Wax Trax! Records radical legacy: Trust the artists

April 11-- Apr. 11--Jim Nash was one of those people who always seemed to be up to something, a wicked smile or a wry joke always in his pocket. He was a music fan who became a music enabler, a "yes" man to countless bands. He was a businessman who hated business. For more than a decade he ran the Wax Trax record store and label with the same free-form, rules-breaking creativity he admired in his artists.

Nash and his partner, Dannie Flesher, a loyal and level-headed confidante, are key players in the era documented by "Industrial Accident: The Story of Wax Trax! Records," directed and produced by Nash's daughter, Julia Nash. They share screen time with the artists, employees and scene regulars that were part of the community they helped build in Chicago during the late '70s and '80s.

But an even deeper story lies in the margins of the movie, one that has nothing to do with economic imperatives such as products, risk-reward oversight and bottom-line management. It is above all a story of trust -- the trust that Nash and Flesher put in their artists to create something out of nothing.

Beyond music that bred or influenced more commercially successful acts, from the transgressive industrial thump of Nine Inch Nails and Marilyn Manson to the brawling big-beat rave music of the Prodigy and the Chemical Brothers, the Wax Trax founders shaped a radical business model -- not that they ever thought of the label as anything as conventional as a business.

Instead, they suggested that label owners needed to be as creative as their artists, as open to new ideas for marketing and distribution as their bands were to reinventing sound and rhythm. Though there was nothing to suggest that Ministry or Front 242 would build an international audience when Wax Trax began releasing their recordings, Nash and Flesher put their artists first. They took financial risks because they not only trusted the music, but their own artistic instincts.

They were often denigrated as "bad businessmen," but in reality they just had a different conception of business than many of their peers. Just as they gravitated toward artists who didn't cater to mainstream convention, Nash and Flesher didn't believe that the business of music required them to carry a briefcase, sit behind a desk with an accounting ledger and play by traditional corporate rules. It was not a formula designed to ensure them lasting wealth or comfort, but what would've been the fun in that?

In contrast to the collage-like and often chaotic approach to life and art that guided Nash and Flesher, "Industrial Accident" is a relatively straight-forward documentary of a vital chapter in music history, one that turned a creative haven for Chicago misfits into a subculture that resonated worldwide. The documentary does not turn away from uncomfortable truths: Nash's break-up with his wife and family to make a new life with Flesher, his eventual self-inflicted bankruptcy, the struggle with AIDS that eventually killed him, at age 47, in 1995 (Flesher died at age 57 in 2010). But this is less a eulogy than a celebration of the music and the aesthetic Nash and Flesher nurtured.

The Wax Trax bands took a punk-rock approach to largely machine-driven sounds that combined elements of underground dance and electronic music, rock and the avant-garde. Some dubbed it "industrial disco," an umbrella term that included Ministry, Front 242, Underworld, KMFDM, and My Life With the Thrill Kill Kult, underground acts who didn't sound anything alike but went on to sell millions of records, in part because they carried the Wax Trax seal of approval. Though much of the music sounded ominous, dark, it also contained raging humor -- sometimes playfully camp, sometimes politically charged.

Yet as gleefully innovative as some of Wax Trax's music could be, the legacy of the Nash-Flesher partnership speaks to something even more profound amid the greed-is-good '80s. As skeptical -- and sometimes downright cynical -- as Nash in particular could be, his love of music and the people who made it was genuine. He gravitated toward the misfits because he himself felt like one. And, above all, he was always a fan, which is why before there was a label, there was a record store.

Like a cherished few Chicago whims that became institutions, the Wax Trax store on Lincoln Avenue was an island for misfit toys, a sanctuary in a city that at the time was largely inhospitable to the weird and the marginalized.

When out-of-towners looking for something left-of-center visited Chicago in the late '70s or early '80s, they inevitably were directed to the store and its wall to wall array of posters, records, band fliers and TV sets playing the latest videos by Cabaret Voltaire or Throbbing Gristle. It was like "we had entered this camp, gay enclave in the middle of this tough city," says David J of British goth-rockers Bauhaus, one of the interview subjects in "Industrial Accident."

Bauhaus arrived in Chicago at Nash's behest, and would play its first Chicago show at Tut's in 1980. Even though it hadn't yet released its first album, Bauhaus was already well-known to Wax Trax clientele because Nash had imported its early singles. The store became the Midwest's primary conduit for all things cutting edge, and in turn turned its customers into a community. At a time when European imports trickled into America from labels such as 4AD and Factory, Nash made his store the one place you could not only hear the music on a rolling soundtrack that blared from the speakers and TV monitors situated amid or above the stacks of merchandise, but buy it.

The stock included Joy Division's "Love Will Tear us Apart" single or Public Image Ltd.'s "metal box" album, housed in a movie film canister, as well as "oldies" that spoke just as eloquently to Nash's taste in the unconventional: a rare single by rockabilly wild man Hasil Adkins, a New York Dolls bootleg, colored vinyl from German art-rockers Can.

Nash didn't think of himself as a taste-maker so much as a ringleader, the guy who made things happen, and then stood back and enjoyed the party he had created out of nothing. He could be found vacuuming the store in the morning, and bantering with customers about the merits of the latest Slits EP behind the counter in the afternoon. Flesher was the guy who kept things running while Nash was plotting his next anti-social outrage, whether it was signing drag-queen Divine or giving Al Jourgensen an unlimited studio budget to create a multitude of side projects and spin-offs from his main gig as Ministry's marauding wild man.

It was not a logical way to run a business, and ended with Nash's rags-to-riches artists leaving the label for even more riches when the major labels dangled big-money contracts and wider distribution. It's telling that most of the bands interviewed in the movie who recorded for the label later bailed on Nash for the majors and often took their back catalogs with them.

But Nash believed in complete creative freedom for his artists, including the right to leave at any time. Trust was a concept in short supply at the time, especially for an industry that had built a multibillion-dollar business by exploiting artists. Any $300-an-hour lawyer would've told Nash and Flesher they were nuts. Instead, they treated the Wax Trax artists and bands as friends, co-conspirators, fellow mischief makers, rather than employees.

Nash and Flesher were trusting, but they were not naïve. They didn't see Wax Trax as their ticket to a mansion on the hill. Instead, they lived in apartments filled with records and off-beat artifacts, much like the record store they ran. "The plan was there wasn't any plan," Nash once said in a Tribune interview. "We weren't going after the Bananaramas of the day. The music we liked, it's not exactly pleasing."

That it ended up appealing to as many people as it did was a surprise. A year before he died, Nash wasn't lamenting the label's bankruptcy. He was still processing the notion that it had lasted as long as it did.

"I'm kind of proud and embarrassed at the same time," he said. "One part of me says anybody could do this. If I could do it, anybody could. Dannie and I have been so close to it, it never seemed like any big deal."

But it was. The Nash-Flesher legacy was more than the music. It was about the attitude that made the music possible.

As Chris Connelly, a key musical contributor on countless Wax Trax releases, once said of them, "Their willingness to take chances, nurture acts, and not worry about the business aspect was crucial. Yes, you could call it bad business for a label to be run this way if you view music as a product. But that's not how they thought of it. And that's why it lasted as long as it did and produced the music it did."

Greg Kot is a Tribune critic.

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