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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 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 rock station WDAI-FMoffered 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

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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-

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After the explosion: anti-disco rioters at . 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 , 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-

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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. At KGON-FM in Portland, Oregon, morning man Bob Anchetta followed his chain-saw demonstration at the Euphoria Tav- ern by smashing and burning hundreds more on top of the conces- sion stand at the 104th Street drive-in for a crowd of 900 who chanted ‘‘disco sucks’’ while waiting to see Animal House.AtWOUR-FMin Utica,

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listeners were given three possible means of destruction every morn- ing—for instance, chainsaw, city bus, or wild-animal stampede—and forced to endure a disco record until someone called in with the means of destruction that had been chosen for it; then the record would be bussed to death, say, and the winner would receive a shard along with a rock record and a little commerative [sic] plaque. At WWWW-FM in Detroit—popularly known as W4—morning man [sic] Jim Johnson and George Baier set up an antidisco vigilante group they decided (‘‘with- out thinking too deeply,’’ Baier now admits) to call the Disco Ducks Klan. They were planning to wear white sheets onstage at a disco that was switching back to rock when the Comiskey Park riot persuaded them to cool it. It turned out that on the day it was supposed to have

6932 Lawrence / LOVE SAVES THE DAY / sheet taken place, they left W4 for another AOR station, WRIF-FM, where they now run an organization called DREAD (Detroit Rockers Engaged in the Abolition of Disco) and hold on-the-air ‘‘electrocutions’’ of disco- lovers whose names and phone numbers have been sent in by the DIA 24 (DREAD Intelligence Agency).

Dahl’s argument that the crusade ‘‘made a lot of people sit back and question the disco stuff that was being shoved down their throats’’ was suggestive of the way in which ‘‘disco sucks’’ was first and foremost a 25 homophobic phenomenon. Disco sucks...what? Did it suck innocent listeners into its seductive rhythms? Did it suck the ‘‘real’’ rock music in- dustry dry? Or did it suck cock? ‘‘Steve Dahl was one of these types, talking about all of this stupid shit, downplaying homo- sexuals, downplaying Jewish people,’’ says Rosario. ‘‘The disco era re- volved around gays and that was something he took up.’’ Dahl claims that he was less incensed by disco’s gayness than by its superficiality and artificiality, but his argument holds significantly less water than Lake Michigan. Superficial and artificial had, after all, become derogatory euphemisms for gay, and this link was made more explicit when John Parikhal, a Toronto-based media consultant, carried out attitu- dinal research on discophobia and reported that his focus groups thought disco was superficial, boring, repetitive, and short on ‘‘balls,’’ and that 26 homophobia cropped up repeatedly. As cultural critic Walter Hughes notes, ‘‘even the subtler critiques of disco implicitly echo homophobic ac- counts of a simultaneously emerging urban gay male minority: disco is ‘mindless,’ ‘repetitive,’ ‘synthetic,’ ‘technological,’ and ‘commercial,’ just

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as the men who dance to it with each other are ‘unnatural,’ ‘trivial,’ ‘deca- 27 dent,’ ‘artificial,’ and ‘indistinguishable’ ‘clones.’ ’’ Dahl denies the depiction. ‘‘I’m sure I made some gay jokes about the Village People or whatever, but I thought that was fairly obvious. I don’t recall the jokes, but there were amusing aspects to all that. I mean if a guy’s going to walk around in an Indian getup, then he’s asking...’’ That, apparently, wasn’t homophobic. ‘‘I get the feeling that you want to characterize this as being antigay, and I don’t think that’s right.’’ Perhaps, but that is only because Dahl’s anti-disco movement finally drew on a far more flexible ideology than straightforward homophobia. For sure, gays were far too prominent and had acquired far too much influence, but then so too had blacks and women, and disco as a whole had come to represent

6932 Lawrence / LOVE SAVES THE DAY / sheet excess, extravagance, hedonism, physicality, and expressivity—all of the things that Dahl’s constituency felt uneasy about. ‘‘In a way I was right with the ‘disco sucks’ people,’’ says Nicky Siano. ‘‘The music had gotten really bad, and a lot of it—although not all of it—was just garbage. But I also remember the anti-disco people being very white, male, and straight. It was like a movement for headbangers. After almost ten years of gay white men and gay black men pretty much owning the scene, heteros wanted to take their power back. Disco was very threatening for a lot of men.’’ That included Dahl and his followers. ‘‘I think I tapped into young, brotherly, male—and dragged along for the ride, female—angst,’’ says the Chicago talk DJ. ‘‘You leave high school, and you realize that things are going to be tougher than you thought, and here’s this group of people seemingly making it harder for you to measure up. There was some kind of anger out there, and the anti-disco movement seemed to be a good release for that.’’ By the end of the seventies, the anger had become national in charac- ter, and much of it was related to the poor performance of the economy. Jimmy Carter had narrowly defeated President Ford in 1976, following a campaign in which nearly 70 percent of voters identified economic issues as their basic concern, yet by the end of his term Carter had failed to make a dent in the underlying economic crisis. At the same time anger was being expressed at the way in which sixties social values had in many respects become entrenched in the seventies. Hundreds of thousands of women and African Americans had broken down the traditional bar- riers that had once kept them ‘‘in their place,’’ and while millions failed to benefit from this success story there was nevertheless a clear perception

