FARTIE MCFUCKBUTT INTERVIEW

Fartie McFuckButt is an old and dear friend of mine. I am respecting his wishes and not using his real name in this interview. I did not give him the opportunity to choose his own pseudonym.

Fartie McFuckButt is a legend to anyone who enjoys live music in Sacramento.

He’s also been a favorite punching bag of Nazis over the years. Fartie’s war stories have become part of our town’s mythology. Wanting to hear them from the source, I reach out and he agrees to meet me at Coffee Works on Folsom. He is late, which I know to expect from a dude who always overbooks himself. It’s a hot Sacramento spring day, so I grab a small cold brew coffee and wait for Fartie. In a corner of the coffee shop I spy Brian Mc-Kenna, another local show promoter. He’s excited to hear what Fartie and I will be discussing. “Oh, man, I’ve punched some Nazis over the years,” he says, relishing the memory.

Fartie shows up twenty minutes later and we grab a table. He is not the rail-thin young man he once was. He still sports a mop of thick, messy, black hair, but with a nice smattering of gray now joining the party. He manages to somehow stay right on the edge of unshaven, never quite reaching bearded.

I tell Fartie how I remember us meeting, describing him getting tired of me sneaking into his club and finally agreeing to let me in free in exchange for odd jobs.

He has no recollection of this but says it sounds like something he would do, and especially something he’d have done for me. He liked me, he explains, not just because I was friends with his girlfriend, but also because “You were a true-blue music fan and I thought you were someone who was for real.”

When I was attending these shows in the late eighties and early nineties, white-power skinheads were a constant presence in the punk scene and at Fartie’s “Tread Mark Club” (not its actual name) in particular. Fartie, having a few years on me, remembers it starting earlier, with racist skinheads showing up in Sacramento in the early eighties when he was booking punk shows featuring bands like Flipper, and the Dead Kennedys. He was surprised to see a macho, racist scene attach itself to punk of all things. “I would expect that more at like a Lynrd Skynyrd concert. Nothing against Lynyrd Skynyrd but I mean you know that just kind of white trash, white supremacist kind of thing, but there it was.” The uniform was already in place, bald heads, white t-shirts or polo shirts, suspenders, tight Levi’s with thin red suspenders, and of course they had their Doc Martens. “They really did have the look, it’s who they were.”

And they weren’t just at his shows. Coming downtown, he remembers, meant you were likely to run into racist skinheads, hanging out on corners, or at the record store.

I ask Fartie something I’ve been wondering about since I was a teenager. How did these assholes keep getting into his shows? Why did he let them in?

“Well, you know, that’s uh … that’s just your whole First Amendment thing or whatever. That was me saying, the best I could …” He interrupts himself to say, defensively, “I want to make clear, too, I don’t think we had that many fights inside. They mostly happened outside.”

That’s true, but the racist skinheads WERE inside.

Fartie describes his struggle with what to do, and it sounds like he harbored some sympathy for them, hoping that they were just dumb kids who were going to grow out of this idiotic phase. He didn’t want the fights, but he did want to see if his shows might have some beneficial influence.

“They were brains that were forming poorly but they weren’t formed yet. So I always felt like maybe there was some redemption. I wasn’t trying to alienate anyone, I was trying to embrace everyone. And hope that that would appease things, and um … I know it sounds naive …”

I agree that it was naive, and simplistic of him. Of course, embracing a young Nazi kid who you can maybe influence toward a better way of thinking might be admirable, but how many black, gay, Jewish, female kids are you then robbing of that scene, that embrace, by allowing it to be full of people who intentionally make others unwelcome? Of course he was young then himself, and over time he’d pay dearly for this naiveté.

Eventually there was a list of people who were known troublemakers, not to be allowed in, and of course there were many skinheads on the list.

Fartie continued to struggle with the antiracist skinheads and punks coming to fight the racists. At one point he canceled a show by Filibuster (a much-loved local ska band). “I love all those guys, but I was pissed off because it was like ‘I host you guys here! You play here! Don’t show up in a pickup truck because you heard there were some skinheads here you want to start a fight with.’”

This makes me love Filibuster even more than I already did. I ask Fartie about SHARPS, explaining that I didn’t like them at the time, but now looking back I wonder, did they help solve the Nazi problem?

