WFMU is in big trouble thanks to Sandy. The Ichiban server got fried when the power went out and we are currently streaming from Dr. Filth's bunker in Asheville, NC. We hope to be back up later this week. In the meantime, please donate if you can.
Big thanks to everyone who has pledged so far during our 61 Days Of October fundraiser! Like Joe in NY NY, Tom in CT (twice!), Chris in East Elmhurst (twice!), Bob in Rockford, MI, Roger in Morristown, Jon in Paris, Anna in Brooklyn, Greg G in Decatur, GA (twice!), Nancy in NY NY, Patrick in Philly, Mellisa in Baltimore (twice!), Richard D in Sebring, FLA, Chris May in Brooklyn (twice!!), Mark in Toronto, Phil in Edwardsburg, MI, Chris in Weehawken Duncan in Manchester, UK, Don in Canada, Theodore and Polly in Brooklyn, Patrick in Austin, Steve in the Bronx, Kevin in Brooklyn, JFO aka Jimmy Fountain in NY, Tiffany in Astoria, Tom in San Diego, John in Levittown, Jody in Brooklyn, Joe in Il, Gio in Brooklyn, Jill in NY, Frank in Ohio, Thomas in Urbana, JD in Shelby, NC, Carmen in Philly, William in Wilmington, Bopkat Vintage in Brooklyn, Terry in Sunnyside, Brendan in Chicago, Ralph & Susan in the Uk, Nicole in Australia, Alexander in London, Thomas in Sweden, Tom in Chicago, Simon in San Fran, Greg O in Asheville, M in Santa Monica, Jacob in Harlem, Hana in Pennington, NJ, Intoxitard, Howie P in Ca, Christopher in Waco, Mike Mc in San Fran & Rob in NY NY!! You can help keep Ichiban streaming 24/7 by making a donation here. We'll even let you choose a thank you gift while you're there! Thanks. I thanked all y'all at the end of yesterday's Debbie Does WFMU!
Man...as has been said, last year at this time we were all together & all celebrating a miracle of modern times, Norton Records. It was an ecstatic long weekend of historic proportions, as is every day life for Billy & Miriam. These people are role models, figureheads, they are what i aspire to be...real, happy honest people that love what they do & love us. Crazy? Without a doubt, but hey? Aren't you? I met Miriam Linna in 1976 at a very early Cramps show & we started talking about her Flamin' Groovies button (I always remember her first words "The Flamin' Groovies! They're my number one!" with a little squeal...). I met Billy Miller A couple years later. Our worlds have collided endlessly through the decades, there's so many photos...
I have been privileged to go on so many Rock N Roll adventures with these people. Whether it be driving out to Randy Fuller's place, to Timothy Carey's house where the World's Greatest Sinner was filmed, All rushing to meet Big Daddy Roth in 1984, an almost teenage house party featuring Esquerita, or paying respects in forgotten graveyards to our icons, always leaving with a rare memento...i have to say i love these people. Their baby, Kicks Magazine/Norton Records/Kicks Books is as i said a miracle. They have given life to artists that were never ever recognized, ever. And given these people hope & fun & careers even. Wonderful memories that define their lives, certainly. We who are obsessed with the alternate side of pop culture are endlessly indebted to them for single-handedly seeking these people out and serving them to us on a 7 or 12 inch silver platter.I can't tell you how insane i felt sitting there watching half the Del-Aires in a VFW Hall somewhere in Florida with 8 or 10 elderly men & women in the middle of the afternoon all of us actually watching Miriam doing the Zombie Stomp all having a blast...these are my personal memories.
Seeing someone like this in tears standing on a pile of rubble that is in fact all of these loves/obsessions/memories/mementos is heartbreaking. I actually cried when i watched it. On a global level, there are people everywhere that love real Rock N Roll & Norton Records & NEED them to fix their day to day working lives. There are people that need this. We are those people! And now is our time to give back!
It's so hard to put into words just how important this is (I'm writing this off the top of my head so bear with me). Billy & Miriam have done endless benefits forever, Miriam goes long distances to visit sick icons & friends in the hospital, I guess I could go on & on but i know I'm preaching to the converted here.
The most important thing here is to HELP. And to know that no help is too small. It really adds up. After a disaster like this people tend to go back to their lives when there's no more news coverage & forget about it. But the victims have to go on still in the midst of the disaster. This is why WE ALL MUST KEEP POSTING OVER & OVER & OVER AGAIN TO HELP NORTON RECORDS. They need our help now more than ever. Donate 5 bucks a week! Make a tiny plan to do something & just follow through with it. It will make you feel good & you will help save A huge chunk of Rock N Roll.
