The most compelling interviewee is Vince Lawrence, an early pioneer of Chicago house music who worked at Comiskey that night as an usher. As a young black man surrounded by crazed white people intent on burning records by mostly black artists—even records that weren’t actually disco—Lawrence could only see Disco Demolition Night as thinly veiled racism. He convincingly connects the riot to a racially motivated beating he once received not far from the stadium. “Steve Dahl from my perspective was the same sort of person resisting the same sort of change,” Lawrence concludes.