His feeling is that they only worsened the problem. “You know what, they were just dudes who wanted to fight. They cloaked it in some kind of ideal but they were just dudes who wanted to fight.”

I come from a family that loves fighting, and it got me in trouble, and it hurt people, which wasn’t the part I liked. My brother became a professional fighter. He was a dude who liked to fight, and he found a socially acceptable, consensual, hell, even productive way to do it. I wondered, if these SHARPS were just dudes who liked to fight, why not go fight Nazis? That’s admirable, right?

Fartie has a different perspective on this. “When I set up an all-ages rock and roll show and they show up to fight, I don’t think that was anywhere on the flyer, you guys, I don’t think I advertised that on the poster. I did not invite you here to fight. So at that point they’ve crossed a line, a public line of decorum, but they’ve crossed me at that point, too.” After a pause he continues, “We were just talking about the Ariana Grande thing …”

Fartie and I are having this chat just days after twenty-two people, mostly kids, died in a bomb blast at an Ariana Grande concert in Manchester, England. “That kinda thing just kills me, as it’s always killed me. There’s nothing I hated more than anyone ever getting hurt at one of my shows, under any circumstances. I don’t care if they fell down and cut their knee open. I always hated it. I didn’t like mosh pits at my shows.”

“I DID!” I tell him, with a laugh.

Skinheads were not the only concern when it came to the safety of his audience at punk shows, with slam dancing, stage diving, and many of us showing up after engaging in a bit of underage drinking or other substance consumption. He once worried he’d be losing his business to a lawyer whose daughter got hurt when a stage diver landed on her.

The security charged with keeping us wild kids in check was a bunch of older black dudes, one of whom, Lincoln, I got chummy with even though he once hit me with a flashlight.

“Lincoln, why’d you hit me?”

Lincoln answered, “You’re doing that stupid dancing. I didn’t want you to get hurt.”

“Lincoln, the only time I ever got hurt dancing was just now when you hit me.”

“Just behave yourself,” he said, patting me on the back.

Fartie tells me he went through several different groups of security guards, including one guy who was a champion kickboxer. “It’s like, well, that’s nice you can do that, I don’t want to see any of that here.”

The kickboxer’s brother was a racist skinhead.

When Fartie ran into skinheads around town, they knew him as the dude who put on the punk shows. “They’d go, ‘hey, Fartie,’ and I would very reluctantly go [in a deep, low voice], ‘hey, guys.’ You know, um, I wasn’t like ‘fuck you, racist!’ but, I like to lead by example and I feel like that’s the best thing I could do was be better.”

I asked him more about the decision process when it came to letting people in, or not letting people in. What about blatantly racist things, swastika patches or tattoos, that kind of thing?

“Oh, no no no no, you know I don’t think I noticed that. I don’t think anybody came in with a big swastika. Maybe people had swastika tattoos that I didn’t notice because they weren’t coming in shirtless …”

I recall they often ended up that way in the pit.

Fartie recalls something that would be very hard to explain to anyone outside of the punk scene, regarding the hateful symbol in the days before racist punk became a thing. “The swastika thing with punk rock was such a weird thing.” Sid Vicious of the Sex Pistols wore a swastika around his neck. Other punks did this, as well.

I totally get his hesitancy here, and it being awkward to try to explain out of context. I never wore a swastika, I wouldn’t, but I too was a Sid Vicious fan, and I had, at one time, defended his wearing the swastika. I think this is a great example of a lot of us white kids thinking we’re being rebellious and not being able to see these things from other contexts. Sure, our white parents and grandparents hated that symbol and so it was ripe for pissing them off, but what about our Jewish friends and their grandparents? To them, more white people running around with swastikas on might not seem so rebellious, just a terrible status quo.

Fartie jokes, “And honest to God that is a cool symbol. It’s one of the coolest symbols ever, for crying out loud. Fucking Nazis get to have that? [In a comical voice] Say what you will about Nazis, they had a sense of design and image. It felt more cartoonish, at first. Now I think anybody who sports that is a freakin’ idiot.”

So, after his optimism and generosity toward the kids with the shaved heads who were fucking up his shows, I wonder how did he come to be on the receiving end of their boots and was it Nazi skins or SHARPS?