The Dictators asked on a Norton Record, Who Will Save Rock N Roll? The answer is YOU! Do it.
Over & out-
Howie Pyro 11/2012
To donate go here: http://www.nortonrecords.com/home.php
To volunteer call the Norton office (718-789-4438) or Billy's cell (917) 671-7185 or email nortonrec@aol.com with the word Volunteer in the subject box.
The Ichiban server in Jersey City is still down, so those of you looking for Ichiban live programming today will find it on our sister webstream Give The Drummer Radio. Matt will be on 2 to 4 PM Eastern, Ted from 4 to 6.
Thanks to Doug and everyone at Give The Drummer Radio for having our backs during this craziness.
Last year we were celebrating Norton Records' 25th anniversary, this year they're struggling to recover from Hurricane Sandy. I spent two days this week helping out, cleaning discs on the volunteer assembly line. It's a daunting task, two hundred thousand + records destroyed, jackets ruined - although some of the discs can be salvaged, hence the assembly line, but they need some help.
I go way back with the Norton Records people - Billy Miller and Miriam Linna. Before Norton Records, before the Zantees, before Kicks, Bad Seed and Flamin' Groovies monthly magazines even. Back to another time, back when it seemed like there were maybe a dozen or so people in the whole world that liked the type of sounds Norton has brought to the world - Esquirita, Hasil Adkins, Jack Starr, et al. Now it seems like everyone knows who they are. Last night a friend texted me - his daughter was playing on WFMU at that exact moment. I tuned in to hear the kid, and she and her friends are warbling their way through a Charlie Feathers tune! My, things have changed. If there was one factor in bringing great rock'n'roll to the world, it was Norton Records. Now they're fighting for their life, Hurricane Sandy (obviously named for the Dion tune) destroyed their warehouse, taking out records, personal items like most of Miriam's fabled paperback collection, Billy's 78RPM's, master tapes, fanzines, Kicks Books, etc. If there was ever a good cause, this is it. You can donate money at the Norton website or time or both.
Reasons you should head to Norton headquarters and volunteer:
*For one thing, it's a good cause, maybe the best cause ever. Norton Records has long been at the forefront of what some of us think of as rock'n'roll, and they're just about the only ones who still do it.
*Free pizza and beer. And rubber gloves....
*Its' where all the cool people are, the ones who hardly ever go out anymore (like me and my wife....). I saw some of my favorite people in the world there this week.
*Despite the tragic and stressful conditions, Billy Miller is still one of the funniest people in the world.
*You'll earn indulgences to get to heaven, or where ever you plan on spending your afterlife.
*Learn the record business from the ground up.
*Learn about the hazards of global climate change and how it affects you and your Hasil Adkins records.
*Meet folks from all over the world, study their habits and learn to recognize their accents.
*More fun than it looks, in fact more fun that most NYC clubs these days.
To volunteer call the Norton office (718-789-4438) or Billy's cell (917) 671-7185 or email nortonrec@aol.com with the word Volunteer in the subject box.
When I opened my first record store in the early 90s, in Columbia, Missouri, Norton Records was the label on which the whole store pivoted, at least in my heart. Crypt had the best contemporary bands and the Back from the Grave comps and an essential persona of hilarious anger and resentment. Estrus and Sympathy had their own West Coast garage punk thing and the attractive graphic design. In the Red had the weirdos, Goner were the weirdos, and Telstar and Bag of Hammers and Ripoff and others were important to an overall healthy rock and roll presentation. But Norton Records not only had some of the best records - it had the point of view and the sense of humor that most explicitly dovetailed with and informed my own idea of what rock and roll was and why it deserved to be celebrated in all of its crazy permutations.
The Revelators play in front of Whizz! Records ca. 1996 or so.
It helped that they were the label that put out local heroes the Untamed Youth. This put Columbia, MO in the rock and roll game, and it was to my mind essential that we keep their records in a position of prominence at all times. This meant frequently ordering directly from Norton, since none of my other distributors reliably kept deep Norton catalog in stock. You could pick up the latest from Matador or get a 35% fill from Get Hip, but if you wanted to make sure you got exactly what you wanted you went straight to the phone and talked to Miriam. Plus they'd keep me in stock on the Youth's notorious "banned" Sophisticated International Playboys EP, which you couldn't get anywhere else. (You should check out Deke Dickerson's remembrances of his early experiences with Norton here.)
BANNED!
