If you remember the summer of 1979, then you remember your father complaining that the car radio was saturated with disco. Disco here, disco there, disco everywhere. It was enough to drive a lot of people to go to a White Sox-Tigers doubleheader and burn their disco LP's and 45s between the games. Let's remember the night that it happened:

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As the 1970s came to an end, the age of disco was also nearing its finale. But the public backlash to the genre reached its peak on July 12, 1979 with the infamous “Disco Demolition” night at Chicago’s Comiskey Park. That incident, which led to at least nine injuries, 39 arrests and the cancellation and forfeit of a Major League Baseball game, is widely credited with signaling the end of disco's reign.

The event was the brainchild of Steve Dahl and Garry Meier, popular disc jockeys on Chicago’s WLUP “The Loop” FM. Dahl had only recently moved to WLUP from rival station WDAI when that station switched to an all-disco format -- a relatively common reformatting trend in American radio in 1979. But however many other rock DJs were displaced by disco, only Dahl was inspired to launch a semi-comic vendetta aimed at “the eradication and elimination of the dreaded musical disease.”

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It was a night to remember, and I happened to be there, sort of. I was a young banker on a business trip with my senior partner. He knew that I was a baseball fan so he bought tickets to catch the game. We got to Comiskey as the first game was over and the "burning" began. As we walked to the stadium, a Chicago police officer told us to go back because the game was cancelled. Then we went back to the hotel and watched the darn thing on TV.

Everything went wrong that night:

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The first mistake organizers made on Disco Demolition night was grossly underestimating the appeal of the 98-cent discount tickets offered to anyone who brought a disco record to the park to add to the explosive-rigged dumpster. WLUP and the White Sox expected perhaps 5,000 more fans than the average draw of 15,000 or so at Comiskey Park. What they got instead was a raucous sellout crowd of 40,000-plus and an even more raucous overflow crowd of as many as 40,000 more outside on Shields Avenue. The second mistake was failing to actually collect those disco records, which would become dangerous projectiles in the hands of a crowd that was already out of control by the time Dahl detonated his dumpster in center field during warm-ups for the evening’s second game.

What followed was utter chaos, as fans by the thousands stormed the field and began to wreak havoc, shimmying up the foul poles, tearing up the grass and lighting vinyl bonfires on the diamond while the stadium scoreboard implored them to return to their seats. Conditions were judged too dangerous for the scheduled game to begin, and the Detroit Tigers were awarded a win by forfeit.

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A few weeks later, we got a check from the White Sox with an apology from Bill Veeck. The bad news is that I did not make a copy of the letter and check for our family history.

Disco saturation was inevitable that summer of '79. Even Frankie Avalon jumped on the disco scene and update his classic "Venus" for dancing. Radio stations were changing format from whatever to disco. You could find "disco" up and down the line.

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It was crazy everywhere, and Iran had not entered our embassy yet. That happened a few months later. It was just a rough summer where it felt, fairly or unfairly, that President Carter had no backbone. Even a "wild rabbit" attacked the President when he was taking some time off at Camp David. Talk about a bad day and rough year for the man from Plains, GA.

It was quite a summer of disco saturation and "malaise," a word that defined everything.

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Image: Easy Peasy AI