A Side of Rock

On August 4, 2006, a punk-rock icon from the eighties reemerged inconspicuously onto the Twin Cities music scene. When ex–Hüsker Dü bassist Greg Norton took the stage at First Avenue’s 7th Street Entry with his new band, an oddly punctuated group called The Gang Font, feat. Interloper, it had been fifteen years since his last live gig. In the interim, he had started his own restaurant, become a respected wine connoisseur, gotten married, and adopted a couple of cats. The one thing he hadn’t done was play much, if any, music. When The Gang Font scheduled its first rehearsal, he didn’t even own an amp.

“It was the first time I’d actually sat down and played with anybody since 1993, and I hadn’t played live since ’91,” Norton recalls. “I thought I should be really, really nervous because I was playing with these great musicians, but instead it was more giddy excitement. Everything just clicked, and the material started falling into place.”

That first show received little press locally, and even less nationally, but Thirsty Ear Recordings, an independent label in New York with a modern  jazz imprint, Blue Series, agreed to produce The Gang Font’s first album based almost entirely on the band’s roster, which includes drummer David King and guitarist Erik Fratzke (two-thirds of the local jazz trio Happy Apple), as well as New York–based keyboardist Craig Taborn. Eight months later, on the heels of the CD’s release, The Gang Font played New York and got enthusiastic media support. The band is hoping to have enough material together by the end of the year to record its second CD, even though The Gang Font technically isn’t any of its members’ first priority, but rather an accidental side project that is slowly growing a life of its own. Where it will lead, none of them knows, least of all Greg Norton.

In his musical heyday, Norton played bass for the 1980s postpunk rock group Hüsker Dü, a band that continues to gain critical acclaim long after its 1988 breakup. The band’s New Day Rising ranked thirteenth in Spin’s “100 Greatest Albums, 1985–2005,” and in 2003, Rolling Stone ranked it 495 on the magazine’s list of the 500 greatest albums of all time.

“It was weird,” says Norton, “because at the time we were just another band that broke up. It wasn’t until maybe ten years later when people started saying, ‘Oh, Hüsker Dü, they were great.’ The Replacements and the Suburbs, they were the popular bands. There were a lot of local bands that were way more popular than we were locally.”

Norton has always been the easiest Hüsker Dü member to spot: He’s the one with the thick handlebar mustache waxed into a fiendish curl. According to Norton, renown music critic Robert Christgau, often called the “dean of American rock critics,” told Norton in 1983 that he had “the best mustache in rock ’n’ roll.” That’s one of the reasons he still has it. “It’s funny that [the mustache] has sort of become this icon,” says Norton. “But when Christgau throws out some phrase like that, it makes you think twice about shaving it off.”

Yet he did shave it off once, in 1990, while working at the since-closed Warehouse District restaurant Faegre’s. Coincidentally, drummer David King—with whom Norton would later team up to form The Gang Font—was a buser at Faegre’s at the same time. But King didn’t recognize Norton without the mustache. It would be thirteen years before their paths crossed again.

Now forty-eight, Norton has had one oven mitt in the restaurant business for twenty-six years. He started waiting tables to supplement his income during Hüsker Dü’s formative years and gravitated back to the restaurant business after the band broke up. Norton wove his way through a slew of restaurants, including the Minnesota Horse & Hunt Club, Harbor View Café, Table of Contents, and the Loring, and in 1995 was hired to open Staghead in Red Wing. Though he learned to cook while working for Lenny Russo at Faegre’s, Staghead was his first official chef position. There, he met his second wife, Sarah, who was the sous chef. Eventually, the couple left, purchased a building in Bay City, Wisconsin, about an hour outside of the Twin Cities, and in 2003 opened a restaurant of their own. They called it The Nortons’.

“After checking out a couple of different spots, we decided [it] was the location we liked,” says Norton, “even though it’s in the middle of nowhere, we’re a mile off the highway and we’re in an old pole barn. I think people pull up and say, ‘You gotta be kidding me—that place is a great restaurant?’ ” Since opening The Nortons’, Greg has transitioned from chef to restaurateur and Sarah has taken the reins as executive chef.

Norton serves food that is organically grown and locally produced when he can, opting to buy from half a dozen farmers in the area—rabbit from Menomonie, organic beef from the Southeast Minnesota Food Network, heirloom tomatoes from Pine City. His esoteric wine list has won awards from Wine Spectator magazine. Most days, when you call the restaurant, his is the voice you hear on the other end. Though The Nortons’ is only open five days a week, Norton is there seven. He even decorated the restaurant—on the walls hang a Loring Café poster and record covers, and a picture of Hüsker Dü rests behind the bar.

