CHILDREN OF A REVOLUTION
‘Industrial Accident’ doc explores Wax Trax! Records as an LGBTQI+ pioneer
In a 1990 interview, Wax Trax! Records co-founder Jim Nash said he just wanted to get the music he liked into the spaces he frequented — they just happened to predominantly be gay clubs.
During a “hush hush” era of American sexual and identity politics, Nash and his partner (in life and in business for 27 years) Dannie Flesher opened Wax Trax! Records — first in Denver, Colo., then in Chicago’s Lincoln Park, where it became the preeminent store and label for discovering music from the most exciting acts in punk, rockabilly, disco, new wave and glam rock, as well as the burgeoning “industrial” genre led by Ministry, Front 242, KMFDM, Revolting Cocks, My Life with the Thrill Kill Kult and more.
From 1978 to 1992, the store and label (officially established in ’81) thrived as guided by the pair — providing a place for everyone: nonbinary folks, drag queens, weirdos, punks, goths and rave kids; bands (both homegrown and international), locals and tourists to coexist; never compromising their vision of
what pop music could sound like or who was allowed to make it.
Its legacy, as a local institution and popular music cultural touchstone, is far from forgotten. While Nash and Flesher have both passed away due to complications from AIDS, in 1995 and 2010 respectively, the mark they left on Chicago has since been celebrated with a three-day “Retrospectacle” (benefiting Center on Halsted, the largest LGBTQI+ resource nonprofit in the Midwest) at Metro in 2011. Meanwhile,
the influence of the bands that built the label’s roster can be heard across genres and movements from queercore to EDM. Nash’s daughter Julia even revived the label’s imprint in 2014, 13 years after Wax Trax! officially closed its doors.
Last year, “Industrial Accident: The Story of Wax Trax! Records,” the selfproduced documentary film written and directed by Julia Nash and illustrator/partner Mark Skillicorn, aimed to tell the whole history of her father’s oft-chaotic independent music experiment. To tell the most complete story, the first daughter of the city’s industrial dance scene pointed the lens at the relationship at the heart of everything.
In just over 94 minutes, the film simultaneously establishes and explodes Wax Trax’s and the industrial genre’s queer history — while making the case for why it should be further explored and celebrated along the way.
“Wax Trax was a community of people, all kinds of people, who didn’t feel like they belonged or were appreciated, or acknowledged or accepted in other places,” Nash says. “That was what I was hoping would resonate with people throughout the movie; the vibe of family — my dad, that store, that label, it welcomed everybody. The gay community, I think it was just along the same lines of they were outcasts. Any of these little subsets were outcasts, and they all found a comfortable place and a home at Wax Trax! It just so happens these two guys were gay. A lot of people found that out in the movie.”
Built on a love of early nonconformist acts like David Bowie, T. Rex and Roxy Music and transgressive cult films like those by writer/director John Waters, Jim Nash and Flesher created much more than what Metro owner Joe Shanahan once called “the marketplace for the disenfranchised.”
For LGBTQI+ music fans and culture consumers, Nash and Flesher’s Wax Trax! was an alternative world within the much harsher confines of the Midwest — free from stereotypes and predefined expectations or expressions of sexuality and gender.
During Wax Trax!’s prominence, what was thought of as “mainstream” gay culture was dominated by inoffensive, commercial pop from groups like Culture Club and Wham! Disco was on its way out (at least with the straight, white men controlling the music industry), and the most subversive tunes — made by queer black and brown artists and those abroad — were further relegated to the underground. Freedoms, and therefore consequences that came with being “out” seemed reserved for
those in New York and LA. At the same time media and government hysteria over the impending AIDS crisis and faux moral outrage surrounding what was considered a “deviant lifestyle choice” were enough to keep everyone else closeted.
“It’s just honesty, you know? The whole thing is honest,” Nash continues, discussing “Industrial Accident’s” direct framing of part of her family’s history. “And, to be completely transparent on the whole gay culture/AIDS — again, to really embrace that and discuss that in the movie, there are so many levels and different stories throughout this film, you couldn’t — we simply could not, we had to stay focused on this particular flow that we had. You could go right into the early ’80s and the ’90s with the AIDS epidemic, and I wanted to, and originally we had different footage — but eventually it was like ‘Look, we all know what happened. Why do we need to re-educate? This is the facts.’ ”
Instead, she let those who were there do the talking.
In the film, former employee Steve Knutson says, “Being an out, gay couple at that time where they lived in Kansas and Denver was a big deal. And they didn’t apologize for it, they didn’t hide from it … They didn’t care what anybody thought.”
Nash’s ex-wife, Jeanne Payne — with whom he remained close until his death, also appears throughout.
“I really thought he was having an affair with this girl who was hanging around all the time,” Payne says in the documentary. “Turns out he was having an affair, it just went a little differently.
“He was acknowledging something in himself that he had a difficult time accepting, and didn’t want to change his life because of the life we had. We were happy,” she continues. “But the two of them fell in love, and you can’t choose who you fall in love with.”
“At times during making this, and during the editing process, I’d like sometimes ‘Would my dad be upset if I said this, or showed this, or played this?’ ” Julia Nash recounts. “No, maybe, I don’t know? But this is part of the story, this is what it’s about, you know? I wanted to hear the good, the bad, the ugly. This isn’t all rainbows and roses. There was some heavy s--- going on, talk about it.”
