Video Premiere: The Baseball Project Remember ‘Disco Demolition’ In Animated Clip

Combining two loves — music and baseball — The Baseball Project is a true indie supergroup. Featuring Mike Mills and Peter Buck, of R.E.M., Dream Syndicate frontman Steve Wynn, Scott McCaughey, leader of both The Minus 5 and and Young Fresh Fellows, and Linda Pittmon of The Filthy Friends, the band took the members’ baseball fandom and turned that into a passion project of songs about America’s Pastime.

With baseball’s more than century-long history, there is a lot of material for the group to write about, from a song about current phenomenon, Los Angeles Angels DH/pitcher Shoehi Ohtani, to legends like the Boston Red Sox Ted Williams.

One of the standout cuts on the band’s new album, Grand Salami Time (a term for a grand slam home run), is “Disco Demolition,” a song that looks back on one of baseball’s most infamous nights.

On July 12, 1979, the Chicago White Sox hosted “Disco Demolition Night,” a radio stunt gone horribly wrong. A local DJ hosted what was supposed to be a promotion, where fans got together and destroyed disco albums during the height of the disco backlash. But a riot ensued and the second game of the double header was canceled.

Thought of as a publicity stunt gone wrong at the time, the whole event has been rewritten in history as one that was actually racist and homophobic. Wynn writes about that in the song. But knowing the message of being open minded has to be delivered in a palatable way, the band found a brilliant way to do so, enlisting James Blagden, who did the animated video showcasing pitcher Dock Ellis’ very famous 1970s no-hitter, thrown while Ellis was on acid, to do an animated “Disco Demolition” clip, premiering here.

I spoke with Wynn about the song, the clip, baseball and more.

Steve Baltin: Let’s talk about this video and the premiere we’re doing for “Disco Demolition.” Do you remember that night as it was happening or hearing about it at the time?

Steve Wynn: I heard about it after it happened. I was 19 then and a baseball fan, [but] I don’t think I knew that it was in the works. It’s funny because that event happened, I say in ’79, and at that point in my life, you’ve got to figure late ’70s, a guy like me, I was punk rock all the time. Punk rock in 1977 turned my life upside down. That was when I heard The Clash and The Pistols and The Buzzcocks and all those bands and started singing live, ’cause I was old enough to start going to shows. That turned everything up down. So for me, at that point, I didn’t like anything that was popular culture. I didn’t like mainstream movies. I didn’t see Star Wars. If it was anything right down the middle, I didn’t want to know about it and that included disco. I was a big fan of ’60s and early ‘70s soul and loved it then, love it still. But disco when it came out, I wasn’t a “Disco Sucks” person. it just wasn’t really, first and foremost, on my radar. So the whole Disco Demolition night at Comiskey, wasn’t something that was something I would think about, care about at all at that point.

Baltin: I got a chance to interview Nile Rodgers who I’ve known for years now. And we talked about it and it was very interesting to go in depth in it, because from his perspective, the whole Disco Sucks backlash was very detrimental to a lot of people’s careers and it was so steeped in racism and homophobia. It’s very interesting to look back on it now. And it’s funny when you start to look back on it for this video, were there things that you realized about it that very much surprised you?

Wynn: Yeah. And, in the song I write about that, in the third verse. One thing of The Baseball Project, it’s always a fun challenge for the band that you’ve got a lot of things to say in a four-minute song. You want to explain what you’re writing about, whether it’s an event or a player or a part of the game. You want to explain it to somebody who maybe would not know what you’re talking about. You want to say what happened and you want to have a point of view about it. That’s a lot to do in three verses and three choruses. And in “Disco Demolition,” I had to say, “Okay. Here’s why it happened. Here’s what happened. Here’s the aftermath.” And I very much wanted to make the point that you just said, which I do in the third verse, that it was “A bonfire set ablaze by a fear of sex and race in a time when we all should have hung our head in disgrace.” It’s true. But you’re right. At the time, there wasn’t an awareness of that. I’m trying to flashback to 19-year-old me, how I felt about certain things. I remember liking Chic. I actually thought Chic was a pretty hit band at the time even as I listened to punk rock. Those records sounded great and there were things I liked. But, for someone like me, punk rock just wiped the table and changed everything. But disco was equally exciting and subversive and against the mainstream. It was saying, “We are making our own culture here in New York that we don’t even care what happened before. This is what’s happening now and we love this.” And the fact that it was so divisive and made people so angry, reflects badly on the buttons that was pushing for those people.

