Three and a half decades along and still going strong, seminal Chicago house-music label Trax Records celebrates that 35th anniversary with an evening open house July 12, held at its Near West Side headquarters.
According to Trax Records owner and president Rachael Cain, a bevy of Trax house acts and DJs will be pumping the unmistakable high-octane dance beats — which, of course, sport a Chicago-shaped birthmark — at the Grand Avenue edifice housing Jay B. Ross Foundation and Royalty Retrieval Services.
Ross, the late entertainment attorney and philanthropist who served as Cain’s early champion and first manager, also “inspired all the artistic, as well as charitable, activities that have continued taking place in his creative beehive of a building,” Cain said.
Talent will include underground TV-and-music cult figure Marcus Mixx, producer-DJ Oliver Fade, DJ/multi-instrumentalist Gibs, LGBT hip-house practitioner (and new Trax Records signee) Mikey Everything, DJ Saladin (aka label manager Larry Saladin) — and Cain herself, in her dual role as flagship Trax artist Screamin’ Rachael.
House music emerged from disco’s ashes in early-1980s Chicago, and the genre’s most prominent record labels were local indie imprints: Trax and DJ International. Only Trax is still active; its extensive catalog encompasses music from house’s most hallowed names, including DJ/producers Frankie Knuckles, Marshall Jefferson, Ron Hardy, Mr. Fingers and Phuture.
“Trax represents the pantheon of house music,” noted Peter Raleigh, founder and co-owner of the label’s New York-based publishing company, Raleigh Music Group (which also administers the catalogs of such pantheon-dwellers as Elvis Presley, George Gershwin and Janis Joplin).
Trax’s origins date back to a day in 1985 when businessman Larry Sherman, who owned Precision Pressing Plant in Bridgeport, found a trio of youngsters knocking at his door ± nascent house producers Jesse Saunders and Vince Lawrence, together with vocalist Rachael Cain — looking to press up a vinyl disc of their inventive new sound, which didn’t yet have a name.
Cain was a rock singer so thoroughly repelled by overproduced disco’s stranglehold on radio airwaves and nightclub stages alike — “Someone told my agent I should be wearing ‘a nice disco dress,’” she recalled with a grimace — that she “rebelled” and began fronting her own punk band, Screamin’ Rachael and Remote.
Regularly holding it down at Space Place, a DIY nightspot in the Fulton Market warehouse district, Cain would find herself inexorably drawn to what was spinning at an adjacent venue called, simply, the Warehouse (from whence would come the “house” handle). It began one night when a young fan approached her to say that DJ Frankie Knuckles was mixing her song, “Fantasy,” at that neighboring venue.
Thus was Cain introduced to house, and she was instantly hooked — captivated by its stripped-down, emotionally direct musical approach, an aesthetic it shared with punk. She cut a house song of her own, “Fun With Bad Boys,” produced by future house legend Farley Keith and New York hip-hop-legend-in-progress Afrika Bambaataa.
The record industry began to take notice, though as Cain recalled with a laugh, she did have to guide some big-league record execs into house’s comparatively uncharted waters. One was Curtis Urbina, now owner and president of house label Quark Records: “I played my track for him, and he said, ‘When will it be finished?’ — and I said, ‘It IS finished!’”
Urbina explained in a phone call, “As a label A&R [talent executive] listening to these house tracks, they were so sparse it sounded like a demo. But the music had gotten into my brain.”
Cain describes working her way up to Trax Records’ top spot as “a learning curve,” mastering music-biz minutiae while continuing to record and perform. She then spent some time signed to an East Coast record company, and was living in New York in 2006 when Sherman requested Screamin’ Rachael come back to Trax. Cain agreed to return as a label artist — but only if appointed label president as well.
Cain took the reins when the trailblazing home of house was, as she put it, “already in a legendary place”; in addition to signing new artists, her overarching vision was and continues to be promoting house music’s identity as a fully established genre. To this day, as she pointed out, house — unlike most other varieties of popular music — “isn’t found in the Smithsonian, or even the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.” Cain is, in fact, planning to donate her extensive archives to the Chicago History Museum, for a proposed permanent house exhibition.
“I want to do for house what Sylvia Robinson did for hip-hop,” Cain declared. Having worked for music-industry giant Robinson in the ’90s, Cain considers the late recording artist and founder/CEO of foundational rap label Sugar Hill Records “my inspiration and mentor.”
In the early 2000s, pre-presidency, she’d taken what quickly proved to be a vital, transformative step toward raising house’s profile: securing digital distribution for the company’s recorded catalog. “I had the feeling then that the whole world of music was going to change,” she said, “and we were one of first labels to get onboard. Look what’s happened: the idea of any label not having digital distribution is unthinkable.”
For Cain and Trax, the flip side of deploying forward vision is simultaneously hewing closely to their roots — especially with new music. “Before we’d cut the vinyl for a record,” Cain said of Trax’s earlier years, “we’d give an acetate [test pressing] to Frankie Knuckles, who’d try it out on club dancefloors first. We let the public directly decide what they love.” Cain and company still get prospective Trax artists’ music to tastemaking DJs first — and mostly disregard an act’s social-media numbers, which can be manipulated.
“Rachael’s still doing it, all these years later; it’s amazing,” Quark Records’ Urbina reflected. The honorary title “Queen of House” — bestowed on Cain by early mentor Bambaataa, one of hip-hop’s most respected pioneers — “doesn’t even do her justice.”
Cain recently teamed up once again with another longtime mentor and collaborator, the rap deity and Rock and Roll Hall of Famer known as Grandmaster Melle Mel, on the slamming track “Boom Goes My Heart.” It’s one of numerous new Trax recordings slated to appear on an upcoming 35th anniversary compilation album.
Open-house attendees will hear selected songs from that package, as well as take in the facility’s recording studio and printing facility/art gallery, which also serves as intimate performance venue. Cain noted that framed art and label merchandise will be available for purchase, with proceeds benefiting Youth Communication Chicago, “an organization that has served Chicago teens for over 40 years.”
Colleen Theis, COO of The Orchard/Sony Music, Trax’s distributor, hails Cain’s dynamism as a performer and “lady boss,” steering an entity rich with “phenomenal slices of club history. House’s energy pulls you in; Rachael’s really learned the way to directly engage each listener individually.”
Adds music publisher Raleigh, “Today there’s a focus on [female] empowerment, on women owning and running their own businesses. And Rachael was ahead of that curve by 20 years.”
Moira McCormick is a local freelance writer.
