re: Endless Sleep - The Obituary Thread

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Billy Miller, a rock ’n’ roll archivist and collector whose record label, Norton, gave new life to forgotten rockabilly artists and garage bands of yesteryear, died on Sunday at his home in Brooklyn. He was 62.

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The cause was complications of multiple myeloma, kidney failure and diabetes, his wife and business partner, Miriam Linna, said.

Mr. Miller and Ms. Linna met in 1977 at a record fair in New York. She was an original member of the punk-rockabilly group the Cramps and the editor of a fanzine for the rock band the Flamin’ Groovies. He was a fanatic collector.

“He was selling, I was buying,” Ms. Linna said in a telephone interview on Monday. “I was looking for ‘You Must Be a Witch’ by the Lollipop Shoppe,” a 1960s Las Vegas garage band. Mr. Miller had the record and invited Ms. Linna to drop by his apartment to pick it up. A marriage of true minds quickly followed.

The couple began publishing Kicks, a magazine devoted to overlooked rock ’n’ rollers, in 1979. They founded Norton, in 1986, as a way to broadcast their shared passion for artists like Hasil Adkins, a rockabilly singer who played multiple instruments simultaneously; the guitarist Link Wray, known for his raw reverb sound; and Esquerita, a blues screamer and pianist who decisively influenced Little Richard.

The label, named after Ed Norton, the character played by Art Carney on the television series “The Honeymooners,” soon became what The Village Voice, earlier this year, called “the definitive provider of rockabilly reissues from the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s.”

The label earned a following for its rediscoveries and for imaginative anthologies like “The Raging Teens,” a series devoted to New England rockabilly artists. It attracted not only fans in search of the unusual but professional musicians with a keen interest in rock history, among them Robert Plant, Jimmy Page and Elton John.

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Before founding Norton, Mr. Miller and Ms. Linna performed with the rockabilly group the Zantees and later with the garage band the A-Bones. He sang; she played drums. But they channeled most of their energy into ferreting out forgotten acts and labels and amassing the detailed historical information that informed Norton’s scholarly liner notes.

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Norton breathed new life into the dormant careers of artists like James Timothy Shaw, who, under the name the Mighty Hannibal, recorded the R&B song “Jerkin’ the Dog” in 1959 [Actually it came out in 1965 -- K]. After the label released the anthology “Hannibalism!” in 2001, Mr. Shaw began performing again.

The Alarm Clocks, a teenage garage band from Parma, Ohio, reunited after Norton issued “Yeah!” in 2000, featuring both sides of their 1966 single, “Yeah” and “No Reason to Complain,” along with unreleased recordings.

Norton’s compilation discs shed light on lively recording scenes outside New York, Philadelphia and Los Angeles. Its series of releases focusing on the Pacific Northwest, for example, sparked renewed interest in the Wailers, one of the earliest garage bands, and the Sonics, often credited as the first grunge band.

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Although the label feasted on arcane artists, Mr. Miller saw nothing peculiar about his tastes.

“Some people accuse us of being into nostalgia and being narrow-minded because we don’t listen to the ‘latest’ music,” he told the authors of the guidebook “Incredibly Strange Music” (1993). “But it’s not nostalgia — I wish I’d heard all these obscure records when I was a little kid.”

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