Baltin: It’s remarkable how much of a precursor that was for everything that’s happened in the last, let’s say eight years when you enter the Trump presidency and how divided and how intolerant we were. And it’s interesting because in a lot of the ‘70s, there wasn’t that and disco was one of the things that really opened it up to be openly hateful.

Wynn: Yeah, it was one of those cases we’ve seen since then over the years of, “I don’t like what those people are doing. I don’t feel comfortable with what I’m seeing over there.” Now I think about someone like Steve Dahl for example, who was a rock ‘n’ roll DJ. And I’d like to give him the benefit of the doubt and say, some people just said, I’m hearing what is mainstream disco and thinking it is not the music I like. And maybe it’s taking away somehow from rock music. Maybe, for him, it had nothing to do with any of the negative things we’re talking about. You could say, “Hey, I just happened to like Bruce Springsteen and I just happened to like The Rolling Stones and this doesn’t fit into my plan.” But I’ll tell you what, you know who liked disco? Bruce Springsteen and the Rolling Stones. They embraced it. ‘Cause they were curious artists and they said, “Yeah. I hear stuff that I can work with.” So who’s to say. I think what actually happened shocked everyone because like you say, it opened it up just like Donald Trump has over the last six years. It just gave people license to be ugly. And went, “Oh. I’ve been thinking all these things and feeling all these things, but you’re saying it’s okay to go out and act on it. Well, great, here we go.” And I think that was the scariest thing about what happened on July 12, 1979 and what’s happened in the last 10 years.

Baltin: This is a night that’s 40-something years ago. And again, only because I spoke about it with Nile Rodgers in the last couple years have I ever thought about it. So I’m curious, was it something that just popped up in your head or is it something that you’ve thought about often over the years?

Wynn: Well, at The Baseball Project we’re on to our fourth and kind of fifth album, ’cause we did a collection for ESPN. So we’ve written and recorded like maybe 70 or 80 songs about baseball. So we’re always looking for something to write about. We’re always thinking about things. And we’ll be the first to admit our sweet spot of engagement with topics is the ‘60s and ‘70s and even ‘80s when we were particularly young and new to all this stuff. And so, I think in the back of my mind for some time now, I know I wanted to write a song about the Disco Demolition Night. It was just a great story. And there’s a lot to say about it. This was probably first about five years ago, I had the idea. And I knew the basic outline. I knew this crazy event happened. I knew a game was canceled. I knew people went bonkers. I knew the field blew up. I knew all these things. And I’ll be honest, I hadn’t thought that much about the political and social background of the event. I didn’t think that much about what people did because I hadn’t seen anything about it. And once I started to write the song, I started looking online. I watched the special ESPN did about that. I found a lot of YouTube clips. And the more I dove in, the more I was just shocked. I think the song turned around for me at that point. It even for me turned around from being what a wacky day that was to who can believe that to this is really awful.

Baltin: How did your views change over the years?

Wynn: The thing that I wrote into the song, which I thought was interesting, I think about young punk rock and Steve way back in the ‘70s. How I like this and I don’t like that. I don’t like hippie music. I don’t like music that goes on with long prog jams. I now play in a band, The Dream Syndicate, that does long prog hippie jams and I’m totally fine with it. But over the years, like I said in the song, the ugliest of frat boy culture has embraced funky type music. Hey, disco sucks. But Limp Bizkit, that’s okay. That’s kind of funny how you over time, the things that are seen as scary and other become just part of the fabric of mainstream. It’s a good lesson to just not be closed-minded about stuff.

Baltin: It’s interesting how it was okay when rock artists adopted disco.

Wynn: Exactly. Nobody had a problem with “Miss You” by the Stones. It was a big hit ’cause the Rolling Stones were doing the four-on-the-floor boom, boom, boom kind of beat and that was okay. But I don’t know about Donna Summer. Now they listen to, my God, “I Feel Love” or “Hot Stuff,” great songs. When you talk about Nile Rodgers, I think about how hurtful that must have been for someone like him, a serious artist, a trailblazer artist who made incredible influential records at the time being told, “Your music sucks.” It’s definitely the fear of the other plays into all these things. And I don’t expect everybody to like every music but maybe give it a shot. Open your ears.

Baltin: Talk about the importance then of letting people know this happened. It seemed funny at the time, but you realize it was really serious.

