This article needs additional citations for verification .(August 2024) |
Norton Records | |
---|---|
Founded | 1986 |
Founder | Miriam Linna Billy Miller |
Genre | Rock |
Country of origin | U.S. |
Location | New York City |
Official website | www |
Norton Records is an American independent record label founded by musicians Miriam Linna and Billy Miller in 1986. The label concentrates on rock, rockabilly, primitive music, punk, garage rock and early rhythm and blues. [1] Most of its output, both new releases and reissues, is issued on vinyl.
Billy Miller first encountered Miriam Linna while she was drumming for The Cramps in 1976. The two were properly introduced one day in 1977 while Miller was vending at a record show; the two chatted about music and he sold Linna a copy of "You Must Be a Witch", a single by The Lollipop Shoppe. Miller later said, "You can't let a gal with taste like that slip away!" A year later, in 1978, Miller and Linna started Kicks, a magazine devoted to obscure rock, soul, and rockabilly. [2]
In 1986, the couple published an article in Kicks about West Virginia guitarist Hasil Adkins, for which the response was so intense that Linna and Miller decided to form a record label to reissue his music. They named their company after Ed Norton, Art Carney's character on The Honeymooners. Adkins had recorded about 15 singles in the 1950s, but many had never been released or collected on an LP. The label's debut release was a four-song 7" titled "Haze's House Party," soon followed by the Adkins compilation Out to Hunch. "We made 500 copies and prayed that it would sell," Linna recalled of the latter.[ citation needed ] In 1987, Norton released an Adkins 7" with two songs, and Miller co-produced recording sessions for a subsequent LP, The Wild Man. [3]
Along with previously unreleased discoveries, Linna and Miller have reissued hundreds of obscurities and classics from the 1950s and 1960s, and their label's extensive catalog also includes current talents. Notable artists released on Norton include Tommy James, Doug Sahm, Gene Vincent, Kim Fowley, Reigning Sound, King Coleman, Esquerita, Charlie Feathers, Flat Duo Jets, Ron Haydock, Flamin' Groovies co-founder Roy Loney, Terry Manning, Rudy Ray Moore, Ronnie Self, Jack Starr, Gene Summers, The Teenbeats, King Uszniewicz, Gino Washington, Andre Williams, and Link Wray. [1] In 2009, Norton released three outer space-themed Sun Ra compilations: Interplanetary Melodies, The Second Stop Is Jupiter and Rocket Ship Rock.
Norton releases also include themed singles series with special sleeve and label designs. The 45 RPM Jukebox Series in 1999, for example, featured nine singles by Pacific Northwest garage bands The Sonics and The Wailers in Etiquette Records/Norton sleeves. [4] The Rolling Stones Cover series of 7-inch records, pairing contemporary artists covering Stones songs, began in 2003 and features 32 split singles with London Records-styled graphics. [5] The Sun Records Jukebox Series collected 28 Sun label rarities by Carl Perkins, Roy Orbison and Sonny Burgess, among many others, on 14 split singles with classic Sun Records-inspired designs. Norton's El Paso Rock series of LPs and CDs chronicles the early days of the El Paso, Texas rock scene, beginning with the first recordings of Bobby Fuller, including the original 1964 pre-hit version of "I Fought the Law" first issued on Fuller's own Exeter label. Volume two in the series offers more Fuller in a selection of "never before issued live mayhem from Texas teen clubs, shopping centers, bowling alleys circa 1962-64 plus insane home recordings." [1]
In Billboard's "Declaration of Independents" column, Norton received kudos for their Sonics and Fabulous Wailers reissues, and Goldmine praised Norton's Big Star CD Nobody Can Dance as "the most exciting reissue of the decade... one of the strongest pieces of music I've heard in 25 years."[ citation needed ] Radio station WFMU celebrated the label's 15 years in the business with the "Norton Records 15th Anniversary Roast," which aired October 25, 2001, on Music to Spazz By hosted by Dave "the Spazz" Abramson.
Norton Records stages events in the New York area, such as their 2005 New Year's Eve Rock N' Roll Show & Dance at Union Pool in Brooklyn, headlined by Linna and Miller's band the A-Bones and emceed by The Mighty Hannibal.
