O n a recent Sunday at Jazzy’s Cabaret, Fernando Pinto was getting nervous. The Afro-Caribbean “supper club” and music venue was booked back-to-back with a brunchtime fashion show and the latest installment of Pinto’s East Rock Concert Series—and the fashion show was running late.
But Pinto’s a pro. When the audience for his show, featuring Italian guitarist Fabio Mittino and the acoustic-electric California Guitar Trio, started showing up expecting to seat themselves in the still-occupied dining room, he cheerfully diverted them to the bar instead. He made sure his performers, whose soundcheck was now delayed, were comfortably ensconced in a back room. He held court with a small coterie of friends and acquaintances at Jazzy’s door, somehow without blocking it. And despite the unexpected time crunch, the ERCS show went off hitch-free, concluding with a standing ovation.
Pinto has seen a lot of those in the 40 years he’s been booking and promoting live shows in Connecticut. But even after all this time, he remains a wide-eyed music lover eager to share what he loves with the world, balancing passion with efficiency and ambition.
Growing up in Portugal, it wasn’t clear that music was his destiny. He left for the US with his mother in 1977, a month shy of his 18th birthday. His homeland was still reeling from decades of life under the “Estado Novo,” a repressive political project that had only officially ended in 1974. He found work making airline bearings as a third-shift machinist at Danbury’s Barden Corporation, which ended abruptly when he lost the tip of an index finger. Then some friends who owned a Danbury club called Togobees hired him as a DJ spinning discs by alternative-rock darlings like The Tubes and The Pretenders. When they decided to open Togobees 2 in Naugatuck in 1982, Pinto became a partner, buying the others out two years later. He rechristened this space The Night Shift Cafe.
Almost immediately, he began booking bands who now comprise a who’s-who of indie rock acts—Sonic Youth, The Flaming Lips, Yo La Tengo—but also became fascinated by the blues, eventually scheduling blues and R & B artists once a week. “At the time people said, ‘This kid from Portugal, he’s nuts to mix his roster up this way,’” Pinto says, “but to be a successful live music promoter, you have to diversify.”
His big blues dream was to book Bo Diddley, and despite long odds he pulled it off. “We got along well,” Pinto remembers, although the sometimes-cantankerous Diddley loathed the management at his overnight accommodations. “He called and said he wanted to move. He told me, ‘These fuckers are as black as I am, but they’re racist against black people. I encounter this garbage everywhere I go.’ So, I moved him to Howard Johnson’s.” Problem solved. Though Pinto had fretted he couldn’t make enough money to pay Diddley, he not only met the $5,000 contract but made a $2,000 profit. “After that, I didn’t have to pursue any bands,” Pinto says. “They were calling me.”
In 1989, Pinto decided to take a breather and sold The Night Shift. After spending a few months back in Portugal, he started working as a booking agent for The Moon, the popular New Haven alt-rock club so fondly remembered that it still has its own memorial page on Facebook. This small space roared with the sounds of Wipers, Johnny Thunders, Ellen James Society, Mighty Mighty Bosstones, Smashing Pumpkins, but none of them made an impression like the young Seattle band Nirvana, about to break through with a monster album titled Nevermind. During the band’s first and only New Haven performance on September 26, 1991, lead singer Kurt Cobain jumped so exuberantly that he hit his head on The Moon’s low ceiling. “Afterward, he took me aside and said, ‘You know, Fernando, you seem like a nice guy,’” Pinto recalls. “‘But I don’t know if I like being booked into a closet.’”
This—along with The Moon’s fateful and possibly fatal decision to stop offering live music—confirmed Pinto’s suspicion that he’d have better luck hosting hot young bands at a bigger venue. So he opened his own, dubbing it Tune Inn. The location had previously been home to a rock bar called Urban Jungle that, although successful, had been beset with issues including, apparently, a drug-addicted owner behind on his rent. “This was when the whole Ninth Square had been boarded up for 20 years,” Pinto says. Mayors John C. Daniels and John DeStefano, Jr., were “focused on rebuilding the area and thought a rock bar limited the possibility of attracting other businesses downtown.”
Taking over this “problem location” gave Pinto plenty of headaches, the biggest being that he had to wait six years to get a liquor license. Decades later, this still aggravates him: “Over [several] years and two clubs I’d been a permittee, no problem.” Without a liquor license, he feared he’d be unable to attract an audience old enough to imbibe legally, so he turned Tune Inn into an all-ages club. That didn’t smooth his relations with city authorities. “The police would come down and arrest people every single day. When the Special Olympics came to town in 1995, the city tried to close us down. They applied all kinds of pressure. It was brutal.”
