Smashing up disco records was a stunt Dahl did at area bars, but he got to bring his shtick to a wider audience when White Sox management started arranging publicity stunts to boost attendance. Over the years, the event has come to signify something larger in the culture — a point at which the implicit musical divide between whites and African-Americans became uncomfortably explicit. It also helped kill disco as a viable genre.

“Disco was gay, black and Latin in spite of the fact that probably many of the people who made it happen in a very big way were white,” says Vince Aletti, the first music critic to write about disco. “Many, many people perceived it as a kind of undermining force, like rock ’n’ roll was, in a way.”

The reason for the Disco Demolition Night promotion, Natkin says, is that the two worst teams in the American League were playing a doubleheader

Dahl, says Natkin, thought the event might make the front page of the local papers the next day, but Disco Demolition Night ended up national news — and controversial news at that. Dahl’s intent might have been to mock the “disco lifestyle,” but his stunt was perceived as having racist overtones. Chic’s Nile Rodgers (who would go on to produce Madonna) later likened the event to “Nazi book-burning.”

“I was appalled,” remembers Marsh. “It was your most paranoid fantasy about where the ethnic cleansing of the rock radio could ultimately lead. It was everything you had feared come to life. Dahl didn’t come from Top 40 radio, he came from album rock radio, which was fighting to heighten its profile.”