Widow to continue issuing rock rarities after husband’s death
Na maturing phase for the singer of “Runaround Sue” but were mostly rejected by his label at the time, Columbia Records.
“Kickin’ Child,” released yesterday,was the last album Miller worked on; it marks Norton’s first release since Miller’s death. The label worked closely with Sony Music, which owns Columbia, to prepare and manufacture the album — but, by Dion’s choice, it’s coming out on Norton.
“Passions work more than money in the music game, and I know they have passion,” Dion said of Norton’s owners.
Linna and Miller met in 1977 at a record fair and soon began publishing Kicks, following a path laid by earlier fanzines in digging into remote corners of rock history.
By 1986, when Linna and Miller started Norton — named after Jackie Gleason’s neighbor on “The Honeymooners” — they had already been diggingdeeper than most, and the Norton catalog swelled with unusual artifacts such as reissues of the wild oneman band Hasil Adkins.
“I think of them like archaeologists going through the layers of this music to find its root source,” said Lenny Kaye, a guitarist, rock historian and compiler of the 1972 album “Nuggets,” another precursor to Norton.
Norton’s taste has attracted superstar fans, including Elton John and Robert Plant, named the label’s customer of the year in 2006. Norton also became a precursor to what is now a broad field of young labels.
Miller’s death isn’t Norton’s first setback: In 2012, its Brooklyn warehouse was flooded by superstorm Sandy, destroying most of the label’s 250,000 records as well as paperwork, master tapes and much of the stock of their book imprint, Kicks Books.
“It took a lot of gusto out of the game to see stuff floating around there,” Linna recalled.
Drawing on decades of goodwill in the business, they got much of the label’s catalog back into print, and Norton now sells discount “Sandy” records — jacket gone, vinyl fine — in bins outside the shop.
When Miller died, Linna said she was weighing whether to close the shop. Then the vultures started swarming, asking whether she wanted to sell the label.
“I got a little bit ragged but righteous with them,” she said. “I did tell them, in no uncertain terms, that we were going to be a label” — her voice rose to a yell — “long after they were going to be food for the cockroaches and dinosaurs! I don’t even know what that means, but it was like, ‘Goodbye!’ ”