1979 · Behind the Songs
A drummer’s autobiography set to four-on-the-floor — burned at Disco Demolition Night, then reborn in a Pitbull smash.
In 1979, Chicago did what half of rock was doing: they made a disco record. But where some bands fumbled the assignment, the horn section from the Windy City attacked it with musicianship to spare. ‘Street Player,’ written by drummer Danny Seraphine and keyboardist David ‘Hawk’ Wolinski, runs 9:11 on the album Chicago 13, with an 8:44 dance mix and a 4:15 single edit. Columbia issued it as a single twice that year, first in October and then as a remix in November, and it stalled at No. 91 on the Billboard Hot Soul Singles chart. It was also the band’s last single to feature guitarist Donnie Dacus, who was replaced by Chris Pinnick after the Chicago 13 tour. A flop, then — except that ‘Street Player’ refused to die, returning decades later as one of the most sampled Chicago recordings ever.
Seraphine wrote the lyrics about his own upbringing in the city of Chicago, chronicling his time in street gangs and in a succession of teenage bands. He developed the music with Wolinski, who soon after recorded the song with his own band, Rufus, for their 1978 album Street Player, where it opened the record. The Rufus version is funkier and leaner; what Seraphine heard in his head, though, was bigger. While on a European tour with Chicago, he conceived the idea of reworking the song as a disco track in the vein of Rod Stewart’s ‘Da Ya Think I’m Sexy?’ — but, as he put it, with a higher level of musicianship. When the band’s former producer Phil Ramone agreed to the idea, Chicago cut their own version, with Peter Cetera handling the lead vocals.
The recording is a fascinating hybrid. To capture the relentless grooves of disco, Seraphine’s drum parts were looped, an unusual move for one of rock’s great drummers, and the dance mix — which opens with a timbale fill — pushes the four-on-the-floor kick drum and a louder hi-hat even further forward, adding a synthesizer overdub to the intro that the album version doesn’t have. The track also features a trumpet solo from Maynard Ferguson, the high-note legend, who was so taken with the session that he soon invited Seraphine to play on his own ‘Rocky II Disco.’ Walter Parazaider, Chicago’s saxophonist, later called the song the band’s answer to disco, while trombonist James Pankow described it as a relatively intelligent approach to disco. Cashbox heard a return to the band’s old horn-dominated sound; Record World called it bright and spirited with broad appeal, praising its light disco beat.
The timing could not have been worse. The twelve-inch single of ‘Street Player’ was among the records blown up at Disco Demolition Night, the infamous July 1979 promotion at Chicago’s Comiskey Park in which a crate of disco records was detonated between games of a White Sox doubleheader, touching off a riot. Chicago’s own disco single, by a Chicago band, went up in smoke in Chicago. The symbolism was almost too perfect. Disco’s commercial collapse was already underway, and ‘Street Player’ — a genuinely well-crafted record caught in a cultural backlash — never stood a chance at radio. AllMusic’s Lindsey Planer would later joke that the song could easily be mistaken for a Village People number, which is both a compliment to its groove and a measure of how thoroughly the era was buried.
Then came the second life. In the 1990s, producer Kenny Dope sampled the horn riff, the drums, and pieces of Cetera’s vocal for ‘The Bomb! (These Sounds Fall into My Mind),’ released as a single by the Bucketheads in 1995 — a top-twenty hit in several countries. Cetera first heard himself coming out of a barbershop radio in California’s San Bernardino Valley and did a double take: that’s me, he thought, I swear that’s me. The bigger aftershock arrived in 2009, when Pitbull, with Seraphine’s permission, built ‘I Know You Want Me (Calle Ocho)’ around the ‘Street Player’ horns. It became a top-five hit in the United States, the United Kingdom, and several other countries. In 2010, Seraphine received ASCAP’s Songwriter of the Year award for his share of the song. A disco flop had become, thirty years late, a global songwriting triumph.
The reassessment kept coming. In 2024, Forbes named ‘Street Player’ the greatest disco song of all time, a verdict that would have sounded like a prank in 1979. Beginning in the 2010s, Chicago restored the song to its live setlists, and in a 2017 interview Robert Lamm described it as a nod to EDM, hearing the track’s looped drums and four-on-the-floor pulse as a preview of electronic dance music. He wasn’t wrong: the song’s construction — a drummer looping himself, a synthesizer humming under the horns — anticipated production techniques that would dominate pop decades later. What sounded like bandwagon-jumping in 1979 now sounds like foresight.
What to listen for: the drums, obviously. Knowing Seraphine looped his own playing, you can hear the exact moment the human becomes the machine, the groove locking into a grid that still somehow breathes. Then Ferguson’s trumpet solo, which erupts out of the disco pulse like a guest from another genre entirely — which, of course, he was. Listen for the horns answering Cetera’s vocal lines, the old Chicago brass section proving it could swing at 120 beats per minute without losing its identity. And compare the album version with the dance mix if you can: the timbale fill that opens the remix, the louder hi-hat, the added synthesizer in the intro. It is the same song wearing two different decades, and both of them fit.
There is a pleasing symmetry to the story. A song about Chicago’s streets, written by a kid from those streets, was burned in a Chicago ballpark and then carried around the world by a rapper from Miami. ‘Street Player’ failed at everything it was supposed to do in 1979 and succeeded at everything else afterward. Put on the 9:11 album version, let the loop lock in, and hear a great band playing disco better than disco’s enemies ever admitted.