"... As a record label during an American music-industrial boom, Casablanca Records, from its 1973 inception in Los Angeles, embodied all of the too-ridiculous-to-possibly-be-true stereotypes of excess and debauchery that marked the industry during the era.
"By
late 1977, industry giant PolyGram had acquired a majority stake in
Casablanca. “After the four KISS solo albums had emphatically bombed,”
says Larry Harris in And Party Every Day,
“we knew that PolyGram would at last realize that we were losing a
fortune. They were handling all distribution for us, and it was
impossible that they would fail to notice two millions returns. No
amount of cooking the books was going to hide truckloads of unwanted
records, especially since those trucks were backing up to their
doorstep, not ours. When at last the ruse was up, PolyGram insisted on
dramatic changes.” This development led to Harris having to lay off
approximately one third of Casablanca’s nearly 175-person staff. “The
bloodletting,” says Harris, “took place on June 29, 1979.”
Weeks
later came the loudest death knell: Disco Demolition Night, the
explosive obliteration of disco vinyl sanctioned by a “popular Chicago
DJ named Steve Dahl [who] had lost his job when his station changed its
format to disco.” For weeks, Dahl, encouraged “anyone wishing to destroy
their disco albums to bring them to Comiskey Park on Chicago’s south
side.” He made plans for July 12, 1979, to stack the albums in a pile in
the outfield, then detonate a small-scale explosive, blowing the whole
collection of vinyl sky-high.
Mike
Veeck, promotions director for the Chicago White Sox, was fully
supportive of Dahl’s plan. He announced tickets for the White
Sox-Cleveland Indians doubleheader that night would be sold at 98 cents
(Dahl’s radio station being at 97.9 FM) for fans who brought disco
records to be destroyed. Says Larry Harris: “This drew a beyond-capacity
crowd of over fifty thousand. The demographic was atypical—read:
pot-smoking rock music lovers—and the crowd had no sense of baseball
etiquette.”
When
the dynamite-packed pile of records was detonated in Comiskey Park’s
outfield after the first game of the doubleheader, the crowd rushed the
field and “a small-scale riot ensued.” This public display of contempt
for the genre came to be known as “the day disco died” and hit
Casablanca, the mainstay of which was disco itself, hard...."
Read the full tale here From Cocaine Disco to Electronic Dance: the Loaded Legacy of Casablanca Records
More on Disco demolition rally here
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