House Music’s Civil War: Inside the Battle Over Trax Records Decades after the Chicago label changed dance music forever, former friends are locked in an intense feud over its past, present and future. Story:
Once he grasped the scope of the irregularities, Vince called Rachael, who has owned 50 percent of Trax since 2006, as a result of her divorce from Larry. “Rachael,” Vince remembers telling her, “Give [the songs] back. You’re making a mistake.” Rachael, he says, refused, and Vince says he got a message from Trax saying something to the effect of “We don’t have a contract [proving we own the songs], but we’re going to assert a claim anyway, until a court says otherwise.
In October, Vince and his lawyer, Sean Mulroney, filed a suit against Rachael, Trax, Sandyee Sherman, and the Sherman estate on behalf of the plaintiffs, 22 men and one woman, mostly Black, all of them first-wave Chicago house musicians. The plaintiffs claim they never signed contracts selling all the rights to their work to Larry, but that he — and later Rachael — simply registered the copyright to their work to Trax anyway.
Either way, on Sunday, Aug. 31, 1980, there was an explosion that set Smugglers ablaze. A man later identified as Randazzo was seen running from Smugglers. Larry ran away too, bleeding from the head. They both jumped in a car and sped away. Larry got third-degree burns and ended up in the hospital, according to Rachael.
He also bootlegged. Wurlitzer, as Vince remembers, had stopped producing the super-thick 78 rpm singles that fit its jukebox mechanism, so Larry was copying all kinds of music onto these chunky old 78s and selling them to enthusiasts. And after “Fantasy” came out, the way Rachael remembers it, they were a gang — Rachael, Vince, Jesse, and Jefferson. She says she and Vince used to take out Larry’s Corvette; she and Jefferson toured together, spent holidays together. As Jesse recalls in his memoir, Rachael gave him an added assist, persuading her pal, the late lawyer Jay B. Ross, to loan Jesse five grand to get Jesse’s label, Jes Say, off the ground. “Screaming Rachel … was once again an angel to me,” Jesse wrote.
BY THE EARLY 1990s, Larry was living at an address that would one day house notable Chicagoans — perhaps the most notable living Chicagoans of all, in fact: the Obamas. The former polka-records guy had moved into 5046 South Greenwood Ave., the six-bedroom brick Georgian in semi-urban Kenwood that would become the Obamas’ place in Chicago during all eight of their years in the White House.
But the giddy optimism of Rachael’s homecoming was soon replaced by something much darker. Not long after moving back to Chicago, she says, Larry hit her for the first time. It was over a vet’s bill. Boss, the Trax warehouse cat , needed $1,000 worth of care. They fought over it. “That was when he gave me my first black eye,” she says. On another occasion, Dec. 4, 1998, according to his arrest records, Larry “grabbed and jerked her left arm and slapped her” at Lake Point Tower.
Rachael and Larry had to use AuctionWeb — soon to be renamed eBay — to make ends meet. “Larry was totally on the Steiff thing,” says a longtime friend of the couple, fashion designer Michael White. Steiff: as in the much-coveted, high-end teddy bears. Larry was selling them on eBay for up to $2,000, according to White.
Larry and Rachael defaulted on the loan, according to a legal filing, and when the licenses didn’t cover the advance, they had to pay the advances back. And when they couldn’t do that, Casablanca collected on the debt. In 2006, the company obtained a court order, and one morning two Cook County sheriff’s deputies arrived at Lake Point Tower with some movers and seized computers, master tapes, filing cabinets, recording equipment, and anything that belonged to Trax.
In 2007, Casablanca licensed the classic Trax catalog to Demon Music Group, a company owned by the BBC that deals largely in entire vintage catalogs, often packaging them up as bargain-bin compilations sold in supermarkets. In 2012, Rachael and Larry got back ownership of Trax from Casablanca, but the deal that Casablanca struck with Demon giving it exclusive rights to the catalog remained in place.
LAKE POINT TOWER is a significant address. Famous athletes — Scottie Pippen, Sammy Sosa— have all called it home, as has former Obama adviser David Axelrod. When they let you past reception, toward the elevators, you pass a wall covered by a sheet of falling water. The elevators let out onto a large, empty, bright white room the shape of a triangle with the corners rounded off.
Vince says he knew early on that Larry was screwing him and the other artists. He never considered suing. Why? Partly because they couldn’t afford a lawsuit back then, but also because “it’s Uncle Larry.” The Trax kids had a kind of twisted attachment to Larry, according to Vince.
He thinks he didn’t sign papers to protect his share of Trax in the early days because in some, perhaps subconscious, sense he simply never expected a fair deal — so why reach for one? And if he’s not careful, he might teach that to London: “I consciously level the playing field so he understands he can do whatever the fuck he wants.” Part of that lesson, he says, requires getting the rights to his music back from Trax.
Trax says either that it has valid contracts or that valid contracts have been lost in its various ordeals, and provided a 1986 contract tofor Jefferson’s “Move Your Body .” Jefferson claims Trax has forged or amended his contracts, including the one for “Move Your Body.”
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