In addition to the magazines Kicks and Bad Seed, Linna published a book in 1997 on photographer Eddie Rocco, who contributed to Charlton's Ebony Song Parade and freelanced for Fort Worth's Sepia magazine. The Great Lost Photographs of Eddie Rocco collects many unpublished 1950s and 1960s pictures, including shots of Esquerita, Ruth Brown, the Treniers and Roy Orbison. After finding a copy at the Smithsonian's Museum of American History bookstore, Dr. Ink (aka Dr. Roy Peter Clark) highlighted Rocco's importance in an April 2, 2003 review:
Rocco's work would come to the attention of Charlton Publications, a house that specialized in printing lyrics of popular music along with photos of the stars. Founded in 1931, Charlton produced a series of popular music magazines, which provided beat-happy boppers of all ethnicities with information on R&B musicians, songwriters, and disc jockeys. ... In spite of its reputation for mass-producing pulp fiction and comic books, Charlton Publications, writes Miriam Linna, "has long gone unlauded for pioneering true racial integration in mass market magazines at a time when other teen periodicals remained safely segregated." Rocco was no Pat Boone, exploiting and whitewashing black creativity. Instead, he and his camera were telling the untold story of the evolution of black music beyond the borders of a black audience. [6]
In 2009, Linna launched her paperback book imprint, Kicks Books, with Sweets and Other Stories by Andre Williams, followed in 2011 by This Planet Is Doomed – a collection of Sun Ra's poetry – and Save the Last Dance for Satan, Nick Tosches' account of the music business and the Mafia. There are several Kicks titles in print, including I Fought the Law, Linna's Bobby Fuller biography published in 2015. Kicks Books releases have been accompanied by Kicks Perfume custom fragrances, and Kicks also pressed a 7" Sun Ra centennial memorial souvenir record in 2014 to launch a three-book Sun Ra series. [7]
Norton Records kicked off its 20th anniversary in 2006 with a massive (for an indie) 80-page catalog, featuring a cover photograph of Marty Lott (the Gulf Coast Fireball, aka The Phantom) and a dedication: "Our 20th Anniversary catalog is dedicated to the memory of Norton's very first artist, the immortal Hasil Adkins." Adkins died in 2005. [1] Also in 2006, Norton released Dangerous Game , the first solo album by Mary Weiss, the original lead singer of The Shangri-Las. Backed by the Reigning Sound, Weiss recorded 13 original songs plus a cover version of the Shangri-Las' "Heaven Only Knows".
On November 10–13, 2011, Norton's 25th anniversary celebration was a four-night "all star spectacular" at The Bell House in Brooklyn. The bands included Black Lips, The 5.6.7.8's, The Alarm Clocks, Andre Williams, Dave "Baby" Cortez, The Mighty Hannibal, Mick Collins, The Great Gaylord, The Reigning Sound, Jackie and the Cedrics, Question Mark and the Mysterians, The Sonics, Bloodshot Bill, Figures of Light and many others. Concurrent with the celebration, Norton issued a number of new releases, including the Figures of Light album Drop Dead and a self-titled album by Cortez.
Norton's Red Hook, Brooklyn warehouse and mail order operation was heavily damaged by Hurricane Sandy on October 29, 2012, and the label lost most of its back catalog. Fans of the label and local volunteers organized fund-raisers and over several months helped to clean up the warehouse and save as many of the records as possible. As of January 2016 only 66 of Norton's releases were not back in print, and Linna mentioned plans to restore the rest of the catalog by the end of the year. [8]
In January 2016, the label opened a brick-and-mortar retail store, the Norton Record Shop, in the Prospect Heights area of Brooklyn, to sell records and printed matter. Miller died of multiple myeloma in November 2016. Linna issued the acclaimed lost Dion album on Norton in 2018. The shop closed in 2018, and mail order operations moved to Cleveland, Ohio. Linna published the 576 page Mind Over Matter: The Myths and Mysteries of Detroit's Fortune Records in 2020. [8] [9]
The Cramps were an American rock band formed in 1976 and active until 2009. Their lineup rotated frequently during their existence, with the husband-and-wife duo of singer Lux Interior and guitarist Poison Ivy the only ever-present members. The band are credited as progenitors of the psychobilly subgenre, fusing elements of punk rock with rockabilly. The addition of guitarist Bryan Gregory and drummer Pam Balam resulted in the first complete lineup in April 1976. They released their debut album Songs the Lord Taught Us in 1980. The band split after the death of lead singer Interior in 2009.
Robert Gaston Fuller was an American rock singer, songwriter, and guitarist best known for "Let Her Dance" and his cover of the Crickets' "I Fought the Law," recorded with his group The Bobby Fuller Four.
Harvest Records is a British-American record label belonging to Capitol Music Group, originally created by EMI in 1969.
Mercury Records is an American record label owned by Universal Music Group. It had significant success as an independent operation in the 1940s and 1950s. Smash Records and Fontana Records were sub labels of Mercury. Mercury Records released rock, funk, R&B, doo wop, soul music, blues, pop, rock and roll, and jazz records. In the United States, it is operated through Republic Records; in the United Kingdom and Japan, it is distributed by EMI Records.
