Disco came and disco went, with Chicago’s Comiskey Park a memorable battleground in ‘The War on Disco’

If you can hum a few bars of “Disco Duck,” have I got a show for you.

It is the latest episode of the distinguished PBS “American Experience” series, which has over 35 seasons given television viewers award-winning documentaries about usually weighty subjects, as it dips into disco with an entertaining and thought-provoking hourlong trip.

One reason is the presence of Chicago and a number of talking Chicagoans in the episode “The War on Disco,” as the city was the principal battleground in this “war,” with Comiskey Park literally exploding on July 12, 1979.

Do you remember that night? Do you remember disco?

I have to ask because when disco was big, it was very big, and when it vanished it did so quickly and for keeps, former disco fans rarely mentioning the word or their memories.

But for a few flashy years in the 1970s, disco was the dominant force in the entertainment and nightclub scenes, with Dingbat’s, Bistro, Faces and dozens of other clubs dotting the Chicago area, mirrored balls spinning over packed dance floors.

The program argues persuasively that disco was born of a time — ”a decade of fear” — in a country suffering soaring unemployment, rising gas prices, factory closures and other ills. At the same time, Black Americans, Latinos, women and gay people were eager to have recognition and cultural prominence. Disco represented a liberation of sorts, offering freewheeling oases where the marginalized could express their energies. The beats were catchy, the lyrics fervent and the scene flamboyant. Discos were places of self-expression, relatively safe and undeniably lively. They sprouted across the land.

And the scene skyrocketed when John Travolta hit the sidewalks, dance floors and movie screens in 1977′s “Saturday Night Fever.” That same year the famous Studio 54 opened in New York City.

By then, disco was firmly mainstream, with almost half the radio stations in the U.S. playing the music. But not WLUP-FM and its leading disc jockeys, Steve Dahl and Garry Meier. Dahl had come to that station only months before, fired from his former radio home at WDAI-FM, when it went all disco all the time. Proudly anti-disco, Dahl was paired with like-minded Meier and the pair concocted a promotional event as a way for listeners to express their distaste for disco.

And so was planned at Comiskey Park on July 12, 1979, on what they called Disco Demolition Night. They never expected 80,000 people to show up. But with admission of 98 cents and a disco record, people did, with 50,000 filling the park, and another 30,000 outside eager to get in for the scheduled twi-night doubleheader between the White Sox and Detroit Tigers.

There were cops on horseback and beer flowing. Danger hung in the air.

Between games, a large box filled with disco records was detonated, blowing a massive hole in the center-field turf. Thousands of “fans” rushed onto the field, starting fires and stealing bases and things became so ugly that the second game was canceled, later forfeited to the Tigers.

That event is captured at length in this show and the images will be familiar to those of a certain age, embarrassing for a few who might have to explain to their kids or grandkids what it was they were doing there.

It was a bit surprising to see and hear Meier in the program since, when I wrote about Disco Demolition Night a few years ago and asked him to comment, he told me, “Why bother? That was 30 years ago, and I am not interested in reliving the past.”

Maybe he has mellowed since, because he has a few things to say for the “American Experience” cameras. Dahl doesn’t speak to the filmmakers, obviously content to let his feelings stand as they do in the 2016 book, “Disco Demolition: The Night Disco Died” (Curbside Splendor). It’s a good book that inspired a later exhibition at the Elmhurst History Museum.

His collaborators on that book were photographer Paul Natkin and journalist Dave Hoekstra (with Bob Odenkirk writing an introduction). Both Natkin and Hoekstra appear in “The War on Disco,” typically smart and incisive.

Producers Lisa Q. Wolfinger and Rushmore DeNooyer have gathered many fine commentators. As in most documentaries, academics have their say, most of it valuable if a bit intellectually strained. Much better is listening to such people as Joe Shanahan, owner of Metro Chicago and Smart Bar and a longtime fixture and influence on the music world, and Diane Alexander White, an esteemed photographer who was there as a curious 24-year-old.

Disco did die that night as radio stations across the country “stopped playing the music overnight.” But the show makes a case that disco’s death paved the way for the birth of house music, and subsequently EDM. Chicago’s Frankie Knuckles, the late father of house music, once told the Tribune, “I witnessed that caper that Steve Dahl pulled. It scared the record companies so they stopped signing disco artists. So we created our own thing to fill the gap.”

And that’s been good thing.

“The War on Disco” airs 8 p.m. Oct. 30 on WTTW-Ch. 11, more information at www.pbs.org

rkogan@chicagotribune.com