“He was so intense,” says Julia Nash, daughter of the late Jim Nash, one of the architects of Wax Trax records. “Even in the hospital that night, he was just–I don’t know, there was this power. I don’t know the word for it, but it was amazing. Me and Dannie were there for his last breath, we were holding his hand, and something crazy came over the whole room.” Nash, a wisecracking entrepreneur, and his partner, Dannie Flesher, founded first a store and then a record label based on a mutual commitment to harsh music and blithe business practices. Their record label became the progenitor of industrial music before going bankrupt and being reborn in 1993. Nash died October 10 at 47, of symptoms brought on by AIDS.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Flesher was Nash’s partner, professionally and personally, for almost 25 years; Nash’s daughter, Julia, was the manager of the Wax Trax record store, which recently moved to Wicker Park. The intersection of Nash’s relationship with each is a tale worthy of a movie.
A variant on the venerable “there’s something I have to tell you” scene produced the news that Nash had a wife–and a three-year-old daughter and an infant boy to boot. “I left for California,” says Flesher. “I didn’t want anything to do with breaking up a family.”
Nash had always remained on good terms with his wife and family. “She never said one bad thing about my dad,” Julia says of her mother. His daughter moved to Chicago in 1986 and took over the retail arm of the business the next year.
Now Flesher concentrates on work. “It hits me when I sit down to think,” he says. The 25th anniversary of that warm February evening was just months away. “Half of me is gone, literally,” Flesher says. “I’m just lost sometimes.”
