A Side of Rock

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.