Video: New Disco Demolition Footage Shows The Madness In Real Time

By Stephen Gossett in Arts & Entertainment on Sep 20, 2016 6:16PM

Thanks to some newly uploaded footage on YouTube, one of the most notorious events in Chicago music and sports history can be relived in all its raw, unfiltered original form.

The crazy legend of Disco Demolition has grown more and more larger than life since the fateful events of July 12, 1979. On that infamous night, a perfectly good doubleheader between two middling baseball teams went flying out a control thanks to local novelty DJ Steve Dahl. He worked up a gimmick that allowed fans to get into the Chicago White Sox home games for just 98 cents and a disco record; then blew up all that vinyl in a crate after the first game, sending the disco-hating crowd of wild-eyed hesher rock kids into a fit of pandemonium.

The controversy only magnified as time went on, as charges of racism and homophobia were lobbed at the event. When we spoke with Dahl (and his most vocal critic) in July, he maintained that such a perspective is revisionist history.

We’d never call critical and contextual analysis “baggage,” but it’s no doubt useful to have this document available in the raw.

The clip—which consists mainly of the WSN Channel 44 broadcast of the game and much of the aftermath—doesn’t quite contain everything from that night (there are some regrettable edits and moments of static). But it’s the closest you’re likely to see. Get to it before MLB notices and comes ceasing and desisting.

And for a perfect companion piece, the same user who uploaded the footage, on Sunday, also added a short documentary about 10 Cent Beer Night, which went down (the tubes) in Cleveland in 1974.

[H/T Slate]