Four decades later, Disco Demolition Night has not aged well.

"This wouldn't have happened if they had country and western night."
-- White Sox pitcher Rich Wortham

To me, the infamous Disco Demolition Night in Chicago forty years ago is an excellent case study for the merits of revising one's point of view when new information arises. Put another way, there really aren't purely musical sentiments in which "disco sucks" can be isolated from cultural contexts, even if it seemed so to us at the time. Back then I was pushing 19 years of age and delighted to see disco taking it on the chin, but in truth I lacked the emotional maturity necessary to understand what Dave Marsh wrote at the time:

White males, eighteen to thirty-four are the most likely to see disco as the product of homosexuals, blacks, and Latins, and therefore they're the most likely to respond to appeals to wipe out such threats to their security. It goes almost without saying that such appeals are racist and sexist, but broadcasting has never been an especially civil-libertarian medium.

Now, I know better. It goes to show that when the facts change, or when a persuasive and factual counter-argument appears, reasonable people can and do change their minds.

Why are the Chicago White Sox commemorating Disco Demolition Night? at The Economist

On July 12th 1979 disco records were destroyed as part of the in-match entertainment. It has come to be seen as an appalling act of prejudice

ON THURSDAY nights the Chicago White Sox give something back to baseball fans, usually T-shirts for the first 10,000 people through the gates of Guaranteed Rate Field. On July 4th the garment is a handsome navy-blue number to mark Independence Day; on July 25th they remember the legendary Sox team of 1983 with a “Miracle on 35th Street” tee. And today, June 13th, when they play the New York Yankees, they are planning to commemorate one of the strangest—and, for many people, most disgraceful—episodes in their history with a T-shirt bearing the legend: “Disco Demolition – the night records were broken.”

Disco Demolition Night took place on July 12th 1979 at the Sox’s old stadium, Comiskey Park. Trying to boost attendance in a season of poor crowds, the Sox invited a local DJ named Steve Dahl to provide some entertainment between the first and second games of a double-header against the Detroit Tigers. Mr Dahl, a rock DJ, had lost his slot at a radio station when it switched formats to disco, and when he got a new job he made much of his unequivocal hatred of the music. This hatred was to be the entertainment for fans. Mr Dahl invited his listeners to bring disco records to the ballpark where he would blow them up, to “end disco once and for all” ...

The story of Cross Section's 1979 Quadrophenia soundtrack cover of "Hi Heel Sneakers" by Tommy Tucker.

All the way back in 1979 I bought the double LP of the soundtrack to the Quadrophenia movie.

It repeats much of the Who's album of the same name, plus a generous share of re-recordings, which may be subtly different (there are an abundance of grace notes on "I'm One," for instance), but different, more produced all the same. Even better, they're all pretty good, and help give this a different -- yet, again, subtly different -- feel than the album that's welcome.

Then there's the last side of the record, containing a bunch of mod anthems -- which means there's a bunch of early-'60s soul, plus a couple of girl group numbers and "Louie Louie," all of which are familiar, yet still offer a good portrait of what mods actually listened to. Along the way, a song by the High Numbers -- the early incarnation of the Who -- is thrown in for good measure, along with the Cross Section's take on "Hi Heel Sneakers," plus three new songs, all added to assist the film narrative, all enjoyable but only "Four Faces" really standing out (and it sounds more Who by Numbers than Quadrophenia, anyway).

Those three new Who songs were the rationale for my purchase; one of them including drumming by my teen idol Keith Moon (the Loon), who'd died the previous year, but in the final analysis the song that stuck with me all these years, regularly recurring, was Cross Section's cover of "Hi Heel Sneakers," a 1963 blues song by Tommy Tucker.

Here's the point: I've never had the slightest idea who or what Cross Section was, assuming it was a one-hit-wonder garage band from the early 1960s as preferred by Mods. I also was entire ignorant of the source recording.

It has taken me only 40 years to bother finding the answer.

Cross Section, The Band from Quadrophenia, by Simon Wells (Zani)

When 5 teenagers in 1978 saw an advert in the NME that read “Do you want Sex, Drugs and Rock and Roll?” you can imagine what they said! The advert was referring to the movie Quadrophenia, based on The Who’s 1973 studio album of the same name.

The movie was now being made, a young band was required to portray a band mid 1960’s playing in a club in London, this was to be a scene in the movie. A demo was sent as an answer to the advert plus a publicity shot. The band sat back and got on with their lives, namely school and playing in local clubs and pubs in Kent and South East England.

To their amazement, in the summer, the band auditioned along with many other hopeful groups that had been chosen out of hundreds of applicants. The list was narrowed down to 70 or so bands.

After playing live in front of a couple of members of The Who at the Electric Ballroom, Cross Section got to be the band of their choice. Roger Daltrey approached them after the audition in Camden High Street and, much to their disbelief, told them he liked what he heard, and popped the question -‘Would you cut your hair?” “Yeah I’d dye it green” said the drummer - naturally!

Tucker's original version is pretty good, too.

ON THE AVENUES: Ain't it funny how we all seem to look the same?

ON THE AVENUES: Ain't it funny how we all seem to look the same?

A weekly web column by Roger A. Baylor.

We emerged from the shadows of The Dolphin pub in Plymouth’s Barbican and began walking toward the harbor, the open sea visible in the distance to the south, when a steadily mounting, mechanized buzzing was heard around the corner.

Were we being pursued by lawnmowers?

Soon the street was filled with flashy vintage motor scooters, piloted mostly by older men wearing archaic clothing from some time long ago, and suddenly there came a devastating flashback from somewhere within my Indiana heartland soul … but why? How could someone like me, born and raised thousands of miles away, who never even visited England until 1998, possibly experience Sixties-back-dated déjà vu on a Devon quayside in the year 2009?

