Читать книгу Disco Demolition - Steve Dahl - Страница 12
Оглавление“DISCO DEMOLITION,” BY BOB ODENKIRK
Fireworks. clouds of smoke, teenagers.
Beers in hand and the smell of beers a-wafting.
Levi’s, mullets, baseball jerseys,
disdain, grievance, and a hint of ultraviolence.
A dream fueled by Italian beef,
steak fries, sliders—
unsettling, with a weird joy coursing through it all.
So sorry they had to cancel game two—oops.
That is my poem about Disco Demolition. I hope you liked it. Nobody asks you to write poetry once you get out of grade school, because it tends to be annoying, but I thought I’d take a hack at it because I am moved by the memory of Disco Demolition Night. Also, I like to make fun of poetry.
MY INTRODUCTION
Disco Demolition was a hoot. It may have been intended as a lark but at some point, a point that no one saw coming, it snowballed into a hoot. From another point of view, it was most certainly a debacle.
Not for me, though. I was and am a big Steve Dahl fan. I lived in Naperville, a quiet and pleasant ‘burb. Too quiet and too pleasant, actually. I wanted to rebel against the general ease of it all. Growing up in the Catholic family with the alcoholic dad (yawn), I loved anyone who was saying, “This garbage you see all around you? You got it right, it’s all garbage.” When you’re a teenager, the bullshit detector is fresh out of the box and the batteries are charged full. Steve laughed at pop culture, and his favorite people were my favorite people: John Belushi, Bill Murray, Joe Walsh, funny people with one eyebrow raised at the world. Steve Dahl was anarchy in my UK.
When people ask me why so many funny people come from Chicago, I tell them it’s got to do with this chip-on-your-shoulder, eyes-on-the-ground-in-front-of-you, no-smoke-blowing-allowed, rotten attitude. I love it still. (Steve is from California, so I don’t know where he came to own his scoffing gaze, and I don’t care.) He was the voice inside us, and he did things we wished we could do, like the breakfast club, the parody songs, the prank calls. And he laughed, a lot. Listening to him was fun as hell.
Why did we hate disco? Well, I’d like to start by saying that I also hated Bob Hope and his smarmy double-entendre weirdness, Dean Martin and his phony “I’m a drunk and I don’t give a shit” act (believable though, on both counts), and all of that late seventies co-opted hippy culture (the show That’s Incredible!, the film Oh God, the Ford Pinto). It was awful, man. There was a lot to hate. But disco music and the culture around it really rose to the occasion. The over-processed sound! The lyrics! The mirrors! The mirror balls! A drug of self-obsession best imbibed off a mirror—what a duo! The seventies needed someone to officially ridicule it, and in Chicago, Steve was the man for the job.
Was it a “homophobic event” at it’s core? No. However, there were homophobes in any large group of twelve- to twenty-one-year-old males of that era; quite a few were likely homosexuals who hadn’t yet come to joyful acceptance of their true selves. The best argument against this politically-correct twisting of the movement: just listen to Steve’s song parody of disco culture “Do Ya Think I’m Disco?” The main character is heterosexual and working hard to let everyone know it. It’s a great parody, it tells a story, it’s mean-spirited, and it’s well-aimed.
Don’t trust a teenager who isn’t angry. Maybe being angry about the pop culture movement of the moment is an overreaction, but when I watch footage of Disco Demolition, I still feel a connection to that group of teenagers and what happened that night. It was bigger than anything my generation of Chicago kids had seen. And no one expected it. Even if you loved baseball, it was so fun to see something so big and official like a pro baseball game go off the rails. Steve in that army helmet, Jimmy Piersall losing his mind, and those kids—they looked like me and my friends—all those kids walking around in the clouds of lingering smoke, laughing, sliding into base, being stupid and reckless and wild. It still inspires me. I’m glad it happened, and that nobody got too hurt. Vietnam, voting rights, the Democratic [National] Convention [in Grant Park], something truly worthwhile to protest against—was either protested out or not within our limited field of vision. Punk rock had happened, somewhere else, and we were a few years from our Midwest version of it, distinguishable by more self-hatred than anger at the queen of England (I’m talkin’ about The Replacements). We worked with what we had.
‘Ya proud of yourself, Steve? You should be. This is a great story here: a great night of massive, principled stupidity. I can’t wait to read it myself. That’s all I can say.
Wait, no, there’s one more thing: disco sucks.
