30 years ago this week, The Detroit Tigers visited the Chicago White Sox for a double header. During the intermission between games, a Chicago disc jockey who had long railed against how disco was a threat to his and his fan’s beloved rock n’ roll (a thinly-veiled racist screed some say), he invited fans to get in cheap to the baseball game if they brought a disco record for him to destroy in center field. Obviously, a slightly different crowd gathered in the bleachers, smoking weed, chanting “disco sucks” and throwing their disco platters as frisbees at the players.

“And then all hell broke loose,” Jack Morris, a Tigers pitcher, said. “They charged the field and started tearing up the pitching rubber and the dirt. They took the bases. They started digging out home plate.”

As the fans raced onto the field, outnumbering their expectations by about double their usual 30,000, officials called off the second game and tried to restore order to the park. Regardless of the damage, and malintent, the night had for disco, which unfairly lumped seminal classics into the same pile as the low-brow ‘hits’, the story is humorous and visually evocative of the time period when rock was still king. “Disco Duck” may taken the fall, but it could be argued that through the night’s events the true art of disco (see: Larry Levan, Arthur Russell, Giorgio Moroder) was saved.

via New York Times