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.”