To appeal to its young clientele, Tune Inn reportedly became the first New Haven club to host raves, selling energy drinks to keep the kids on their feet. Before long, it was hosting successful live punk, ska and hardcore shows for audiences who “didn’t care whether we sold alcohol or not; they were into the music.” Still, with no alcohol revenue and an obligation to pay bands reliable “door deals”—a percentage of the cover receipts—he struggled to keep the club afloat and realized he needed to diversify his business.
“I started to see kids coming in with crates of records to sell to one another. At the end of the night, they’d walk out with empty crates,” he says, explaining the first in a chain of events leading to the opening of a record store inside Tune Inn. Pinto initially told the young entrepreneurs, “‘When you bring your records in, you’ll give us 15 percent of your sales.’” But, “within two weeks, they stopped bringing records.” He also noticed that many local acts who were packing the club—including ska band Spring Heeled Jack and hardcore punks The Pist—didn’t have record labels. So Pinto started his own, called Elevator Music, and began producing discs filled with tracks by Connecticut acts. “The first was Blood from the Streets of New Haven, then Skanarchy Vol. I, II and III—they sold like hotcakes.”
Elevator Music would go on to produce 34 discs over 15 years, but at first Pinto leveraged its releases to build Tune Inn’s record store inventory and spread the label’s music throughout the region and country. “Touring bands would come to the club and I’d trade 50 of my discs for 50 of theirs, particularly if their shows went over well. I also distributed discs to other stores. On a good day, I’d take in $3,000 in sales. This is what kept the club open for 10 years. Otherwise, we wouldn’t have lasted one.” Funds may have been shaky, but his reputation with performers remained solid. Pinto recalls that renowned California punk band Rancid turned down a showcase at Toad’s Place to play Tune Inn “because the word on the street was we’d provide a bigger, more appreciative audience.”
In recent years, Pinto has concentrated on freelance promotion, booking shows at several local venues as well as organizing national tours and even international events. He focuses carefully on matching each show presented by his East Rock Concert Series to an appropriate venue. Pinto has found that “sit-down-and-listen” shows work best at settings like Jazzy’s and Hamden’s Best Video, while raucous “party shows” are better suited to venues that attract standing-room audiences such as Hamden’s The Cellar on Treadwell and Cafe Nine (though it seems his relationship with the latter has cooled with a change in ownership last year).
Over the next few months, Pinto has more than a dozen shows scheduled. Judit Neddermann and Hayley Reardon, two “critically acclaimed singer/songwriters making waves in the modern Folk scene,” are coming to Jazzy’s on March 1. On March 16, Dobro master Abbie Gardner and local scene stalwart Frank Critelli will play Best Video, while Chris Spedding—a British session guitarist who’s worked with Paul McCartney, Brian Eno, Elton John, Ginger Baker and The Sex Pistols—rocks The Cellar with South African drummer Anton Fig and bass player Keith Lenten. On April 28, venerable singer-songwriter Robyn Hitchcock will play the Westport Library.
Pinto doesn’t care that many of the acts he presents are not household names, and he’s never chased money in his booking decisions. He’d rather promote artists who are “influential” than commercially successful, and he’s constantly discovering new performers—that is, new to him—thanks to a large network of “music nerds” and his own restless curiosity.
Lately, Pinto’s been thinking about retiring, sort of, to Portugal. Last August, he helped establish Luna Fest, a multi-day music fest in the Portuguese city of Coimbra, whose first edition featured The Fleshtones, Gang of Four, the Buzzcocks and John Cale, the multi-instrumentalist cofounder of The Velvet Underground. Pinto is currently working on the itinerary for this year and has an offer to fill the job for the next three after that. “Coimbra is like an ancient city on a hill, with a river at the bottom,” he says. “During the festival, people loved sitting on the riverbank. We had people coming from all over Europe to attend.” A certain “looseness,” he notes, “is a part of rock festivals, but you have to meet deadlines, too.”
His story reminds me of this mic-drop line from Hamilton: “Immigrants—we get the job done!” After four decades working for Connecticut’s music scene, whenever retirement comes, Pinto can rest easy knowing it was a job well done.
Written by Patricia Grandjean. Photographed by Dan Mims. Images feature Fernando Pinto at each of the two fountains on the New Haven Green.