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among white male voters that Carter had introduced a series of contro- versial liberal positions around abortion and affirmative action that were less important to the ‘‘average Democratic voter’’ than the economy. The loss of faith in the direction of the Democratic Party coincided with the rise of the New Right, a group of conservative voters who co- alesced around a series of volatile issues that had become associated with the so-called excesses of the 1960s and the subsequent attack on what conservatives interpreted as the most basic institutions and values of American society—the church, the nation, and the monogamous hetero- sexual family. This group had begun to articulate its ideas in the late sixties, when it was dubbed the ‘‘middle-American’’ revolt, and the cam- paign gathered momentum throughout a decade in which the old rules

6932 Lawrence / LOVE SAVES THE DAY / sheet of the Protestant work ethic and abstemiousness were challenged by the new codes of self-fulfillment and pleasure. By the end of the seventies, notes historian William Chafe, ‘‘Americans faced a frightening array of prospects—permanent economic stagnation, the presence of an ‘under- class’ that directly challenged the essence of the American dream, and 28 bitter division over fundamental cultural values.’’ Drawing on this dis- enchantment, Ronald Reagan’s Republican Party recast its political iden- tity. Having been historically identified as the party of sectional interests, it reinvented itself as the representative of the average American, leaving the Democrats—historically the people’s party—to represent marginal groups, supposedly at the expense of the nation. Disco could hardly be disentangled from these developments. African Americans, gays, and women—key players in the countercultural move- ment of the sixties—were integral to the new culture of the night, and the spreading principles of bodily pleasure, sexual liberation, nonnuclear families, and self-exploration found their most compelling outlet in the arena of the discotheque. When the New Right began to caricature the seventies as stagnant, unproductive, undisciplined, tasteless, wasteful, extravagant, inefficient, morally degenerate, corrupt, and lacking in di- rection, it was as if they were euphemistically talking about disco. ‘‘It wasn’t just a dislike of disco that brought everyone together,’’ says Dahl. ‘‘It was all of the shared experiences. But disco was probably a catalyst because it was a common thing to rally against.’’ Disco was the perfectly polyvalent symbol of all that was wrong with the outgoing decade, and it also contained potential scapegoats galore. The left didn’t exactly surge to dance culture’s defense. If the New

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Right believed that disco represented the wrong kind of capitalism, then large swathes of the left maintained that disco simply was capitalism, and it was into this hostile terrain that Richard Dyer bravely stepped to justify the party politics of the night, publishing an article entitled ‘‘In Defence of Disco’’ in Gay Left in the summer of 1979. ‘‘All my life I’ve liked the wrong music,’’ he wrote. ‘‘I never liked Elvis and rock ’n’ roll; I always preferred Rosemary Clooney. And since I became a socialist, I’ve often felt virtually terrorised by the prestige of rock and folk on the left. How could I admit to two Petula Clark LPs in the face of miners’ songs from 29 the North East and the Rolling Stones?’’ In fact, disco contained many potentially progressive practices, and Dyer was one of the first writers to theorize these credentials, arguing

6932 Lawrence / LOVE SAVES THE DAY / sheet that whereas rock confined ‘‘sexuality to the cock’’ and was thus ‘‘indel- ibly phallo-centric music,’’ disco ‘‘restores eroticism to the whole body’’ thanks to its ‘‘willingness to play with rhythm,’’ and it does this ‘‘for both 30 sexes.’’ Disco also offered dancers the chance to experience the body as a polymorphous entity that could be reengineered in terms that con- founded conservative models of masculinity and femininity. ‘‘Its eroti- cism allows us to rediscover our bodies as part of this experience of ma- 31 teriality and the possibility of change.’’ But for the most part the left distrusted the politics of pleasure, and the overwhelming majority of disco evangelists were more interested in having a good time, producing records, and opening clubs than formulating a coherent response to the public backlash.

*** Whereas white suburban rockers viewed disco as being, among other things, irredeemably black, so black urban music aficionados tended to regard the music as being predominantly white. That was certainly the opinion of Nelson George, who outlined his position in an article for the New York Amsterdam News in January 1978. While conceding that disco ‘‘has definitely put money in the pockets of many Blacks,’’ George main- tained that, in the final instance, ‘‘disco music has opened up Black sta- 32 tions to penetration by white artists.’’ George’s case revolved around a careful analysis of black ‘‘crossover’’ records—‘‘a nice way of saying, 33 caught the fancy of white people’’—during the disco boom. According to Billboard figures, thirty-six of the top one hundred pop records of 1973 crossed over from black stations; in 1975 the figure was down to twenty-

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