EXTRA: 39 years, really?

It has been 39 years to the date that either Chicago White Sox fans allowed a catastrophe to occur in between games of a double-header against the Detroit Tigers. Or else outspoken broadcaster/former ballplayer Jimmy Piersall showed himself to be the ultimate crotchety old man.

We're talking Disco Demolition, when local broadcaster Steve Dahl made his rep by leading the anti-disco music rally (dressed in a pseudo-military uniform as a "general" in the war against bad music) that resulted in some 2,800 fans storming the field and causing damage, while many others remained in their seats and wondered what kind of "dope" these young kids were smoking.

I STILL GET a kick out of watching the WSNS-TV broadcast of the game, with Piersall attempting to narrate what was happening on the field (along with the late baseball writer Bill Gleason of the Chicago Sun-Times), while also showing his contempt.

"This is the sickest sight I've seen in a ballpark in my life," Piersall said. "This garbage of destroying a record has turned into a fiasco."

While many of those who have memories of storming the field talk of how liberating an experience it was.

We even got to hear Piersall go into a diatribe that makes him sound like he was a Trump-ite, some four decades before it was fashionable to be so.

"WE HAVE BECOME a nation of followers, we're insecure. We follow someone who's a jerk," he said, while adding he didn't understand the appeal of the event. "I'd rather go swimming, or do a lot of other things than stand around on a baseball field."

Some 39 years later, people still recall the event -- and some people awash in Chicago Cubbiness try to use it to detract from the White Sox.

Which makes me think Gleason may also have missed the point when he said, "This is not a scene I want to remember."

Because it is one that many of us will never forget. Including Major League Baseball itself. Because would anybody be remembering a 39-year-old game between the two teams that finished in fifth place in their respective American League divisions for any other reason?

  -30-

A Christian takeover of the Loop?

I remember being a pre-teenaged kid back in the early days of WLUP-FM when it was at its late ‘70s peak – when Steve Dahl was a young smartass rather than his cranky aged self and before he tried turning Comiskey Park into a funeral pyre for bad music.

Back in the days when Lorelei’s lips gave many a 12-year-old boy a wet dream.

AND BACK WHEN “the Loop’s” listenership would have been people inclined to listen to “the Devil’s music” of hard rock ‘n’ roll!

So what should we think of the fact that the radio station formally brought its programming to an end this week, and on Saturday will officially be taken over by a company that desires to turn the 97.9 FM radio frequency into one that broadcasts Christian-themed programming.

Is this The Lord himself trying to purify a radio frequency that the hard-core ideologue fanatics would say for four decades has given Chicago various forms of Satan’s tunes?

Is it truly some sort of bad irony that the station would become Christian? With Dahl himself publicly suggesting that the final tune he thinks should be played on the station before it becomes religious in them is “Highway to Hell.”

AS THOUGH WE really need another playing of AC/DC before the new owners turn it into a sister station of Arlington Heights-based WCLR (The Educational Media Foundation now owns both, along with 342 others across the country)!

Should one of these t-shirts go on exhibit at the Chicago History Museum?

Personally, I think too much is made of this theme. The reality is that the radio business is ever evolving and changing. The fact that the WLUP format and image survived from 1978 to the present means it had a long run.

One much longer than many other radio stations can even dream of having.

For all the crackpots who are eager to say WLUP ultimately failed, I’d say its successes put it at a level that make it an image permanently a part of Chicago. Although I think that now-unemployed broadcaster Mancow Muller overstates his significance when he says he can now go off to broadcast retirement like past Chicago iconic figures like Ray Rayner and Bozo the Clown.

One-time WLUP competitor also now has religious image

ACTUALLY, WHAT THE WLUP situation makes me recall is another hard-rock radio station of my Junior High school years – the old WMET-FM. I can remember being a 13-year-old listening to my fellow students quarrel over which station was better.

WMET ceased to exist in Chicago decades ago. The call letters are now used by a Washington, D.C.-area radio station that is part of the Guadalupe Radio Network.

As in it offers up programming meant to appeal specifically to Catholics. The two rockin’ images of the late ‘70s on the radio are now in the hands of people determined to serve God.

I still remember when I did a stint in college in Washington in the mid-1980s and being shocked to hear the “MET” call letters in the use of the Lord. Even though none of my non-Chicago counterparts in D.C. could appreciate the irony.

From the Beatles to Rush (as in Limbaugh)

I MUST CONFESS to not having actually listened to “The Loop” in years. I don’t doubt the people writing broadcast eulogies who say the station reached its peak in the late ‘70s and failed to adapt to the changing times.

But the idea of “the Loop” going religious isn’t the biggest abomination that could have occurred.

That, in my opinion, occurred many years ago when the one-time “Music Radio” WLS-AM that gave us Top 40 rock ‘n’ roll with its “Silver Dollar Surveys” of the top records decided to become a serious talk radio station.

The concept of Rush (as in Limbaugh, not Geddy Lee) filling the Chicago airwaves’ same frequency that once gave us Larry Lujack (and sidekick ‘Lil’ Tommy Edwards)? That’s more abhorrent than any programming change taking place now at “98 FM.”

  -30-

The Bee Gees, or Cheap Trick? They both want to make me wretch musically

I was not at Comiskey Park 30 years ago today, so I don’t know firsthand how out-of-control the crowd truly got in between games of a scheduled doubleheader between two ball clubs playing their way through dreadful seasons.

