A TEAM FOR THE AGES
On August 11, 1978, less than a year before Disco Demolition, Janet Joliat married Steve Dahl. They have endured the magnitude of Disco Demolition, Steve’s battle with alcoholism, job instability. The Dahls have raised three wonderful sons.
None of the Dahls like disco.
Janet Dahl sat alone on the sofa in their southwest suburban Chicago home. “[Steve is] introverted. I don’t think a lot of people know him really well. He’s not comfortable in the world.” She looked around the living room and continued, “This is his safe house. He is very happy with a snack tray and a television set. Steve married everything he wasn’t; he was uneducated and he married a teacher going to law school. He was shy and he married a blabber. He had a very dysfunctional family and he married into this grounded Irish-German family. I was a lifeline for him and he was an adventure for me.
“The disco thing was very validating for him. He was speaking. And someone was listening. It wasn’t about causing trouble and making money. He was uncomfortable doing it. He looked goofy and chubby, his hair was bad, and he was breaking records on his head. But to be embraced was validating for someone like him.
“He was honored he was touching people. And he was touched back.”
Janet Joliat grew up in Royal Oak, Michigan. Her father Tom sold heating and air conditioning systems for commercial buildings, while her mother Elaine raised Janet and her five siblings. In 1976, Janet was twenty-six years old, teaching at Bloomfield Hills Junior High School. She listened to Steve Dahl on WABX-FM during her morning commute.
“Detroit was a hard rocking town,” she said. “I felt an affiliation with his music selections. He played California rock. The first time I heard Bruce Springsteen, he was playing it. I was dating his best friend, and we met that way. And the next thing you know, I was dating him.”
Janet and Steve owned similar record collections. They had albums by the Eagles. Jackson Browne. Dan Fogelberg. She said, “We were compatible, but he had been in a very short marriage and sort of ran away from home. He needed nurturing. My parents weren’t happy. He was bouncing from station to station.
“When we started dating he seemed vulnerable. All of his bravado seemed fake to me. He’d come to Detroit in a hideous turquoise Subaru with an after market air conditioner. When I’d see him rolling around in that car, I’d think, ‘That is the stupidest car I’ve ever seen.’ I wanted my radio guy to be more glamorous than this car. So he saved all his money and bought a 1976 BMW. It was Band-Aid brown, it looked dumb, and he paid a lot of money for it. But it was, ‘I’m a DJ now; I’m hip and I have this car.’
Steve and Janet dated for eighteen months before getting married.
It hasn’t been easy, but they stayed together for their children. Patrick, thirty-five, works Banner Collective, a branch of the Wirtz Corporation; Michael, thirty-three, is a producer at the Leo Burnett advertising agency; Matthew, thirty-one, is a video editor at Mr. Skin and a firefighter in LaGrange Park.
“Steve comes from an alcoholic mom and dad and an alcoholic brother,” she said. “He didn’t know anything else. He had no idea about a family life. I didn’t even realize he was an alcoholic. I was probably the classic enabler because I didn’t see the signs. I was left to raise the kids. He slept in the morning. Worked in the afternoon. Drank after work. Sobered up and came home. It was hard. He went from being a compensating drinker where he would get jolly and hang out with people to becoming really vitriolic. It was like his liver decided not to filter anymore. He knew he was on borrowed time. He had to stop. We had a thirteen-year-old who was taking notes. It was getting harder to say, ‘Dad’s got the flu.’ But Steve is shy, and for ten years it was a good social lubricant for him. And then for five years it was a terrible deterioration where he was angry and kind of lost. It was very dark. Those were the years surrounding the end of the Steve and Garry [Meier] partnership.
“But I was not ready to give up.”
And then Dahl quit drinking.
It was June 24, 1995, during rehearsal for the next evening’s Navy Pier concert with Steve Dahl & the Dahlfins with special guest Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys. “I just stopped,” Dahl said in a separate interview. “I didn’t think I would be able to help my boys make it through high school with ‘Do as I say, not as I do.’”
Janet’s resolve was wavering. The Dahl boys were entering their rebellious teenage years. “I’m a sleeper and he’s an insonmniac,” she said. “After he stopped [drinking], for eight years he was up every night until they were home. He knew what to look for. They would have gamed me so much, but Steve was right there.”
Former White Sox left hander Ken Kravec was scheduled to start the second game of the Disco Demolition double-header. “I used to listen to Steve Dahl every morning,” Kravec said in an interview. “Every day he talked about how he hated disco. He was way ahead of his time as a ‘Shock Jock.’ I did the White Sox fantasy camps for over twenty years. [In 2010], they brought in Steve Dahl for the fantasy camp.”
Dahl played first base, coached by the late pitcher Kevin Hickey and former outfielder Harold Baines. “You thought some crazy guy was going to show up with a shtick still playing that role,” Kravec said. “But he was older, more mature and mellow. He obviously had moved on and went down a different road. Good for him.”
Roman J. Sawczak was guitarist and musical director for Dahl’s band Teenage Radiation in the 1980s. He played on the “Do Ya’ Think I’m Disco” recording, and during the mid-1980s, he was executive producer for Dahl and Meier’s radio show on WLUP. Sawczak knew Dahl very well, but now they rarely speak.
“The day I heard he sobered up, I was so happy,” Sawczak said from his home in Dyer, Indiana. “I guarantee you he would not be here today. Steve was an extremist. When he was good, I don’t know if I’ve known anybody more generous. But I don’t know if I worked with anybody that’s been more of a jerk. Now I imagine it’s not as much up and down. We were doing cool gigs with Teenage Radiation, and we’d do two hours. One time at the Park West I think we played three songs. He’d start drinking and going off on tangents. Then when we got to the song, we’d have to stop and start because he forgot the words. We’d stand there and go, ‘Is this any fun anymore?’ And it wasn’t. But I have no hard feelings on Steve about anything. I’m more grateful and thankful than ever.
“And disco still sucks.”
Darlene Jackson, known internationally as DJ Lady D, is considered a house music pioneer. She also happens to be a producer, owner of the D’lectable Music label, and a single mother. She has played Lollapalloza in Chicago and performed disco and techno sets in Asia and Europe.
In the mid-1990s, Jackson was working as a suite attendant for a Ringling Brothers Barnum & Bailey Circus performance where Dahl and his family were guests. “I was thinking I wasn’t going to like him,” Jackson told me at a coffee shop in Chicago’s Ukrainian Village. “He was actually really nice. He mellowed [after he quit drinking]. Looking back, the emotional arc of Disco Demolition is that you had this outward moment of hate, highly focused onto a specific thing: disco music. After closer examination, it revealed itself to have racist and homophobic aspects. That may have not been Steve Dahl’s mind frame at the time, but it came from somewhere. And it reverberated. Energy in, energy out.”
When Dahl lost his job at JACK-FM in Chicago in December 2010, his wife was concerned. Joe Walsh’s “Life’s Been Good” was the final song he played before he signed off the air. “That was his life work, he was repudiated; time had passed him by,” she reflected. “And that was at Christmas. He was devastated but resolved. He really likes communicating. He likes being the guy in the car. If there was a moment, I would think that’s the moment he would have said, ‘I’ll just have one drink; it’s Christmas.’ But he is very determined.
“He realizes he is a better man.”