Fans, friends help Norton Records
AFTER THE NEW YORK COMPANY was ravaged by superstorm Sandy, volunteers and donations began pouring in
When 13 feet of water surged up over Red Hook last October, most of the semi-industrial neighbourhood in Brooklyn, N.Y., was plunged into the Hudson River, taking out hundreds of businesses. Warehouses, wineries, restaurants, tattoo shops, supermarkets — gone.
No one expected the magnitude of superstorm Sandy’s wrath, least of all people like Norton Records owners Billy Miller and Miriam Linna, who’d weathered last year’s hurricane Irene with little to no damage. The sheer pressure of the surge bent the exterior iron doors of their record label’s warehouse down at the river’s edge; in a matter of minutes, nearly a quarter-million CDs and vinyl LPs and 45s were under six feet of water.
“It killed almost our entire inventory,” Miller says over the phone from his home and office in Prospect Heights.
The 26-year-old independent label has a catalogue of about 200 albums and 300 singles, almost entirely composed of rare and previously unissued material from early rock ’n’ roll, garage and soul acts like Charlie Feathers, Hasil Adkins and The Sonics.
The CDs were destroyed, as were the hundreds of thousands of extra record sleeves they used to keep lesserknown artists in print. They had to act fast to salvage the vinyl. “It’s just, where do you start?” Miller says.
A video of Linna explaining the damage they sustained was quickly released online. In it, she asked volunteers to come down to help them wash records, and because many of their neighbours had no electricity or way of leaving Brooklyn anyway, they obliged.
“When we first started, it was, ‘Come on over.’ And they were coming in in droves,” Miller says.
Sandy hit New York on a Monday; by Sunday mor- ning, Montreal musician and one-man band Bloodshot Bill found himself on garbage detail at Norton Records after having played two shows the night before.
“You can’t tell how big the warehouse is from the video,” says Bloodshot Bill, who is one of a scant few modern artists signed to Norton. “It looked like a horrible amusement park.”
Out in the hallway, a record-cleaning assembly line had been organized. “They had people ripping off covers, passing off the records, and the next people would take them out of the sleeve, wash the record, put those in a pile. The next people would give them a drying, and then they would be stacked to dry even better,” he says.
“I had a garbage bag full of (the covers of) one of my records and another garbage bag full of another one of my records.”
As normal life resumed in New York, though, the herd of volunteers thinned out. Now at more than 70 days into the cleanup operation, Miller, Linna and their tiny staff are still washing records currently being stored in watertight containers at Brooklyn-phono, their pressing plant.
“We keep going over and getting more records to clean,” Miller says. “You don’t want the records to dry — the paper sticks to them. So I actually water the records every now and then, like I’m gardening.”
But if volunteers aren’t pouring through their doors to help wash records, at least cheques have been pouring in through the mail. From Australia to Germany to Middle America, fans and friends of the label have been independently organizing benefit shows to help Norton recover from the storm.
“The only thing they asked for help with (was the cleanup). And they kind of stress that, in their whole almost 30-year history, that they’ve never really asked for help,” says Bloodshot Bill.
And so the benevolent gesture caught Miller and Linna off-guard.
“We were very reluctant to take any kind of donations. We’ve never borrowed money. We’ve never courted any kind of big sponsorship,” Miller says. “But people just started sending cheques. ... They feel a connection to the records, too.”
Here at home, Bloodshot Bill is organizing a benefit show at Quai des Brumes this Saturday, with 100 per cent of proceeds going to Norton. Meanwhile, Miller and Linna have printed 10 limited edition Sandy sleeves by illustrator Avi Spivak to keep selling records.
“We’re definitely on our way back. We’re not going to let bad weather kill the record company,” Miller says.