Quadrophenia, that’s how.

Unbeknownst to us, at least until the whirring eventually subsided and my wife’s cousin deigned to explain, the Who’s seminal 1973 album was being adapted and restaged as a musical by its writer, Pete Townshend. The show would be playing at the Theatre Royal Plymouth, and so we bought tickets and attended a performance. It was cleverly done, with a group of young vocalists and instrumentalists gleefully blasting their letter-perfect way through passages made immortal by Townshend (guitar and vocals), Roger Daltrey (vocals), John Entwistle (bass and brass) and Keith Moon (drums and percussion).

Tears were in my eyes throughout, because Quadrophenia always works that way for me.

---

The basic facts are well known. Quadrophenia was conceived by Townshend as a concept album embracing aspects of post-war British cultural history utterly remote from the American experience. Jimmy, the protagonist, is a Mod; on the other side of the contrasting ethos aisle are the Rockers. These rival gangs have everything in common when it comes to their shared white ethnicity and socio-economic futility in Great Britain; duly deprived of larger differences, they fight endlessly over small patches of turf defined primarily by styles, fashions and attitudes.

Jimmy’s personality is explained as a four-part disorder (perhaps “quad-polar” in amateur newspeak) of conflicting emotions, each of them further symbolized by a band member: Introspective “beggar” (Townshend); tough guy and “helpless dancer” (Daltrey); groping romantic (Entwistle) and manic lunatic (Moon). In turn, each of Jimmy’s personalities is scored as a musical theme, and in operatic fashion, these themes are stated through bookending instrumentals (“Quadrophenia” and “The Rock”), woven through the narrative, and brought to an epiphany in “Love Reign O’er Me.”

Arguably, Quadropenia is the Who’s aggregate musical pinnacle, fusing the players’ greatest individual strengths during a period just before weariness and attrition began taking their toll. Astoundingly, not one of them was 30 years old when Quadrophenia was recorded. As a whole, while oblique, Jimmy’s saga makes far better sense than that of Tommy, the group’s better known album. Upon release, Quadrophenia was no “instant” classic, but it has aged quite well, its deeper, layered textures successfully maturing over time. Like Pink Floyd’s The Wall, Quadrophenia’s universals are capable of creative reinvention apart from their original milieu. These days, Tommy seems positively impoverished by comparison.

However, Quadrophenia’s enduring resonance has less to do with the details of its birth and subsequent reincarnations than with an unquestioned, bedrock fact of the rock and roll canon in its most expansive sense, because in the end, the music’s all about me.

Pete Townshend, that distant Englishman, addressed me – one listener out of millions – with Quadrophenia, an album I first heard at 13 years of age and found utterly impenetrable, but a few short years later, gratefully embraced as fully capable of addressing the innermost labyrinths of my far-off Hoosier world in a way that was just plain uncanny, and remains inexplicable these many years later.

Why not?

That’s rock and roll.

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In retrospect, it is clear to me that from a very early age, I’ve harbored inclinations toward cantankerousness, rebellion and insolence. Curmudgeonly is my destiny. Granted, these traits took a while to coalesce into a doctrine for daily living. Like so many teenagers, I couldn’t always find words or principles to articulate my thoughts, and when I became aware of the Who and Townshend’s terse early statements of doubt, self-loathing and alienation (“Can’t Explain” and “Substitute”), contrasting with outbursts of aggression and bravado (“My Generation” and “Anyway Anyhow Anywhere”), they definitely were an influence.

But I can be a very slow learner and a very late bloomer. To grasp the broader implications of Quadrophenia, I had to grow a bit older and be knocked good and hard on the noggin in a metaphorical sense. My inevitable comeuppance came in 1979.

Although captivated by my philosophy and history courses, I was muddling disinterestedly through university, completely clueless about the future. Then, providentially, I met a girl, and for the first time ever, there was seeming clarity, because naturally, as with every TV show I’d viewed since the boob tube became my de facto babysitter in 1963, there would ensue a storybook romance, marriage, a career to pay the bills, children, softball, holidays … and so forth, until at last, decades later, I’d find myself seated in one of Thornton Wilder’s wooden stage chairs.

This stunningly short-lived relationship proved as providential as I’d imagined, only for all the “wrong” reasons – at the time. In retrospect, it simply isn’t possible to overstate my foolishness and immaturity; even worse, these conditions were just as uncomfortably obvious to me then. A lifetime of coddled pop song lyric gullibility was no preparation for a “happily ever after” plot line to be squashed unceremoniously underfoot, but there was a cassette handy for offering consolation: Quadrophenia. Pete knew what it felt like, and I listened to his prescription every day for weeks on end.

---

On February 16, the surviving members of the Who came to Louisville and staged a compelling revival of Quadrophenia, performed in its entirety. The story of how I first came to appreciate the album occurred a thousand or more years ago. It was the jumpstart to a process of self-discovery that happily hasn’t stopped since, and yet oddly, just as Pavlov’s famous mutt can’t remember exactly why he’s salivating, not a one of my founding Quadrophenia myths surfaced during last Saturday’s performance. Instead, I just enjoyed the music. The rest of the historical document just didn’t seem to matter.

Maybe Quadrophenia by the Who at the Yum Brands Arena isn’t very local at all, but when it comes to mythology, maybe we need it to be arena-sized, and not confined to a busker’s cubbyhole. Maybe we’re always looking for selected whole planet universals to help us sort through our own small pond particulars. Maybe music functions as just such a religion in my own innermost world.

Maybe I’m kidding myself, because I know it does.

Tears get in my eyes. Music like Quadrophenia always works that way for me.