“We tend to get more ink for the restaurant through the entertainment pages and the variety pages than we do through the food section,” says Norton. Few of his restaurant’s clientele seem to know his musical history, although, he says, every once in a while “we’ll get a table of four little old ladies, and they’ll be in for lunch, and all of a sudden one of them will go, ‘What was that band you were in again? What was it? Huss-ker Doo, was that it? He used to be in a band,’ ” Norton says, laughing. “It’s always hilarious. They’re so sweet.”

One drizzly spring day in May, after the lunch rush, Norton sat down at his bar and explained how The Gang Font came to be. He wore a periwinkle blue and white short-sleeved dress shirt and black trousers, and his legendary mustache showed no signs of drooping.

Norton is a musical omnivore. He listens to everything and has always been interested in avant-garde music and free jazz. Known for being the most experimental member of Hüsker Dü, he was always finding ways to sneak elements of jazz into the band’s arrangements. While Norton was working at Staghead, a customer brought him a CD by The Bad Plus, a progressive jazz trio whose members all hail from Minnesota and Wisconsin. After seeing The Bad Plus perform at the Dakota in December 2003, Norton introduced himself to Dave King, the  band’s drummer and only member who still resides in Minneapolis.

King quickly identified Norton as the perfect person to play bass for a new postrock group he had been thinking about that would combine jazz, noise, rock, and metal. “At the time, I knew I could bring the noise,” says Norton. The conversation stayed open, but not serious, for a couple of years. Finally, in February 2006, the band had its first rehearsal.

The idea behind The Gang Font is to return challenging instrumental music to a few popular genres—particularly metal and rock—that have become too formulaic and predictable. “Instrumental music used to be a lot bigger in the sixties and seventies,” says Norton, “and then all of a sudden everybody was saying, ‘Ooh, no, for it to be popular it has to have vocals.’ ” Including “feat. Interloper” in the band’s name is a coy in-joke reference to hip-hop groups’ affinity for “featuring” guest performers.

According to King, Norton was a natural fit for the project. “Greg is into a lot of avant-garde music and contemporary classical music,” says King. “He isn’t some guy that’s limited to his past, to this punk or power pop punk thing.”

Still, those punk roots are present in Norton’s contributions to The Gang Font’s sound. The band’s music is loud, crashing, and ferocious at times—particularly when Norton, King, and guitarist Erik Fratzke’s playing collides. But their music can also be ethereal and cerebral, especially when keyboardist Craig Taborn takes off on one of his distinctive musical meditations.

“Some of our music is deeply confused,” admits King. “On the one hand, there’s this tight arrangement, and on the other hand, there’s this atonality and improvising going on that runs roughshod over the arrangements sometimes. The idea was to write some music and see how [Greg] reacts to it in a pure way, instead of busting his ass about things—like, ‘Would you play this note here?’ Greg’s sensibility is so natural. He’s ingested a ton of music in his life, so it just sort of comes out in these wild shapes, and that’s really where it works.”

Former First Avenue general manager Stephen McClellan met Norton in the early eighties, when Hüsker Dü started playing the Entry, and thinks Norton’s long musical layoff may have helped him in the long run. “The time and distance since the Hüsker Dü breakup has allowed Greg to play in a group less bogged down with Hüsker Dü baggage,” he says. “The music is more apt to be fresh and treated differently than [that of], say, Grant Hart’s Nova Mob or Bob Mould’s Sugar. Those bands emerged immediately after the Hüsker Dü breakup, while The Gang Font, feat. Interloper is happening at a different time in the Hüsker Dü storybook, in a different surrounding and circumstance.”

“With The Gang Font, it’s a blast playing live,” says Norton. “Erik is a natural showman on guitar, so it’s a lot of fun feeding off of that, and there certainly are moments to go wild and jump around. But there are also moments when the groove is mellower. Also, Dave brings so much energy to whatever he does. When he’s got that huge grin on his face—it’s hard not to feed off of that.”

Still, the band remains a side project for all its members. “Right now, the restaurant is my top priority,” says Norton. Meanwhile, King, Fratzke, and Taborn are all involved in other bands, each one with its own demands. Norton is philosophical about The Gang Font’s future, however. “We don’t want to limit what The Gang Font can do. So if, say, Sonic Youth asks us to tour Japan with them, it’ll be like, ‘Well . . . OK. If you insist,’ ” he says, laughing.

Will Norton ever host a Gang Font gig at The Nortons’? “Uh, I don’t play dinner music,” he says with a wry grin. “The joke is that I’ll get up and play when we want everybody to leave. Time to clear the room? Not a problem.” 

Megan Wiley is online editor of msp mag.com.