“So I said, ‘My son is going to have my, and I don’t give a fuck anymore.’” (Rachael denies the exchange happened “Vince fabricated that scenario,” she says.) “‘What you’re telling me is you know you have no deal, you know that it’s mine, and you’re not giving it to me unless I sue you?’” Vince recalls saying. 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, but we’re going to assert a claim anyway, until a court says otherwise.”
(Larry died in 2020 his widow, Sandyee Sherman, owns the other half.) “Rachael,” Vince remembers telling her, “Give back.
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. Paul Johnson, Celebrated Chicago House Producer, Dead at 50 It amounts to a civil war over the catalog of arguably the most important label in the history of house music. Vince and 22 original Trax artists are locked in a legal battle over the rights to their classic music with the current co-owner of the company, Rachael Cain, Vince’s onetime friend and Larry’s ex-wife. What Trax helped start has since synthesized into the $7-billion-a-year EDM business, and Chicago house has recently been growling through the mainstream in major ways: Beyoncé’s Renaissance and Drake’s Honestly, Nevermind, both from last year, were homages, with house grooves coursing through their tracks.īut today, the house of Trax is in disarray. in a loud, shrill, gorgeous, hormonally haywire kind of way. The latter song gave the world the first real taste of acid house, the subgenre that later crossed the Atlantic and took over youth culture in the U.K. Trax captured the Big Bang of a youth movement: It was the first label, in January 1984, to release house and, in the space of two years, put out both the genre-defining “Move Your Body (The House Music Anthem),” by Marshall Jefferson, and the genre redefining “Acid Trax,” by Phuture. It was what the world came to know as house music, and for all of its epochal innovation, Vince says it had a simple appeal: “It was the best we could do, and we knew it worked at the parties.” The result was a new sound - heavy, stripped-down, synthetic but groove-rich - made by Vince, his friend Jesse Saunders, and other, mostly Black, kids.
Amid that swirl, perfectly on-beat digital rhythms meant DJs could experiment with seamless mixing, and synthesizers were becoming affordable enough to be available outside of studios. At first, “house music” meant anything that the club’s DJ, Frankie Knuckles, played - disco, Italo disco, Philly soul, New Wave, even punk. It was “house” culture, named after a club called the Warehouse. A lot of what he and his friends were into, he remembers, “came from us reading GQ and wishing we were rich.”Īround then, there was a specific vibe at Chicago’s high school parties, downtown gay clubs, and on local radio - underground but not exclusive, sophisticated but not so preening that nobody wanted to dance. As a teenager in the late 1970s and early 1980s, he was urbane and in the know: He liked Izod shirts, white K-Swiss sneakers, and straight-leg jeans he ran hip parties, loved import records from Europe, and aspired to make music of his own. Vince grew up on the South Side of Chicago. IN THE EARLY DAYS of house music, nobody hustled harder than Vince Lawrence.
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