I remember asking Billy Miller if the Untamed Youth album would be released on cassette, since I was very worried (insert sad horn sound here) about our band's commercial potential in the marketplace. Billy's response was that "cassettes are for Madonna." When the Untamed Youth came to New York to play, Billy took me in the Norton-mobile to the pressing plant to see our record being made.
Billy Miller looked at a stack of reject 45's and pulled out a red vinyl 45 called "Roaches" by the Court Jesters. "Hey, this one is a good doo-wop song about Roaches, you have it?" I replied I did not, but I knew I certainly needed it. Soon my world would revolve around doo-wop sounds about Roaches, one-man band songs about government cheese, and surf songs about monkeys.
Somehow I knew, though, that this was my place. A world where a pancake-shaped molded vinyl particulate would be obsessed over as though it were the Shroud of Turin by a group of unemployed, broke jackasses that really, god bless 'em, really really cared about the music. They could tell you about alternate takes, they could tell you about which pressings were vinyl and which were noisy styrene, they could wax philosophical about how Hasil Adkins and Jerry McCain had been separated at birth, even though one was white and one was black. I felt all the same things, and I knew that Jerry Lee Lewis alternate takes were important to me, too, even if they didn't mean a damn to the friends I had back in Missouri. For that moment of recognizing and accepting my fellow species of lowlife music-obsessed, record collecting miscreants, I owe Billy and Miriam and Norton Records a huge thanks.
It saddens me now to think of the Norton Warehouse, submerged under Hurricane Sandy bilge water, those precious biscuits of vinyl waterlogged. Some of those priceless nuggets have my own precious teenage angst garage band music recorded on them. I remember lugging those boxes down the stairs nearly 25 years ago, and it makes me damn proud to know that Norton Records has hung in there that long--prospered, at that.
I know that the good people will come together and help save what records can be saved, and people will help Billy and Miriam recover from this tragedy. Norton Records is too damn important to let some flood water put 'em out of business, where Madonna had failed to do so. You can't drown the loud sound, indeed!