Wynn: It seemed funny at the time ’cause all we saw were little bits in the newspaper and Sports Illustrated, maybe a clip on the evening news. I can’t remember if that was on there. But it wasn’t like now where you can just flip on YouTube and see endless visual evidence of it. And when you look at what happened, oh, my God. I don’t know if I ever saw footage from the event until the last five years. I just didn’t hadn’t looked it up, whatever. And what you’re saying is it did seem funny. It just seemed like, “Oh. They had a Disco Sucks Night and people went nuts and they called off the game.” But you look at what happened and it was really awful and ugly.

Baltin: Tell me about the video.

Wynn: We had the idea not too long ago. “Wouldn’t it be great if that guy [James Blagden] who did the Dock Ellis ‘No-No’ video, did a similar historical, psychedelic treatment of the song?” We approached James Blagden, who did the “No-No” video. And he said, “I’d love to.” He was right on it. So that was great. And I just saw the video for the first time about five days ago. I had seen a few drawings, a few sketches, but I saw it for the first time. I love it. I just think it’s such a great work, he did such a fantastic job. And it’s like you’re saying, it’s first and foremost, an entertaining video, but he matches visually what I’m saying lyrically in the song, the message that what went down there was maybe not so cool.

Baltin: You mentioned the Dock Ellis No-No. I know what that is. A lot of people are not going to know what that is. This guy pitched a no hitter while on LSD which was turned into an animated video.

Wynn: If you could sum up baseball in the ‘70s in two things, you could just say, “Well, here’s how baseball was different back then now. One, a guy threw a no-hitter on acid. And two, people blew up a bunch of disco records on the stadium field to the point where the game had to be canceled.” [laughter] Those are two very ’70s things. I can’t imagine either of those things happening now in any way. No. Not a chance. But yeah. The Dock Ellis thing, and the simple short version of it is, for the readers is he was a great pitcher in the ’70s who liked to party and took acid thinking he wasn’t pitching for a while. And it was a trip that had a lingering effect and he didn’t realize, but he was still tripping while it was time to get down to start the game. And he was like, “Well, here I go.” And threw a no-hitter in which he walked a lot of guys. He was throwing the ball all over the place. But the video that James Blackton did for that was so popular ’cause it spoke to not just sports fans or baseball fans, but people who just like weird moments in his history. I would say anybody who’s reading this who hasn’t seen it, just go on YouTube and put in Dock Ellis no-hitter acid and it’ll come up and it’s fantastic. It’s a great video.

Baltin: Recently on YouTube, I found some old videos of the George Brett Pine Tar Incident. Are there those defining moments for you that you haven’t written about yet?

Wynn: Yeah, I think we have many more records we can make because there’s always more to write about. I think the George Brett incident would be a great song. I don’t know how we’d write it. When we write a song on The Baseball Project, it’s not just our typical editorial board meeting as I like to call them because they’re more closer to being on a newspaper than to being in a band sometimes. I would probably go to Scott [McCaughey] and say, “I’m gonna write a song about the George Brett Pine Tar incident.” And Scott would say, “Well, what’s the angle? What are you gonna say?” It’s not enough to write about it. You’ve got to have something you want to say. And this would be how a song would develop very different from writing songs for any of our other bands. I guarantee REM and Dream Syndicate and Minus 5 and Zu, the Pedal songs weren’t done that way. Baseball Projects, we really think about all the ramifications of what the song is trying to say, which makes it a really fun band to write for. And also, which I always say this, speaking for Forbes or speaking to you who’s a lapsed baseball fan, you don’t have to like baseball to like The Baseball Project. We’re just telling universal stories. We find the story there that might connect to a non-baseball fan. I say people should be no more afraid of The Baseball Project if they don’t like baseball than they should have been of disco if they didn’t like disco. It’s all good.

Baltin: As a fan, who’s your favorite player of all time?

Wynn: Sandy Koufax. I don’t even hesitate. So there’s the Angeleno in me, I’m LA guy, I’m Jewish. He was a Jewish ball player. I think he had a very rock and roll career. Had five amazing years and walked away. He is like the epitome of it’s better to burn out than fade away. Now the reason for that was he had terrible arm troubles and he was in pain all the time, but he left. He quit at 30 years old at the top of his game and I thought that was such a unique thing. Plus he was just a great pitcher, the epitome of LA, all that stuff. Great names too. Very cool. Rock and roll kind of name. Sandy Koufax.