EXTRA: Will Disco Demolition really sell Buona Beef more sandwiches?

Thursday is the day (the night, specifically) that the Chicago White Sox will be using 40-year-old memories of exploding records and running amok on the Comiskey Park turn to try to attract fans to the old ball game.

The game against the New York Yankees is having a t-shirt giveaway -- 10,000 shirts remembering the events of July 12, 1979 when the White Sox bolstered their attendance for a double-header with the Detroit Tigers by letting people into the ballpark for 98 cents IF they brought a disco record to be blown to smithereens.

THE PROMOTION WOUND up being too successful. The anticipated crowd of some 20,000 turned out to be in excess of stadium capacity, with another 20,000 or so people stuck outside trying to figure out a way to sneak in.

And as we all remember, all the burn-outs who wanted to rock 'n' roll all night and rage against the evils of disco music (mostly because they couldn't dance) wound up losing control, storming the field, causing significant damage to the playing field, and have many people to this day ranting and raging about how "stoned" all those kids must have been.

The event is considered something significant in White Sox history -- which is why the team says it went ahead with using the 40-year-old event as a reason to celebrate.

The giveaway

Although I wonder just how many sandwiches Buona Beef (the sponsor of Thursday's event who paid for all the t-shirts being given away) will actually wind up selling as a result of the event?

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EDITOR'S NOTE: Included is a YouTube recording of that ballgame, The 2-hour, 34-minute mark is the key point where the records blow up, while 2-hours, 39 minutes is where the "fans" take over, and where broadcaster Jimmy Piersall starts denouncing the crowd as a batch of followers.

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.”

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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.

Perspective on disco era explains much

Rod Blagojevich is nine years older than I am, and it shows in the way we remember our young years.

For the most interesting snippet I picked up on when hearing how Blagojevich was interviewed at the Los Angeles airport by the program TMZ was when our now-impeached governor said, “I came of age in the disco era.”

OF COURSE, WHAT the television program was trying to do was get Blagojevich to submit to a semi-serious interview about his hair (which got blown all out of shape when Blagojevich performed for promos for a reality television program that he may still be involved with – even if a federal judge won’t let him leave the country to perform in).

Our now-former governor downplayed the idea that he spent endless hours primping his pompadour into a specific shape – “It’s towel dry and I just comb it and I’m on my way,” is how he described his hair care routine.

Yet I still can’t get my mind around the idea of Blagojevich taking pride in coming of age in the 1970s “when the brush was like an extension of your arm.” Too many of us remember the gaudy polyester, tacky television and other pop culture nits (although personally, I always thought the 1980s were a more trivial-looking decade).

Admittedly, Blagojevich is not wrong.

HE WOULD HAVE just turned 21 when the film “Saturday Night Fever” was the rage at the movie theaters (instead of filler for cable television channels). I could picture the guy who grew into something of an Elvis buff wishing he could be John Travolta – and not the “Vinnie Barbarino” version, but the “Tony Manero” one.

Couldn’t you just see a youthful Milorod in a white suit trying to work the dance floor, putting his take of the moves on various women? A part of me envisions Rod and Rob (his brother) hitting the discos together, trying to be suave but really coming off as little more than a real-life take on the Festrunk Brothers.

You remember, the Saturday Night Live characters played by Steve Martin and Dan Aykroyd who were supposedly from Czechoslovakia and were always trying to hit on “the foxes” by being “wild and crazy guys” – but were really a couple of nerdy nitwits.

Of course, none of these women would have been the future Patti Blagojevich. She would only have been 11 around this time.

BUT WHEN ONE considers that moment in time, perhaps it is no mystery why he turned out the way he did.

By comparison, I was only 12 when Saturday Night Live was all the rage (and my aunt Christina insisted it was a wonderful film – I watch it now merely as a period piece of the late ‘70’s, nothing more). I even remember the idea in 1977 that disco music was supposed to be the hot trend – although it was more like the hot fad, so ridiculously out-of-date by Jan. 1, 1978.

I get the feeling that if I had met Blagojevich back in ’77, I wouldn’t have been too impressed with him. Anybody who cites his habits from back then to justify combing his hair a lot would have literally been a real-life Tony Manero (who in the film has a scene where he gets upset that his father hits his hair to try to emphasize a point).

“I spend a lot of time on my hair,” Manero said. “Don’t hit my hair.”

DID THE BLAGOJEVICH family around that same era have to experience the sight and sound of Rod doing his Manero impersonation of that same line?

Perhaps this attitude also helps to explain just why Blagojevich turned into that most pathetic of people – a fan of the Chicago Cubs.

The cross-town White Sox, after all, are the team that once had the “Disco Demolition Night,” where on a June evening in 1979 they filled a bin with vinyl records and caused an explosion – blowing shards of wrecked musical recordings all over the playing field and instigating a mini-riot that caused the Detroit Tigers to get one extra victory that season (the White Sox had to forfeit a game).

To this day, some people try to claim that the mere thought of holding such a promotion is somehow offensive, and that White Sox fans should be looked down upon for being the kind of people who would encourage the heavy metal meatheads of that era to think their nasty thoughts about disco music (which is good for a couple of moments of dance, but little else).

AS I WRITE this commentary, a mental picture pops into my head of a then-22-year-old Blagojevich being in the stands at Comiskey Park (I don’t think he really was, but imagine this with me).

When the record bin explodes after a youthful Steve Dahl got the crowd worked up into a frenzy, Blagojevich would have been among the throngs that charged out of the stands and onto the playing field.

But instead of running around like a drug-induced doofus, Blagojevich would have been the one trying with one hand to pick up shards of disco records in an attempt to “protect” the music. His other hand, of course, would have been trying to cover his head. “Don’t hit my hair,” he would have been shouting to the unwashed masses that night.

This may not have really happened, but it is totally in character. And that could explain way too much about how Blagojevich turned out the way he did.

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EDITOR’S NOTE: I still remember a time a reporter-type asked former Gov. Jim Edgar how much hairspray he used on his own apparently-perfect coif. He didn’t show as much humor (http://www.tmz.com/2009/04/24/blagojevichs-hair-care-mystery-revealed/) in his answer as Rod Blagojevich showed with his retort.