I quickly discovered Norton was waaaay more than Untamed Youth - more than any other label I could or can think of, Norton epitomized rock and roll as a point of view, a way of life, a pair of shades through which you could view the world. The best bands are as much about fully realized, manifested personas as they are about the music (prime Stones, Dolls, Ramones, Cheater Slicks, Menster Phip & the Phips), and Norton was an entire label that managed to project that attitude of a larger-than-life entity strolling through the world casting illumination on all things rockin'. From the perspective of a record guy in the middle of Missouri (and now North Carolina), Norton Records was not just Billy Miller and Miriam Linna - even if it really is just Billy and Miriam most of the time. Billy and Miriam had a baby and it named itself rock and roll.
The Norton attitude was clearly flash-fried in the same kind of yuk-up-yer-sleeve Mad Magazine attitude as me, while at the same time, Norton obviously took the important things seriously - the Link Wray Missing Links series, f'rinstance, is some of the most deadly stuff released by anyone ever. Another label might have presented a wildman like Hasil Adkins as a novelty act, but Norton accorded him the respect and awe he truly deserved. At the same time, it also gave props and perspective on the stupidest records ever created and really opened up my mind to the vast scope and wonderful ridiculousness of rock and roll. The notion that, oh, I dunno, the Slough Boys and the Real Kids were part of the same continuity, that Wade Curtis's "Puddy Tat" and the Twiliter's "Rollerland" and Bobby Fuller's El Paso Recordings had an equal place in the rock and roll firmament was, if not exactly alien to me, brought into better focus because of Norton.
I learned that it was all about chickens.
Kicks set the standard for hyper-hyphenated ultra-injokey but passionate and informative rock and roll writing. And don't get me started on how awesome their old print catalogs were. Distributed records (who knows where they came from?) like the Big Itch series clarified that the ocean of insane music was too big to ever get a true handle on, that it was impossible to ever run out of new noise, even if that meant digging deeper into the past rather than keeping a both eyes on the future. Which was fine with me.
Without these records of unknown origin, the world would be a much poorer place!
I remember when Do You Feel It? The Captivating Sound of Question Mark and the Mysterians came into the shop fresh on its release. This record defied every notion of what a reunited 60s band was supposed to sound like in the 90s - how could so many of those songs actually sound BETTER in '96 than in '66? I actually brought this question to Miriam in an e-mail to restock the album, and she replied "I don't know what to tell you about how it happened, all I know is that it just is, and that's what makes it so wonderful, darling!"
And while you can fill in the timeline on the actual history of the Norton empire, like Question Mark and the Mysterians topping their two "real" albums on one crazy night in Coney Island in front of a room of 50 people at three in the morning (I think that's the deets), it's harder to get a grasp on how all the pieces fell into place to become the inspiration, the resource, and the outlet for so much great stuff. How many of the labels I mentioned at the top of this post were inspired or at least influenced by Norton records, and how many of them are still even around? Would we have Ugly Things magazine without Kicks? Would Sundazed and the entire model of US rock and roll reissue labels even exist without Norton? Would Ichiban?
Thinking about the entire Norton catalog, along with their legendary archive of print memorabilia, master tapes, Kicks books, and God knows what other irreplaceable bits of the culture, all waterlogged and/or destroyed when the warehouse got swept up in the Sandy surge breaks my heart AND my jaw. That place was a museum waiting to happen, and the loss seems immeasurable. But Billy and Miriam, proud and determined parents that they are, aren't giving up. They aren't throwing out the baby with the flood water, but they need your help nursing it back to health.
Norton Records needs to be saved. Norton Records has to survive and to continue, because the world needs Norton Records. And Norton needs volunteers and it needs donations. If you're visiting this blog or listening to Rock 'n' Soul Ichiban, remember - Norton Records is your heritage as much as it is anything else.
You can find out the latest on how best to volunteer your time in this recent update on the situation, and you can donate here.
We are still at it here at Norton Records, trying to recover from the total destruction of Norton Records warehouse. The volunteers have been amazing - there's even Norton artists cleaning their own records! Sony Records, United Record Pressing and Discwashers have donated a ton of supplies for salvage purposes and we can't thank them enough. The Discwasher machines are speeding up the salvaging process immensely. Volunteers are still needed. E-mail nortonrec@aol.com with VOLUNTEER in the subject line or call 917-671-7185 (my cell phone) but no text or Facebook responses. we will be setting up a second crew at Brooklyn Phono in Sunset Park. Tom at Brooklyn Phono has been a saint and this second location will surely help speed things up. He's come up with some insane mad scientist way of saving 45s. If you want in on that, please put VOLUNTEER SUNSET PARK in the subject.