“It was Nazis. There were so many incidents.”

Fartie recounted an infamous night in Sacramento’s history, from his perspective.

In the early morning hours of January 4, 1992, a group of nine black men and women entered the Carrows Restaurant in midtown. As they entered, a table of skinheads got up and left. A short time later a car full of men drove by firing guns into the restaurant. No one was hit.

The rumor around town was that the shots were actually aimed at a group of SHARPS who was also at Carrows and had nothing to do with the group of black people there but I’ve never heard this confirmed.

Fartie tells of going into Carrows, as he often did in the a.m. hours after shows, shortly before the attack. Two skinheads sitting at a table recognized him and said hello. He said a hushed hello back and went to his own table.

He noticed the table of young black kids seated by the window, right across from him. “Maybe they’d been out dancing that night or something, they were dressed really nice, you know … just teenagers hanging out.”

He didn’t get the news of what happened until the following Monday and called an anonymous tip line to report that he’d seen two skinheads there earlier in the evening.

He didn’t know their names, only their nicknames, and he stressed that he was not saying they had anything to do with the shooting, but he thought they might have information.

He had called anonymously and had not left any personal information. Much to his surprise, ten minutes later local police along with the FBI showed up at Fartie’s door. It turned out the waitress had tipped them off that Fartie had been there and that the skinheads had said hi to him.

He told the cops the same thing he’d already told the anonymous tip line, and apparently word got out.

“Next thing I know I got guys walking up to me at shows saying, ‘You’re dead,’ and like, ‘You ratted these guys out.’”

Promoting his shows with posters and handbills became difficult and dangerous. Fartie describes having to run every time he saw a group of skinheads, and they tended to hang out at all the places he needed to be at to distribute his flyers, at shows, parties, and even at dance clubs, where they’d hang out in the parking lot.

Skinheads had an odd relationship with scenes they claimed to hate; lacking any real scene of their own, they’d hang out near dance clubs, go to mod dance parties, presumably just to make trouble, making fun of the clothes and the scooters, calling the guys gay and harassing the girls with lewd comments, trying to provoke fights.

Fartie had several close calls when he had to jump into a friend’s van and race away with threats and beer bottles hurled after them.

Of course, as a show promoter, Fartie couldn’t hide. “I was so easy to find that it led to my beating a few times. You know, it’s like, ‘He’s at the club. When he’s not at the club he goes to Carrows or Lyon’s, so we’ll beat him in the parking lot of Lyon’s.’”

The skinhead who said hi to Fartie on the night of the shooting was the brother of Fartie’s kickboxing security guy. He sat down with his employee and explained that he hadn’t thrown anyone under the bus. That he didn’t say they had done it. And, luckily, surprisingly that worked and things calmed down, for a while.

He didn’t always get off that easy. On another occasion, seeing a group of Nazi skinheads run out of the club, he followed them into the parking lot, foolishly neglecting to alert his security team. “I thought that sticking a shot glass in my pocket would be all I needed to go out and confront five or six skinheads,” he laughs.

He tried to be tactful, asking them if there was a problem, if anyone was messing with them. As he talked, they formed a circle around him, and he knew he was in trouble. “They make a move on me and I grab my shot glass. And I just BOOM nail a guy on the head with it. It was Curly from The Three Stooges comedy here. I hit him on the head with the shot glass ‘boop’ and the shot glass goes wooooooo smash and breaks in the parking lot about twenty feet away. That was the extent of my damage on them.”

Decades later Fartie and I are able to laugh as he describes his head being bounced back and forth between cars, and we laugh harder as he remembers that they tried to break a bottle over his head but couldn’t get it to shatter. It doesn’t work like in the movies, he explains. “It’s like ‘Clink,’ ‘Clink,’ ‘Clink.’ They hit me over the head about ten times and the bottle never broke.”

After taking a few punches to the face, he wrestled away from them, and not having another shot glass to bounce off of their skulls, he starts to spit blood at them. “My fighting back gesture was to spit my own blood on them. ‘Fuck you guys, ptoo ptoo ptoo’ Ha ha ha, that was the best I could do at that point.”

