Miriam Linna met Billy Miller in 1977, while browsing at a record fair. She was looking for “You Must Be a Witch,” by the Lollipop Shoppe, a sixties garage band, and he had a copy back in his apartment. Their marriage—a celebrated meeting of the minds, ears, and shelves—lasted until Miller’s death, of cancer, in 2016. In addition to some musical collaborations (Linna, before meeting Miller, had been the founding drummer of the punk band the Cramps), they became perhaps the country’s preëminent archivists of old rockabilly and doo-wop records, among other treasures. They started the underground magazine Kicks and the Norton Records label, and Linna established a Kicks Books imprint, which published works by Sun Ra and Harlan Ellison.
At the time of Miller’s death, he had been working for more than ten years on a meticulous history of a relatively obscure Detroit label called Fortune Records. Its catalogue, catholic of genre, was a kind of Gnostic gospel of rock and roll, embodying an alternative and mostly neglected story line of rock’s disparate roots. At first, Linna was too grief-stricken to take up the project, but after a few years she and Miller’s co-author, a musician and writer named Michael Hurtt, got down to the harder-than-they’d-thought job of finishing it, with the encouragement of their editor, Marc Miller.
“Mind Over Matter: The Myths and Mysteries of Detroit’s Fortune Records” came out in the fall. “We printed two thousand copies,” Linna said the other day. “It was a gamble, but I’d done two thousand of everything we’d ever done.” The book weighs more than five pounds and costs a hundred bucks. She had insisted on printing it near Detroit, rather than overseas: “It was more expensive to do that, but it meant a lot to give the work to Michigan people.”
Linna was in her apartment, or, really, her splendid athenaeum, in a converted schoolhouse in Prospect Heights—two big rooms teeming with scrupulously arranged books, records, and old magazines, as well as retired jukeboxes, radios, and various ephemera, such as a can of Campbell’s tomato soup signed by Andy Warhol and later inadvertently opened, emptied, and tossed in the trash by the oddball Norton rockabilly artist Hasil Adkins.
“I’m kind of a more-is-more person,” Linna said.
There were fleets of B-movie posters (“Dragstrip Riot,” “The Sinister Urge,” “Juvenile Jungle”) and racks of catchy titles, of a genre she calls “sleaze paperback.” A visitor thumbed through “Side-Show Girl: Men Loved Her at Their Peril!” Linna has one of the world’s largest collections of pulp paperbacks. An additional six thousand are housed in a haunted castle in Cleveland, along with the bulk of the Norton Records inventory. (She and Miller had lost about a quarter of a million records, all of their files, and the Kicks Books inventory when Hurricane Sandy swamped their Red Hook storehouse, in 2012. “Thousands of books dissolved into nothing,” Linna said.) She has a thing for juvenile delinquency; for a while she published a magazine called Bad Seed. “J.D. stuff is my forte,” she said. Another forte: mid-century teen-culture, hot-rod, true-crime, and African-American magazines. She has copies of pretty much every issue of Dig, Hop Up, Ebony Song Parade, Bronze Thrills, Jive, Sepia, Hep, and Pro. “People say I’m an obsessive collector. I say, Not really. I just get what interests me. My interests are limited and specific.”
Linna, who is sixty-five, has had hardly any visitors in a year. She was wearing two masks, a black sweater, black leggings, and leopard-print flats. She has sandy blond bangs, and her show-and-tell patter bore traces of both the Midwest and downtown tough. Born in Ontario and reared in Ohio, she moved to New York in 1976 and worked at the Strand bookstore until she and Miller married, in 1989.
Fortune, too, was founded by a couple, Devora and Jack Brown, who set up a recording studio in the back of their Detroit record shop in 1946 and started producing sessions with every kind of singer and musician in town. Devora, a songwriter, had the ear; Jack ran the business. They hustled their records, had a few minor hits, but never made anyone rich, including themselves. “They had a business model that was no model at all,” Linna said. “It was simply a love of the music.” She went on, “Billy wanted Fortune to be known. Maybe because it was run by a couple, just like our label was, he understood the struggles they had.
“So,” she said. “Do you want to hear anything?”
She pulled down a bunch of 45s, retreated into a corner, to a turntable set up behind a rattan bar, and began spinning Fortune sides, loud as can be, while nodding and bobbing and air-drumming. She had no concern about damaging rare artifacts. “Records are for playing,” she said.
“Leave Me Alone,” by Nathaniel Mayer and the Fabulous Twilights. Then “Route 16,” a mambo/doo-wop one-of-a-kinder, by Nolan Strong, whose high tenor, in the lead of the local group the Diablos, inspired the singing style of Smokey Robinson. Then “Help Murder Police,” by the Hi-Fidelities; “Sally Bad,” by the Utopias; George Young’s “Buggin’ Baby”; the Richard Brothers’ “Drunk Driver’s Coming”; the Andre Williams classic “Jail Bait.” (“This is Keith Richards’s favorite Fortune record,” Linna said.)
The recordings, none quite like the other, all had in common a burning, reverb-y, almost oversaturated verve. “It’s the grittiest music you could possibly imagine,” she said. Her counterintuitive clincher was a piece of ethereal doo-wop, written and recorded by Devora Brown and performed by Little Eddie and the Don Juans, called “This Is a Miracle.” It was, and still is. ♦
