History's Dumpster = GLORIOUS trash! Kitsch, music, fashion, food, history, ephemera, and other memorable and forgotten, famous and infamous pop culture junk and oddities of yesterday and today. Saved from the landfill of time...
Z-Rock was a national hard rock radio
network from the late '80s to December 1996. Z-Rock was very popular
with the headbanger metal crowd. They were heard over some FM stations,
but most of Z-Rock's affiliates were third tier local AM stations that
didn't find much success in any other format.
Z-Rock's days were
numbered once the Seattle Grunge Revolution hit nationwide in 1992 and
music tastes started changing towards alternative rock. In October 1993,
the network further exacerbated their demise by pulling the plug on
their AM affiliates and going FM only. As the network dwindled, so did
their remaining affiliates until Z-Rock was taken off the air by their
parent company, SMN Networks. However, the remaining local affiliates
were allowed to retain the Z-Rock logo and imaging for their
stations.....
Now here was a disaster waiting to happen: The
packaging was nice, a prepackaged gourmet meal (utterly the biggest
oxymoron) and a little bottle of wine. There was just one problem. The
wine wasn't for drinking, it was for preparing the meal with....
Yes...THIS existed in the '70s too.......
An actual food product of the '70s.....Gerber Singles.....for ADULTS.....
34 years ago tonight in Chicago, Radio DJ Steve Dahl of Chicago rock
station WLUP put a glorious end to the disco music craze of the '70s
called "Disco Demolition Night" when he and another DJ came up with the
idea of the Disco Demolition at Comiskey Park on July 12, 1979. Dahl,
who was never a fan of disco had been fired from rock station WDAI-FM
94.7 the previous Christmas Eve when that station changed it's format to
All Disco.
That was the last straw. This meant war.
Dahl was hired by WLUP almost immediately and the anti-disco backlash had officially begun.
Fans
who brought a disco
record to the ballpark this night 34 years ago were admitted for 98
cents, a number which closely matched WLUP’s 97.9 MHz dial position. The
event took place at Comiskey
Park between games of a White Sox/Tigers double-header. Early fears of
embarrassingly low attendance were squashed when 90,000 disco-haters
converged onto a stadium that held 52,000.
After the Sox lost the first
game 4-1, during which time the increasingly rowdy fans got drunk and crazy, the real fun began. Steve Dahl wore a combat helmet and rode
around the ballpark in a Jeep. In center field a giant box was packed
full of disco LPs and blown up which left a hole in the playing
surface. People who didn’t get their Village People, KC & The
Sunshine Band and Sister Sledge records in the box used them as
frisbees and began flinging them through the air. Thousands of fans
then swarmed the field, lighting fires and starting small riots. The
bases were stolen, the batting cage was destroyed and chaos ruled.
Chicago police in riot gear finally cleared the field which was so
badly damaged that the second game could not be played. It was later
determined that the White Sox would have to forfeit the game to the
Tigers because they failed to provide acceptable playing
conditions.......
After the Disco Demolition Night promotion, disco began to lose its popularity. Rapidly.
Steve
Dahl on the other hand still worked anti-disco sentiment, even
producing a parody record of Rod Stewart's "Do Ya Think I'm Sexy" (one
of the first ever "parody" type records which "Weird" Al Yankovic would later
become famous for) called "Do Ya Think I'm Disco". He recorded it as a
single on the independent Ovation Records label (one of the smaller
national indie labels of the time that was based in Chicago.)
As
for disco, it had completely left the pop charts by fall of 1980. It
was replaced by an even more tedious form of music called "adult
contemporary" and acts like Barbara Streisand (one of the very few acts
to have disco hits and survive the backlash) and Neil Diamond began
filling the airwaves along with the arena rock bands (Foreigner,
Journey, Rush, Loverboy, etc, etc.)
However, disco never REALLY
died. It went back underground to the gay dance clubs and R&B charts
where it started for most of the early '80s and resurfaced as pop with
the Madonna craze of the mid-'80s. It exists today as a specialty genre
simply called "dance music". A brief nostalgic revival in the '90s of
'70s disco brought a lot of the older music back into the
mainstream......
