40 Years In, Fernando Pinto Perseveres

Music promoter Fernando Pinto entered Blue State Coffee on a sunny morning with a bag of flyers under his arm as he finished up his walk around the city to hang them up at his usual spots. 

“I know all of them,” he said — though he is still finding more spots, even after 40 years of booking and promoting shows throughout New Haven. As he celebrates that anniversary, two shows in particular are on Pinto’s mind, and on those flyers he is posting. 

The first upcoming show Pinto is promoting is this Wednesday at Cafe Nine featuring British legends APB, local rockers Vertico, and Lust for Life 80s music with DJ Ram and DJ Rom. The second show is Hubby Jenkins with Washboard Slim and The Bluelights on Sunday, April 3, also at Cafe Nine at the Sunday Buzz matinee, which is also part of his East Rock Concert Series.

Of course, there are even more shows coming up via Fernando Pinto Presents, because Pinto never stops working. Even during the pandemic shutdown, he was searching out new sounds and new bands, making plans for when live shows began again. That drive has kept him going since music became a major part of his life as a DJ in the late ​’70s at a club called Togobees in Danbury that was ​“basically like Rudy’s used to be,” Pinto said.

Pinto came to Connecticut from Portugal, which ​“was a rough place to live back in the ​’70s,” he said. He grew up under the repressive dictatorship of António de Oliveira Salazar, who ruled the country from 1932 until he fell into a coma in 1968. The regime he created didn’t fully collapse until 1975. ​“I started my plan to escape Portugal when I was 15 years old,” Pinto said; at the time, young men of 18 were being drafted to fight in Angola, Mozambique, and Guinea-Bissau, as the Salazar regime tried to maintain its hold on those colonies. (They all gained their independence in 1974.) But even after the wars ended, Portugal struggled. 

In the fall of 1977, just before he turned 18, ​“I came here with my mom,” Pinto said. ​“It was the only way I could come legally.” His mother had a brother, Rafael, who lived and worked in Danbury. He ​“invited my mom to come to America, and she stayed here for four months and went back.” The whole idea behind the trip, Pinto said, ​“was to get me here. She left, and I stayed with my uncle for a year or so.” Then he was on his own. ​“My first job was at the Barden Corporation in Danbury as a machinist, until I lost the tip of my index finger. I never went back, and soon after that, I started the DJ gig.”

At Togobees, Pinto would spin alternative music for the college crowd. That led to the opening of Togobees 2 in Naugatuck in 1982, where Pinto began as a DJ, two years later buying his partners out and turning it into The Night Shift. 

“That’s where the music career really started,” Pinto said. He began booking acts, starting with local bands, ​“mostly blues and alternative and some folk.” The college students who frequented the place helped the crowds grow larger and larger.

“They were in class with someone who’d never been to an alternative show — we call it indie music now, but in the ​’80s we called it alternative — that person came in, they enjoy themselves, and next time they bring another friend with them and that’s how it grew,” he said. In time, he also booked a number of well-known national acts from other genres, such as Phish and Bo Diddley.

After selling The Night Shift at the end of 1989 Pinto went back to Portugal, where he was born and raised, for three months. He then moved to Howe Street in New Haven and ended up working at The Moon, as well as booking a couple of shows a week at The Third World Café on Whalley Avenue.

“I didn’t want to run a club,’ he said. ​“I thought it would be more fun to bring shows into a venue.” The Moon was already a well-established club, with live shows and dance parties on Friday and Saturday ​“that would be slammed,” Pinto said. He began bringing in bands on weeknights as well, through his own network of connections that he had built up over the previous nine years. 

“It worked great,” he said. ​“It was like a year and a half I did shows there, and it was amazing the bands that played there in that little amount of time.” One of those bands, Nirvana, played a show as part of their 1991 Nevermind tour (see a full video of that show here) — just a few weeks before the video for ​“Smells Like Teen Spirit” catapulted them to fame. Pinto noted that there is currently a documentary about that show in the works.

His time at The Moon led to him establishing The Tune Inn, a place where he hoped to accommodate larger crowds. 

“It was all of these bands packing The Moon that were already too big for The Moon, and I was like, ​‘man, I got to do something,’” he said. Pinto signed a ten-year lease on a space on Center Street, and the club opened in October 1991. 

The Tune Inn ​“was perfect” according to Pinto, double the size of The Moon with ​“a big stage and big ceilings.” 

Two weeks after the club opened, Pinto began doing shows there with Blind Justice and a host of other local bands.

“New Haven had a really happening scene at that time, like a heavy ​’90s scene,” said Pinto. He applied for a liquor license thinking he would get it a couple months later; it ended up taking seven years. Pinto was still determined to keep up the quality of shows that he was used to presenting.

