Buffalo, N.Y. (WBEN) - Disco is not dead.
7,000 people will descend upon the Buffalo Convention Center at 9 p.m. on Saturday for the annual World's Largest Disco, which is now in its 32nd year. The makeup of the crowd consists of those that were around for the era of wide-collared shirts and bell-bottoms, along with those who grew up hearing stories of that time and want a piece of the nostalgia.
Founder Dave Pietrowski noticed the generational bridge after seeing a decline in attendance about 15 years ago.
"We started to see a decline. We would sellout but we would sellout later and later and later," Pietrowski told WBEN on Friday. "So I called people up that were going for years that had stopped going and were in their 50s and said 'what's up?' The response was almost universally the same, 'we just don't do stuff like that. We don't go out."
Those same people eventually came back.
"Five years later I saw the same people back on the list so I called them again and said 'what's going on?' And they said 'when we were younger, we'd have a party in our neighborhood and our kids were all there and they'd watch and they'd point and they'd laugh. And now they're 21, so now we're going with our kids.'"
So what is it that makes the era of disco so appealing to today's youth? Pietrowski says the music is a drawing point.
"It's fun. The lyrics are real easy. You can understand them, people sing along. And so much of the music from the '70s is sampled in music from the 2000s to today."
Several charities, including Camp Good Days and Ronald McDonald House benefit from the Disco. Almost $9 million has been donated over the event's 32 year history.