Thomas Blanchard Wilson Jr. was an American record producer. He is best known for his work in the 1960s with acclaimed artists such as Bob Dylan, Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention, Simon & Garfunkel, the Velvet Underground, Cecil Taylor, Sun Ra, Eddie Harris, Nico, Eric Burdon and the Animals, the Blues Project, the Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem, and others.
Hasil Adkins was an American singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist. His genres include rock and roll, country, blues and more commonly rockabilly, and because of his unusual playing and singing style, he is often cited as an example of outsider music. He generally performed as a one-man band, playing guitar and drums at the same time.
"I Fought the Law" is a song written by Sonny Curtis of the Crickets and popularized by a cover by the Bobby Fuller Four, becoming a top-ten hit for the band in 1966. Their version of the song was ranked No. 175 on the Rolling Stone list of The 500 Greatest Songs of All Time in 2004, and the same year was named one of the 500 "Songs that Shaped Rock" by the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
Dunhill Records was started in 1964 by Lou Adler, Jay Lasker, Pierre Cossette and Bobby Roberts as Dunhill Productions to release the music of Johnny Rivers on Imperial Records. It became a record label the following year and was distributed by ABC Records.
United Artists Records was an American record label founded by Max E. Youngstein of United Artists in 1957 to issue movie soundtracks. The label expanded into other genres, such as easy listening, jazz, pop, and R&B.
The Muffs were an American pop punk band based in Southern California, formed in 1991. Led by singer and guitarist Kim Shattuck, the band released four full-length studio albums in the 1990s, as well as numerous singles including "Lucky Guy" and "Sad Tomorrow", and a cover version of "Kids in America". After a long hiatus beginning in 1999, the band released a fifth album in 2004 but thereafter effectively disbanded. Almost a decade later, the three core members of the band reunited and started performing again. Their sixth album, Whoop Dee Doo, was released in 2014.
Miriam Linna is a Canadian-American drummer who has run the Brooklyn-based independent record label Norton Records since 1986, originally with her husband, the late producer and singer-songwriter Billy Miller. Her skill as a drummer earned her a "May I recommend?" nod from Bob Dylan on his XM Theme Time Radio Hour program in January 2007.
Eskew Reeder, Jr., usually known by the stage name Esquerita, and occasionally as S.Q. Reeder or The Magnificent Malochi, was an American R&B singer, songwriter and pianist, known for his frenetic performances. He has been credited with influencing rock and roll pioneer Little Richard.
Morris Eugene Simmons, better known as Jumpin' Gene Simmons, was an American singer and songwriter best known for his 1964 novelty single "Haunted House".
Hathut Records is a Swiss record company and label founded by Werner Xavier Uehlinger in 1974 that specializes in jazz and classical music. The name of the label comes from the artwork of Klaus Baumgartner. Hathut encompasses the labels hat ART, hatOLOGY, and hat NOIR.
The A-Bones was an American garage rock band from Brooklyn, New York. Their name was derived from a song by The Trashmen. The band was formed in 1984 by vocalist Billy Miller and his wife, drummer and co-vocalist Miriam Linna, in the wake of a prior band collaboration, The Zantees. The couple were at the time editors of the rock and roll culture fanzine Kicks and on the threshold of launching Norton Records. Guitarist Bruce Bennett replaced original guitarist Mike Mariconda shortly after the band was formed. Marcus "The Carcass" Natale replaced founding bass player Mike Lewis, prior to recording the A-Bones second E.P. Free Beer For Life in 1988. Tenor sax player Lars Espensen further filled out the group from 1990 until 2010.
Evidence Music is an American jazz and blues record label founded in 1992 by Howard Rosen and Jerry Gordon. The label's name comes from the song "Evidence" by Thelonious Monk.
Young American Recordings was an American record label based in New York City. Founded by Rocco Giordano of Kinetic Records and Josh Swade of Maverick Records, it was an independent label that included groups such as British rock band South and worked with other popular groups such as Scottish punk band APB.
William Henry Miller Jr. was an American musician, archivist, and rock 'n' roll collector whose magazine, Kicks, and record label, Norton, championed vintage rockabilly and garage bands.
Chaz Eugene McKinney, known professionally as Chaz Cardigan, is an American singer and alternative rock artist based in Nashville, Tennessee, who describes his musical style as "pop songs with messy guitars." He is best known for his song "As I'll Ever Be", which was featured in the Netflix film To All the Boys: P.S. I Still Love You. His single "Not OK!" peaked at #18 on the Billboard Alternative Airplay Chart.
"No More Hot Dogs" is a rockabilly song by Hasil Adkins. The track was originally recorded around 1955 in mono. Adkins plays all of his own instruments and the track includes his acoustic Gibson guitar and a stripped-down drumkit.