“I was pretty well established with bringing in music” by that time, he said. ​“I liked to bring in real music. That’s my thing. That’s my kick. I like quality. I like music from A to Z. I just don’t like distraction … meaning, it has no substance. I try to stay away from that. I don’t stick to genres. You can have a good punk sound and I don’t look at it like oh, this is punk. I just say it’s a great song, period.”

By the time Pinto got his liquor license the club had already been established as an all-ages venue, so he built a wall separating the lounge and the ​“big room.” He recalled when Jonathan Richman came in and sold out, playing in the lounge, while in the big room people watched the show from the other side ​“and things started to change.” But when Pinto’s initial lease was up in 2002, the landlord wanted more rent than the club could afford, and the Tune Inn closed. 

During this time, Pinto had also started a record label called Elevator Music ​“built with local bands” that put out about 30 to 40 releases over a number of years, including many of the ska bands that had played at The Tune Inn.

“We had bands like Spring Heeled Jack, JC Superska, The Snappers, Johnny Too Bad and The Strikeouts — these were bands that would bring in 500 kids to The Tune Inn, all CT bands,” Pinto said. ​“And I would see the reaction that was happening in the room when these bands played. They didn’t have music out, so I said, ​‘well, we should do something.’”

The label and its website are no longer active, but Pinto still considers it an important part of his legacy and learning process. 

“You have to follow your heart, but following your heart is not the answer for you to be successful,” he said. ​“However, I feel grateful for it, because mistakes have instructed me, or gave me schooling to keep going. I think the biggest mistakes were my best school.”

The music has also instructed him and his way he lives his life. ​“Anything that really tells you the picture of what’s happening, to me, that’s very valuable,” he said. ​“Self-expression that I could relate, or someone could relate to. The political punk is also something I can relate to because of my experiences. I try to live my life with values, and when someone is pushing certain values that don’t agree to me, it’s like, ​‘whoa.’ Punk gave me that force to continue. It made me realize that’s the way to do it, you know? Don’t stand for the bullshit.”

Perseverance has led Pinto to keep trying new ventures, one of his most recent being the East Rock Concert series that began at mActivity four years ago and is now held at a variety of venues throughout the city. The series began with nationally known singer/songwriter acts like Melanie, as well as local acts, and continues this coming Sunday with the Hubby Jenkins-Washboard Slim show at Cafe Nine this Sunday. Pinto is hoping to keep that series going on a regular basis, even if it is not weekly as it was originally planned, presenting what he likes to refer to as ​“roots music” for that series.

“When I refer to roots, it’s blues, folk, country, early rock ​‘n’ roll like from the ​’50s — to me that’s all roots,” he said. ​“It’s the same thing with the world music. To me it is roots. We call it world music because it’s from different parts of the world, but that’s their roots.”

And he will keep presenting punk and alternative bands, including his Wednesday show at Cafe Nine celebrating his 40-year career of doing exactly that. The headliners, APB, are no strangers to the Fernando Pinto Presents roster, having played at The Night Shift many years ago. 

“Imagine if James Brown got The Clash behind him,” said Pinto as he described APB’s sound. ​“It’s funk, but it’s punk. This is an incredible band. I’m sure that those people that went out in the ​’80s that still go out will be there.”

Pinto is also always looking for new bands and new sounds. This past winter he was inspired to take his next step: bringing bands from one of his homes to the other.

“I’m always looking, but I like things that really hit me,” he said. ​“Many years ago, when I started the record label, my intention for the label was to build artists, then go on tour with them and see the world. That was really the motivation. It hasn’t happened yet, but I still want to be able to do that. There’s going to be bands here from Portugal and bands going to Portugal from here. So, I’m excited about that.” 

“Sometimes it feels like New Haven has been a home for me, America period, because I came here two weeks before I turned 17,” he added. This past winter was the first time Pinto stayed in Portugal for four months since coming here in 1977. ​“When I go to Portugal, they don’t know that I’m Portuguese. I’m a citizen of the universe. That is what I always tell them.”

Pinto’s role as a booking agent for a variety of national acts — including Linda Gal Lewis, Jerry Lee Lewis’s sister, and Billy Bremner, who played guitar for Rockpile, the Pretenders, and with George Harrison — is also a major part of his life. He is currently working on rescheduling their tours, which were cancelled due to Covid. One has to wonder, with so many projects going on, how Pinto manages to find the time to do it all. 

“Patti Smith said ​‘fuck the clock,’ and I believe this,” he said. ​“I’m a workaholic, but when it comes to music, I’m in the zone. When I had other odd jobs every two minutes, I looked at the clock. We don’t need clocks, we need jobs that really channel, you know, that energy.” 

“It’s all right here,” he said, patting his chest. ​“It’s all heart.”

Tickets for both the APB/Vertico show on March 30 and the Hubby Jenkins/Washboard Slim show on April 3 can be purchased at the Cafe Nine website here or via the Fernando Pinto Presents website here. More information about all Fernando Pinto Presents shows can be found at his website.