I do remember the over-the-top coverage the event warranted that night on the late night newscasts. Every single news program at 10 p.m. told the tale of teenagers running amok due to disco. The images I remember were on Channel 7, which showed footage of fires being lit on the playing field and a shot of people climbing over the wall behind the center field scoreboard to sneak their way into the South Side stadium.

THERE’S NO DOUBT about it.

The people who showed up at Comiskey Park 30 years ago tonight as part of the White Sox’ attempt to leach off of the radio newcomer Steve Dahl’s growing popularity behaved badly. Even the hard-core of Sox fandom will agree.

Anyone who’s ever watched the video footage shot that night will have to agree that one of the most poignant sights was that of Sox fans in the stands cheering on the Chicago Police (while organist Nancy Faust played the chorus to the “Na, Na, Hey, Hey, goodbye” song recorded by Steam) when they took to the playing field to clear it of the teenage buffoons who were a part of Dahl’s war against bad music. The events of 30 years ago tonight wound up overshadowing the White Sox' on-field activity, which is good in the sense that people don't remember a ball club that went 73-87 and finished in 5th place in the American League west division.

This was only 11 years after the 1968 Democratic National Convention and its protests in Chicago that resulted in the sight of Chicago cops misbehaving in Grant Park. I have always wondered if there were any Chicago police officers who could claim to have been in Grant Park in ’68 and Comiskey Park in ’79.

SO WHAT TENDS to make White Sox fans defensive about the night is the idea that all of us ought to be tainted by the acts of a few meatheads who probably haven’t been to a ballgame since. (I’d joke that they’re too stoned to find the stadium, except that drug addiction is about as sad a situation as alcoholism – Dean Martin’s routines set aside).

Disco Demolition Night (as the Steve Dahl stunt was billed) is spewing various written debates these days about how homophobic the event was. It’s defenders are responding that the real victim are the lower classes (since only “rich” people theoretically could afford to get into the whole disco music scene that was the musical fad of 1977 and was pretty much dying out by 1979).

I have no problem thinking of the people who got all worked up over disco music as being buffoons. I remember being surrounded by many of them back in the day.

Back three decades ago, I was making the transition from junior to senior high school. I can remember a time when the standard “uniform” of the day was jeans and some sort of rock ‘n’ roll t-shirt.

REO SPEEDWAGON. LED Zeppelin. Aerosmith. Those were some of the bands whose logos on t-shirts were the most popular. But another popular shirt were those black with white letters depicting the logo of WLUP. “The Loop. FM 98” (actually, it was 97.9). I can remember being surrounded by the people who thought Steve Dahl was a genius, even before Disco Demolition.

So I know firsthand that the people who want to lambaste the whole anti-disco movement as somehow anti-gay or bigoted aren’t totally absurd. It wasn’t a tolerant crowd that used to enjoy this scene that thought bands such as Styx were somehow musically immortal.

It was one that would criticize anything it disapproved of as being “gay” (because, after all, what could be more insulting than that?).

But there also was the sense that disco became popular (instead of just something played in gay bars) when white people took it on. And in that context, it became something that was used as a way to further isolate those who weren’t a part of their clique.

IT’S TOO BAD that the “have-nots” of this issue took on raucous heavy metal music as the symbol of their cause, in part because it was the anti-disco of a musical beat.

So, if I remember much of the disco “debate” as being between differing cliques of white people, rather than Anglos versus “other” people, then so be it.

So do I remember the people who stormed the field at Comiskey Park as being a batch of lunkheads? Yes.

But they were probably no more pathetic than those people who went out to see the film “Saturday Night Fever,” and became so enamored with the image of “Tony Manero” that they went out and blew all their money on a white suit that they haven’t been able to wear in decades and probably shudder whenever they see the old pictures of themselves while wearing it.

BESIDES, THERE’S ALSO the fact that disco music was purely a dance beat. It had no other purpose. It couldn’t be listened to for pleasure, nor was it something that musicians of any true talent would devote years of their lives to perfecting their skills. And when it comes to dance music, there are many other forms that are preferable.

So when it comes to the eternal question, “Does Disco Suck?,” I’d have to say, “Yes, but no more so than Cheap Trick.”

-30-

EDITOR’S NOTES: Thanks to YouTube, one can watch bootleg video of the Chicago newscasts (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MpQfCcsqQ0E) from 30 years ago tonight.

It has been five years (http://www.discodemolition.com/) since the release of a documentary that tried to put Disco Demolition into its proper perspective.

EXTRA: From 3-1, to 6-4 at final

Steve Dahl may be an unemployed radio host these days (http://twitter.com/SteveDahlShow), but he has a possible point about Wrigley Field. Either that, or the Red Wings are just a better team.

Aside from that observation, I stand by my previously posted commentary about Thursday’s game.

-30-

EDITOR’S NOTES: Despite the hype, Thursday’s game is nothing more than a (http://www.chicagotribune.com/sports/chi-090101-chicago-blackhawks-winter-classic,0,2404554.story) regular-season loss (http://www.suntimes.com/sports/hockey/blackhawks/1357878,CST-SPT-hawk01.article) from which the Blackhawks will (hopefully) soon rebound.

One thing I’ll say for the Chicago Blackhawks; they have the best theme song of any (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hPBw45ETm7o) Chicago sports franchise – even better than “Bear Down, Chicago Bears.”