Disco Came and Disco Went

I remember the 70s as a glorious time, with the musical beat accelerating as the years passed. I adopted disco music as my favorite, so I was crushed when people dropped it like a hot potato. Then a funny thing happened. The music was back in two years, led by Michael Jackson, but by universal agreement no one called it disco anymore. The music morphed into House and EDM, and thrives today in many guises. 

My favorite disco memory was dancing away in a club in 1979 when someone stepped on the back of my foot. I figured I was dancing too close to the person behind me, so I started dancing across the floor. To my surprise, the pain on the back of my foot only intensified. I finally looked down and was shocked. The woman behind me had stepped into my shoe, with the thin needle of her stiletto fitting snugly between my sock and the inside of my shoe. As I started shuffling across the floor I wrenched her shoe off her foot and she came limping angrily after. I tried to present her shoe to her a la Cinderella, but she wasn’t interested.

But for a few flashy years in the 1970s, disco was the dominant force in the entertainment and nightclub scenes, with Dingbat’s, Bistro, Faces and dozens of other clubs dotting the Chicago area, mirrored balls spinning over packed dance floors.

The program argues persuasively that disco was born of a time — ”a decade of fear” — in a country suffering soaring unemployment, rising gas prices, factory closures and other ills. At the same time, Black Americans, Latinos, women and gay people were eager to have recognition and cultural prominence. Disco represented a liberation of sorts, offering freewheeling oases where the marginalized could express their energies. The beats were catchy, the lyrics fervent and the scene flamboyant. Discos were places of self-expression, relatively safe and undeniably lively. They sprouted across the land.

And the scene skyrocketed when John Travolta hit the sidewalks, dance floors and movie screens in 1977′s “Saturday Night Fever.” That same year the famous Studio 54 opened in New York City.

By then, disco was firmly mainstream, with almost half the radio stations in the U.S. playing the music. But not WLUP-FM and its leading disc jockeys, Steve Dahl and Garry Meier. Dahl had come to that station only months before, fired from his former radio home at WDAI-FM, when it went all disco all the time. Proudly anti-disco, Dahl was paired with like-minded Meier and the pair concocted a promotional event as a way for listeners to express their distaste for disco.