Wax Trax Redux
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From such tempestuous origins was the label that introduced industrial rock to America born. Wax Trax’s fourth record was from an extremely challenging Belgian dance band called Front 242. “They toured with Ministry in 1983,” Nash notes, after the album came out, “and hit it off great. The rest is history.” The history, in this case, is ten years of extremely rough and uncompromising mechanized dance conflagrations by such groups as Ministry, Meat Beat Manifesto, KLF, and My Life With the Thrill Kill Kult and a total of perhaps a million records sold. All of this culminated in this harsh music’s public acceptance, in the form of best-selling albums by Trent Reznor’s Nine Inch Nails and, of course, Jourgensen’s Ministry.
In its heyday Wax Trax sold a lot of records. So what put it into Chapter 11? An inability to put that success into a long-term operating plan, Nash says, plus lots of monetary losses. A distribution deal with England’s Play It Again Sam Records cost the company a quarter of a million. The massive shakeout in the indie distribution world in the late 80s–the collapse of Rough Trade and JEM, for example, which distributed for Wax Trax–cost lots, too. “You know, $80,000 here and $30,000 there and after a while, as they say, you’ve got real money,” Nash says.
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