Item From the Past: Disco Was Not on My Mind That Day

It seems that someone you might not expect visited the Superman statue a few years ahead of me (see previous post). Then again, as a Senator he probably got around Illinois a lot.

I noticed a couple of articles in the Tribune recently about Disco Demolition Night at old Comiskey Park, the 30th anniversary of which is today. Steven Dahl, the radio deejay whose promotion it was, did one of the articles. Dahl isn't on radio here at the moment, but he does write a column as "vice advisor" for the Tribune. Or at least, that's what they used to call him.

I'd forgotten about the incident. But I remember a lot of people were bent out of shape about disco. Near the end of Airplane!, the airplane knocks down the radio tower of a disco station, and that got a rousing cheer from the audience when the movie was new. I don't remember caring enough about disco to hate it, though a few individual songs were irritating, or liking it enough to spend any money on it. Mostly it was just background. And considering some of the noxious things that have oozed out of the music industry since, not really that bad.

I'm not sure I heard about Disco Demolition Night when it happened, either. I was busy on Maui that day, possibly at Iao Valley State Park, home of the Iao Needle, or that might have been the day I went to the rim of Haleakala. I made images of those places, but they are slides -- an inconvenient medium these days. The Iao Needle was very green; Haleakala was very much the color I imagined Mars to be.