12/13/2023 0 Comments Trax on wax records![]() They’re old photos of Dannie’s relatives. What about the LP art makes it your favorite? ![]() This was the collaboration between Luc van Acker, Richard 23 of Front 242, and Al from Ministry, and every song on it is great. The biggest thing for me on this record is the cover. Recently I just had one where someone wrote about going into the store with his girlfriend and being the biggest Ministry fan, and when they left the store with a Ministry 12-inch, his girlfriend told them, “Do you know that Al Jourgensen just rang you up?” These stories are so great and there’s so many of them. How was having him selling Chicagoans his own records?Ī lot of people send me emails and letters about this exact thing. Same goes for a lot of the artists on the roster. She actually liked that.Ĭhris Connelly worked at the label and the record store when you were working there. That album was actually the first Wax Trax! release that roped my mom into the label. It’s funny because your father met Dannie at a David Bowie show so it must’ve been a full-circle moment to have a record like this on the label.Įxactly. The title track on this record is in the documentary at a really poignant moment in the film. Chris Bruce and Bill Reiflin are both on it, two also phenomenally talented guys. It reminds me so much of Bowie, which is crazy because Chris Connelly now has a David Bowie tribute band. ![]() That was the first time Wax Trax! had licensed music from overseas to release here.Ĭhris Connelly! He is so talented. He got in touch with the band’s record label in Belgium and made it happen. But Front 242 were a band my dad brought into the store and wanted to license it here. “Cold Life” really kind of made the label and made things start happening for them. Front 242 started working with Wax Trax! after the success of Ministry’s “Cold Life” single in 1981. This was also a really important band for the label because there are two sides of Wax Trax!: the local Chicago label and the European bands who were licensed for their first releases in the US. For me, it’s a really great marker of time and that’s why I picked it. They played their first US show at Medusa’s here in Chicago and when I went to the show I was just like, “What is happening?” There were no instruments on stage and it was such a cool experience. It sounded like nothing I had ever heard before. I love that song “Human.” I don’t know what else more to tell you about it-just that I saw Front 242 for the first time in 1984 so I was only like 15 years old. ![]() Though the label had rocky years thanks to loose handshake deals and bankruptcy, the music stayed the primary focus for Nash and Flesher until their deaths. Combining locally signed acts like Ministry as well as licensing overseas artists for US releases like Front 242, Underworld, and the KLF, Wax Trax! is forever solidified in Chicago’s musical fabric. Thanks to label founders Jim Nash and Dannie Flesher, who met at a David Bowie concert and quickly became life partners, with their pervasive humor and unmatched ears for undersung talent, the label would sell over a million albums by its wide network of artists like Ministry, My Life With the Thrill Kill Kult, Revolting Cocks, and Front 242. It was home to the city’s misfits, and was a wildly influential hub of punk, new wave, and a pioneer in industrial music. Wax Trax! Records started as a humble Denver record shop but morphed into a cultural epicenter in Chicago during the 80s and 90s as a label and store. In Rank Your Records, we talk to artists who have amassed substantial discographies over the years and ask them to rate their releases in order of personal preference.
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