Eventually he got back into the club, and security raced to the parking lot, but the skinheads had made their escape by then.

An incident that’s harder to find the humor in took place in 1996 and put Fartie in the hospital with a broken back. He’d taken a break from doing shows at The Tread Mark Club and restarted his monthly newspaper The Shitburg Times (not it’s actual name). He booked a one-off show in the middle of trying to get the second issue of the paper out. The bands, Pocket Change and Welt, were good friends of his, and he was looking forward to a fun and uneventful night.

During the show, Fartie hid out in the DJ booth with his ancient laptop working on the paper. He had only a few days to make their deadline and prove to sponsors he could successfully get the paper out on a monthly basis.

He heard from security that they’d thrown some skinheads out for starting fights on the dance floor. “Oh man, I don’t do a show for months, I come back and this is what happens.”

The show ended and the sound man was loading equipment out to his truck, leaving the doors to the club open. Fartie’s in the club, holding his computer as a carload of skinheads walk in, five or six of ’em, plus their girlfriends. “With their stupid bowl cuts. I hated that look, that costume of thuggery, that costume of racism, all of it, all the ugliness that was tied into it, that was that look. That’s what they were trying to tell me with that look. That was a look that they deliberately donned because that’s how they were identifying.”

The skins didn’t recognize Fartie. “Who are you?”

“Oh, I’m just cleaning up.”

“Who else is here?”

Fartie’s friends Katy and Megan were closing up the bar and the soundman was outside loading equipment into his truck. Security had gone home already.

“Oh, well, security is squaring up with the owner in the office and we’re just loading out sound.” Fartie tried not to reveal that he was the producer behind the show.

“And the whole time I’m just looking around, ‘Did Eric leave a mic stand in here, anything that I can, is there a chair, anything that I can grab to defend myself?’”

Fartie was also aware that he was holding a laptop with the whole next issue of his newspaper saved on it. He tells them, “Hang on a minute, guys,” and walks over to the stage where he carefully sets his computer down. “I walk back up to them and I’m like, ‘I don’t know if there’s anything else I can help you … ’ and they just jump me. But all I can think at that point is, ‘Thank God I set my computer down.’”

The skinheads all joined in kicking Fartie with their steel-toe boots, and punching him. “I’m swinging like a madman, I’m trying to clock a jaw or a nose if I can. But I’m also doing whatever I can to cover my face.” He describes not feeling fear, just anger, and even a sense of familiarity. “I just wanna jump up and punch somebody if I can. I’ve had this happen before, where I literally know the routine. So, after it was over and they go running out the door, I’m laying there and I can feel sand and grit on my tongue, and I know it’s teeth.”

He jumped to his feet to go get their license plate number, assuming the adrenaline’s gonna kick in and help him through the pain, as it’s done in the past.

But as soon as Fartie got up, he knew this time was different. Screaming pain cut right through him and put him back on the ground. An ambulance was called and he spent the next ten days in the hospital.

Fartie laughs remembering how frustrated he’d get that, in all the times he’d had his face beaten in, nobody ever thinks to take a picture of the carnage for him. I recall that the story around town was that they’d broken his cheekbone and his eye had popped out of his head.

“That did not happen. They’re just confusing my lazy eye.”

What did happen was that he fractured the three lower vertebrae of his back. After his ten-day hospital stay, with no health insurance, he had to wear a tight back brace and utilize a wheelchair some friends managed to find for him. “Which is fine except I lived up a flight of stairs.” His friends brought his computer to the hospital, and he managed to give them verbal instructions there in the hospital room. Amazingly, the paper came out on time.

I commended him on his brilliant move, saving the computer.

“Yeah. Faces heal, computers don’t.”

Nobody was arrested over the beating. “I was shown mugshots of skinheads, but guess what. They all look alike.”

Some believe the lead guy was Dave Lynch, a notorious white supremacist and organizer for the American Front who was later murdered in his own home in Rocklin, California, a suburb of Sacramento.

Pressing Fartie again on his earlier assertion that SHARPS and Nazis were two sides of the same coin, I had to ask him, “How many times did skinheads jump you?”

“Three times.”

“Were you ever jumped by SHARPS?”

“No. No, that never happened, to their credit.”