Been to Previous Sounds, with Top-Heavy Managerial Teams
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395 of 522 been to previous sounds, with top-heavy managerial teams plotting their strategies around potentially lucrative stars and the till-friendly album format in order to create profitable order where there had once been chaos. DJ rations were slashed by record companies when radio belatedly revised its playlist priorities—the fact that disco sounded far better in a club than on the radio was deemed to be unimportant—and disco de- partments subsequently paid less and less attention to the quality of their output, in part because they believed that anything would sell in the post– Saturday Night Fever market. The wider economy, though, was tighten- ing, and audience tastes were diversifying, which suggested that record companies needed to pay more attention to localized, flexible, grassroots sales. Unfortunately, the majors weren’t yet ready to adjust. ‘‘It became 6932 Lawrence / LOVE SAVES THE DAY / sheet ridiculous,’’ says Coles, who returned to his old job behind the counter at Colony. ‘‘They were disco-tizing all these crazy things. It had to end.’’ *** When Chicago rock station WDAI-FMoffered Detroit DJSteve Dahl a job in 1978, he jumped at the opportunity. The honeymoon, however, was brief. A couple of days before Christmas, the station dropped its AOR (album- oriented rock) format in favor of disco, and the new recruit decided that his position was untenable. ‘‘I quit because disco really didn’t fit the kind of show that I was doing,’’ he says. ‘‘I was doing mostly talk, and it was pretty much tailored to my own lifestyle, which didn’t really have many intersecting points with the disco thing.’’ Dahl resurfaced in March on WLUP-FMand started to attack the dance phenomenon as if it were freshly laid concrete—easiest to remove before it set hard. ‘‘Disco represented superficiality. The whole lifestyle seemed to be based on style over sub- stance.’’ Not that Dahl had always hated the genre. ‘‘There was a time when I thought some of it was OK. We used to play stuff from Saturday Night Fever on WDAI. When the movie came out it was kind of cool. But then disco achieved critical mass, and I felt that rock music was threat- ened as a species.’’ Dahl, who knew how to rant like no other talk DJ, began to target dance culture as public enemy number one, and according to the Village Voice, ‘‘he couldn’t help noticing how the phones lit up’’ whenever he turned the ‘‘15-minute lunatic stream-of-consciousness raps’’ he deliv- 20 ered between songs into ‘‘disco-baiting monologues.’’ Realizing that he had ‘‘tapped into this anti-disco sentiment that was really out there,’’ Dahl formed the Insane Coho Lips—named after the Coho salmon, which were turbulence 373 Tseng 2003.10.1 08:35 396 of 522 celebrated in Chicago for having rid Lake Michigan of the lamprey eel, a slithery parasite that had almost succeeded in wiping out the lake’s edible fish. WLUP had to hire two additional staff to cope with applications to the self-styled ‘‘army’’ that was, in the words of the organization’s litera- ture, ‘‘dedicated to the eradication of the dreaded musical disease known as DISCO.’’ This was no sudden, isolated flash of hatred. Back at the beginning of 1976, music critic John Rockwell had noted a ‘‘hardening of rock-critical arteries,’’ and a couple of years later Vince Aletti commented that, for all of its success, Saturday Night Fever ‘‘may not put an end to DISCO SUCKS 21 buttons.’’ Having settled into the Record World chair, Brian Chin also realized he was part of a struggle. ‘‘ ‘Disco sucks’ was always there,’’ he 6932 Lawrence / LOVE SAVES THE DAY / sheet says. ‘‘There was always anger in the music business.’’ Yet as Tom Moulton notes, radio’s rock contingent was the first to bite back. ‘‘Radio DJsliked having the power of being able to say, ‘If we don’t play it it’s not a hit.’ The clubs brought them down a peg or two, so they were the first ones to put a nail in disco’s coffin.’’ By July 1979, that anger was also spewing forth from the likes of Robert Vare in the previously sympathetic New York Times. ‘‘My question is, how did Western civilization get along for so many years without disco?’’ he asked. ‘‘What in the world did people do for release? Did Socrates formulate concepts of justice, honor and love because he was able to wear a Day-Glo toga and twitch and wriggle until dawn? Can you imagine Leonardo da Vinci cornering Michelangelo at the Floren- tine branch of Fiorucci and bending his ear for a couple of hours about some new disco’s laser beam light show or plastic snow machine? How did Pavlova ever manage to execute an arabesque without affixing glit- ter to herself and snorting amyl nitrate?’’ The ‘‘poetry’’ of the Beatles had been replaced by the ‘‘monotonous bass-pedal bombardment’’ of Donna Summer. ‘‘By 1984, when we’re deaf, dumb and blind from disco, we may 22 all find ourselves dancing to a different drummer.’’ Rock-oriented radio DJs joined that attack without batting a collective eye at the irony that they were now perceived to be reputable members of the canonical establishment rather than its disruptive antagonist. ‘‘Radio guys couldn’t wait to drop disco,’’ says Chin. ‘‘It was just a personal gut response. They didn’t want to own a sound that wasn’t male and rock- identified.’’ Dahl became one of disco’s most strident critics, and while the Chicago DJ maintains that all he ‘‘ever did was make fun of disco music because it was banal’’ his sense of humor became increasingly vio- 374 love saves the day Tseng 2003.10.1 08:35 397 of 522 6932 Lawrence / LOVE SAVES THE DAY / sheet After the explosion: anti-disco rioters at Comiskey Park. Courtesy of Bettman/CORBIS lent. Two live appearances—in which Dahl sang his single, ‘‘Da Ya Think I’m Disco? (Am I Superficial?),’’ told a round of Village People jokes, and led a fist-waving chorus of ‘‘disco sucks’’—required police intervention to maintain order, and in the WLUP studio he started playing disco records before ‘‘blowing them up’’ with sound effects. The campaign climaxed on 12 July when the radio jock organized an anti-disco rally at Comiskey Park, home of the Chicago White Sox, which was timed to coincide with a doubleheader against the Detroit Tigers. Fans were told they could pay just ninety-eight cents if they also handed over a slab of unwanted disco vinyl, and forty thousand of them, carrying some forty thousand records, filed through the turnstiles as the first game drew to a close (another thirty thousand were locked outside). Then came the fireworks between games. ‘‘Steve Dahl made a big twelve-foot pile with all the records,’’ says disco fan Ralphie Rosario. ‘‘He got everyone to chant ‘disco sucks,’ and then he blew up the records with dynamite.’’ The crowd rioted. ‘‘They were losing their minds. The only people who actually enjoyed baseball were rock ’n’ rollers. The crowd was made up of middle-class white suburban boys and families with their kids. There were drunken people all over the place. It was Middle America.’’ Dahl maintains that there was nothing premeditated about his cam- turbulence 375 Tseng 2003.10.1 08:35 398 of 522 paign. ‘‘It’s not like it was some calculated thing on my part. I was like a kid playing with matches. I didn’t know what I was doing, and I just tapped into this anti-disco sentiment that was already out there. What’s interesting is that it happened in spite of me. All I was doing was horsing around.’’ Yet the Comiskey Park gathering also had its less comic side, echoing as it did the fascist rallies of the 1930sand1940s, and on this occasion it was Dahl, dressed up in army fatigues and a helmet, who played the role of the charismatic, knowledgeable, and power-hungry con- ductor. The forty thousand followers, sporting regulation black t-shirts that carried the name of their hero’s radio show, embodied the ignorant and inflammable crowd in search of a common cause. Dahl’s argument that he was simply ‘‘doing a show about my life and it all just clicked’’ 6932 Lawrence / LOVE SAVES THE DAY / sheet echoed a standard myth of fascism—that the emergent leader instinc- tively comes to express the will of the masses through a mystical trans- mission of desire.The public detonation of disco music, which was closely associated with gay men and African Americans, mirrored the fascist- style burnings of jazz, which was tied to African Americans and Jews. And Dahl’s acknowledgement that the campaign ‘‘worked real well for me’’ was consistent with fascism’s profit motive: ‘‘disco sucks’’ equaled 23 rock ’n’ roll bucks. Yet despite the apparent attractiveness of the clubbing option—fas- cists only had a choice of one party, whereas dancers could go to as many parties as they liked—the campaign against disco in Chicago con- tinued when WDAI-FM signaled its return to rock with a twenty-four hour looped rendition of Donna Summer’s ‘‘Last Dance,’’ transforming a song of romantic regret into a grotesque caricature of disco repetition. By mid- summer Dahl’s campaign was being mimicked all over the country. As the Village Voice reported: At WLVQ-FM, in Columbus, Ohio, morning man John Fisher put on fa- tigues and a gas mask, declared himself general of a rock & roll army, torpedoed the Village People’s ‘‘In the Navy,’’ and sent uncounted hun- dreds of disco records to the trash compactor between periods at a soccer match.