The Night Baseball Demolished Disco

Fans storm the field at Comiskey Park on ‘Disco Demolition’ night after the first game of a doubleheader between the White Sox and Tigers. (AP Photo/Fred Jewell, File)

AP

On July 12, 1979, the home of the Chicago White Sox, Comiskey Park, became the funeral pyre for disco. As part of a shock-jock radio promotion to bump up attendance, fans got in for $0.98 and could bring their disco records to be detonated on the field between a double-header. (Promoters believed, at best, 5,000 fans would show up; they got a raging and roaring crowd of 70,000.) The second game had to be cancelled because of the conditions of the field. The notorious night came to be known as the “Disco Demolition.” Chicago magazine recently published an oral history of the event, interviewing many of its key players. Read it here. Watch archival footage the crazy event unfold below.