From its first pressing, a 7” release of John Waters’ muse, drag icon Divine’s debut “Born to Be Cheap,” to distributing what’s widely considered the first AIDS benefit single stateside — British experimental duo Coil’s 1985 drastically cover of Ed Cobb’s “Tainted Love” — the label always had a focus toward visceral anti-assimilationism, whether intentional or not.
As noted in Yetta Howard’s “The Queerness of Industrial Music,” many of the bands that made up the Wax Trax roster furthered that point-of-view through splicing instrumentation (sometimes made without actual instruments) with rudimentary, disruptive
“Wax Trax was a community of people, all kinds of people, who didn’t feel like they belonged or were appreciated, or acknowledged or accepted in other places.” — Jim Nash, co-founder
technology — deepening its musical ambiguity and incongruity. Embracing their very real social status as “outcasts” and unapologetically creating from the “sexual minoritarian experience,” as further cited, at the heart of the subculture they identified with — a new electronic expression was formed.
Taboos and stigmas around sex, fetish, religion and lack thereof, love and pain? Not here.
“Trash! Culture!” laughs My Life With The Thrill Kill Kult’s Franke Nardiello aka Groovie Mann on the elements driving the band’s production at the time. “This was all pre-internet, computers and iPhones! You’d move to the city to search out others like you or go out. Dannie and Jim, they were like brothers or parents to me — not gay icons. But when you get the gay sensibilities, when you come out, it can become a shared thing with others, like a language. It’s part of creativity for some, but not the basis. That freedom, in anyway, is inspiring.”
Nardiello met Nash and Flesher when he was 21 after moving to the city from Rockford; attending Columbia College and playing in the band Special Affect with Al Jourgensen (before his days in Ministry). While still underage, he frequented Dugan’s Bistro — a gay dance club in River North famous for a drag queen known as the Bearded Lady — only to be thrown out by the police.
But those experiences, which he’s descibed as “whole rooms flashing,” opened up his world. By the time he teamed up with Buzz McCoy (Marston Daley) in the late ’80s to establish TKK, the pair had honed their brand of avantgarde, industrialized disco that shook the status quo — marrying satirical Satanic obsession, psychosexual lyrical exploration and overt BDSM, leather daddy iconography with beats and riffs that interpolated the likes of Chic and lauded “camp” films like “Mommie Dearest.”
“‘Queer?’ ” Nardiello questions. “There wasn’t so much clarity then with sexuality, no one cared really. (Jim and Dannie) were just cool guys and whatever they did was their biz.
“I mean I sorta model my years that way, in terms of finding a partner to work with,” he continues. “It was cool that there was a collective of people who shared similar music and interests in turning others onto new finds, too. (Wax Trax and the music) played equal parts in sort of helping close the gap between people that were hung up.”
Also an employee of the store, he reiterates the sense of community Nash and Flesher fostered — especially as an alternative to the Boystown scene.
“Boystown had its own problems,” he sighs. “No one hung out in that scene, though — they accepted clones and jocky types, didn’t like freaks or hippie weirdos. Now it’s better, but I live in West Hollywood,” he laughs.
“I honor (Dannie and Jim) for many reasons, and believing in me,” Nardiello continues. “They both always backed me in expressing my ideas at the store in the beginning, pre-label. They launched me; helped me find who I am today, naturally. I think their belief in the things we all loved, music, proved that it generated a unity.”
After a few bad business deals, major labels signing Wax Trax artists to real contracts instead of handshake-agreements, and a sonic (arguably followed by an aligning social) trend toward hetero-masculinist, more explicitly violent industrial rock and numetal led by Nine Inch Nails, Tool, Marilyn Manson — even Korn, the lingering, early subversion of the pioneering generation’s more dance-minded tracks was once again out of fashion.
Today, in an almost fullcircle way, storied gay nightclub Berlin — which used to partner with the label to host release parties and special events — is the only local spot in the city that offers a recurring party exclusively dedicated to the Wax Trax! catalog and artists inspired by it. Resident DJ Greg Haus started the party with fellow resident Jena Max over a decade ago, and wrote about what Wax Trax! meant to him as he came into his own sexuality for National Coming Out Day in 2017.
“I truly believe that Wax Trax! being owned by a gay couple (Jim Nash and Dannie Flesher), and all of the out, queer, and gender nonconforming artists like TKK, Coil, etc. populating the label I loved made me feel comfortable with my sexuality in a way that mainstream LGBT culture simply couldn’t at the time,” Haus writes.
“If it wasn’t for that, I might not have had the strength to be honest about myself with my parents until years later. Jim and Dannie were out, but their ‘gayness’ didn’t define them. It was just a fact of life, which is the way it should be.” he continues. “It’s part of the reason the music and the store have such profound, personal meaning for me. Even now I work in a creative environment and still gravitate towards modern music and art that can inspire the next generation of queer weirdos to feel like they have a community when the mainstream might not speak to them.”
Haus thanked Wax Trax for being his “icon of hope,” adding, “even if you never wanted to be.”
The soundtrack to “Industrial Accident: The Story of Wax Trax! Records” was included as a special Record Store Day release and will be available in limited quantities at local record shops beginning Saturday.