One of the shop’s regulars was Big Black frontman Steve Albini, who remembers the first Wax Trax! release proper in 1981, a 12-inch EP by Chicago punk band Strike Under. They brought cool bands to Chicago too, including the Ramones, who announced Wax Trax! to be best record store they had ever visited. It was a pop culture sanctuary for the people considered freaks and weirdos in Ronald Reagan’s America. Through its growing mail order operation, Wax Trax! provided a lifeline to young people stranded in one-horse towns all over the country. It was one of the few places in the USA where you could score a copy of the Kleenex EP in 1978 or later pick up the early Joy Division and Bauhaus releases. The store stocked material from the growing catalogues of Rough Trade, Factory and other European indie imprints. The Wax Trax! label was built on the foundation of the record shop, which relocated from Denver to Chicago at the end of 1978. Even for the 1970s, that was a pretty outré gag. At one point, Jim demanded that Dannie stop, and when a prostitute came over to start negotiating, the kids were told to throw open the door of the van and introduce themselves. Julia recounts a tale from her childhood when her dad and Dannie drove her and her brother through Chicago’s red light district in a van at night. It’s testament to his charm and essential decency that his ex-wife, the mother of Julia and Aaron, talks fondly about him in the film, but it’s clear he could be unhinged at times. Jim announced to his wife that he was gay and he was going to leave (“Because you don’t have a dick,” one commentator claims he said). When they fell in love, it caused something of a problem because Jim was married with two children. The pair met in 1972 – “We went to a David Bowie concert,” says Dannie in the film – and forged a friendship from their mutual admiration of leftfield British music like Bowie and Roxy Music. Lovers as well as business partners, Jim was a mercurial and wired character, capable of monumental acts of madness, while Dannie was sweet-natured and steady. It’s the two founders who make the Wax Trax! story so compelling. It’s a poignant eulogy to young lives lived fast. The newly unearthed grungy VHS footage catches the two label bosses hanging out with their artists, smoking spliffs, attacking one another, and generally having a great time, all long before the company ran into difficulties and Jim’s health started to fail. He headed back to his home state when he knew he was dying from AIDS, the same condition that took Jim in 1995. There’s lots from the Wax Trax! archives too, some of which the film shows being rescued from a barn in Arkansas, where Dannie Flesher had dumped it when he abandoned the music business in the late 1990s. ‘Industrial Accident: The Story Of Wax Trax! Records’ is produced by Jim Nash’s children Julia and Aaron, leaning on their own testimony and that of various former staff members of both the shop and the label, as well as assorted band members. It’s two decades since Wax Trax! ceased operations, but a fascinating documentary about the label is heading to a screen near you shortly. From the off, it was transgressive, erratic and drug-fuelled, and when it became a label as well as a record shop in the early 1980s, it employed the insane business model favoured by many other independent imprints of the day, with no written contracts (not even verbal agreements) and very little budget control. The label was ‘Brokeback Mountain’ gay, drunk cowboy, fetish-hetero gay. When Trent Reznor was making his name with Nine Inch Nails and delivering his own bon mots for the British music press, he described NIN as synth faggots, which makes for a pretty good description of much of Wax Trax!’s output – outside the mainstream, sexually ambiguous, electronic at heart, and avowedly confrontational. In doing so, it built the pockmarked runway for the likes of Nine Inch Nails, as well as Gary Numan’s industrial synth reinvention. Founded by Jim Nash and Dannie Flesher, and starting out as a record shop in Denver, Colorado, in 1975, Wax Trax! gave the world Ministry, Revolting Cocks, Pailhead, My Life With The Thrill Kill Kult, and a slew of other sample heavy electronic punk outfits that defined the underground of the era. If ever there was a record label that deserved its story telling, it’s Wax Trax!, the Chicago home of industrial music of the 1980s. It’s the story of one of the most exciting labels ever, an imprint that lodged its idiosyncratic brand of dark ‘n’ dirty electronic music deep into the American heartland ‘Industrial accident: the story of Wax Trax! Records’ is a forthcoming documentary about… wait for it… Wax Trax! Records.
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