Guthrie left off,
with songs that placed a greater premium on lyrics than on meter, or even on
the tune. People were no longer hanging
on the latest book of poems from Byron or Tennyson or Wordsworth; they wanted
the latest record from the singer-songwriter, Dylan and Donovan and Joni
Mitchell and Judee Sill and many others. The poets of the 1960s gave us
lyrics, and by the time the dust settled, the word “lyrics” could no longer be
thought of without music. Turn on top 40
radio in 1970 and you’ll hear gritty, folky caterwauling, or blues-infused hard
rock. This new sound was Woody Guthrie’s
legacy. Kids could rock, but who danced
anymore?
Dance music never really
went away, but it did suffer. For a while in the 50s and 60s, there was a
mania to identify the latest dance that all the kids were doing. The
twist? The mashed potato? The frug?
Eh… just move while the music’s playing.
Leave the waltzing and the jitterbugging to your parents.
That wasn’t good enough
for everyone, though. There were still plenty of folks who liked to
dance, and in some alternative reality that didn’t get the same attention from
the radio deejays, dance music continued to evolve into something else.
Pulling elements from soul music, funk, pop and salsa, a reaction to folk rock,
hard rock and progressive rock developed quietly: disco was born.
In the 1970s, disco
burst into the popular consciousness. The music was more about the
beat. No one was really trying to change
the world with their lyrics; it was all about having a good time. Disco
clubs grew in popularity around the United States and around the world. One could argue that rock has largely
American roots, but the development of disco was truly international.
For some reason, disco
inspired a certain resentment among rock fans. Maybe it was because
dancing had gone out of style. Maybe it
was because the smoother, more rhythmic sound was just too different from the
driving, more abrasive rock music. Or maybe it was because the disco
scene attracted gays and minorities more than rock did, and some rock fans felt
threatened. Whatever was going on, it
had to be more than just a matter of preferring Led Zeppelin IV to the Saturday
Night Fever soundtrack.
Disco clubs are known
for outlandish clothes. The iconic white disco suit worn by John Travolta
in the film Saturday Night Fever is the first thing many people think of
when they remember this era, but all sorts of bright, loud colors on polyester
were the uniform of the disco club-going peacock.
Menswear from the J.C. Penney catalog, 1973.
Rock fans eventually
felt the need to push back, for some reason. T-shirts and bumper stickers
announcing “Disco sucks” enjoyed a certain popularity. Disco, too,
enjoyed a lot more airplay in the late 1970s after it hit the mainstream of
American culture. Americans have always risen when their country needed
them, or when they thought their country needed them; it never made much
difference. It was time to kill disco.
The movement to kill
disco was spearheaded by Steve Dahl, a shock jock in Chicago who was famous for
his on-air anti-disco rants. Dahl was very popular, and was able to whip
up a good number of his listeners into a frenzy, and he channeled that energy
to take disco down. Dahl got together with his station, WLUP-FM, and the
Chicago White Sox for a special promotion he dubbed Disco Demolition
Night. On July 12, 1979, the White Sox
were playing a double-header against the Detroit Tigers at home, in Comiskey
Park. Anyone who came to the game with a disco record could get in for
the special admission price of 98¢.
Then, between the two games, the disco records would be collected,
stacked in the middle of the field, and blown up.
It sounded like it would
be a good promotion for the baseball team. White Sox management said they
could normally expect a crowd of about 15,000 for a game like this, but
expected Disco Demolition Night to grow that number to 20,000. As it
turned out, approximately 50,000 people showed up to the game, most of them
bringing disco records. This was far
more than could be collected and demolished, so eventually the promoters
stopped collecting them. Many of the uncollected records wound up being
thrown like frisbees in the crowded stadium, causing injuries to people hit
with the flying vinyl. The White Sox had
hired enough security to handle a crowd as large as 35,000. The gates
were closed when the stadium hit its capacity of 44,492, but people kept
sneaking in anyway.
The records started
flying during the first game (which Detroit won 4-1). Players from both
teams kept their helmets on at all times to protect themselves from flying
records. Some of them came in at enough velocity to lodge themselves in
the dirt on the field, so the players were rightly nervous about injury.
Some of the uncollected records were destroyed in bonfires created by attendees
in the stands. Besides the reek of
burning vinyl, the smell of marijuana was everywhere. Mike Veeck, the son
of the White Sox’ owner Bill Veeck, observed of the attendees, “This is the
Woodstock they never had.” It was a
violent, scary Woodstock, with a very different attitude toward peace and
music.
At 8:40 PM, Dahl’s voice
came over the loudspeaker, promising, “We’re gonna blow up them records
reeeeeealll gooooood!” Sure enough, they did. A large box full of disco records and rigged
with explosives was placed in the middle of the ballfield, and blown up, as
promised. When this happened, attendees rushed the field, and wouldn’t
leave. It’s estimated there were between
5,000 and 7,000 people on the field. The
teams barricaded themselves in the locker rooms while people outside made more
bonfires of records, tore up the field, and stole the bases. Announcer
Harry Caray pleaded with them to return to their seats, to leave the field, but
to no avail. Holy cow.
They wouldn’t leave
until they were finally dispersed by riot police at a little after 9:00 PM, to
the applause of the fans who expected to be able to see the second game.
Most of them fled upon seeing the police arrive. In the end, 39 people were arrested and
charged with disorderly conduct. The
field had been torn up so badly that it was impossible to play the next
game. The White Sox were forced to forfeit the game to the Tigers.
Disco Demolition Night at Comiskey Park, July 12, 1979.
The next day Dahl
returned to work at WLUP, claiming that everything “went wonderfully”, and
chided “the few” attendees who’d gotten out of hand. Mike Veeck, who was
responsible for putting the promotion together, was out of a job the next year
when his father sold the team. As to
disco… well, it declined. And it disappeared—in America, at least. Sort of.
It’s more like it went underground for a while, and then came roaring
back. It’s seen revivals, and today,
disco elements remain part of popular music worldwide. You probably won’t
see anyone strutting around in a white disco suit, though. Some trends just aren’t coming back.
John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever, 1977
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