Sometime between Saturday and Sunday, the makeup of the crowd at the Emerald changed. Small groups of tough-looking men sporting short or no hair and faded tattoos began to filter in through the front door and coalesce near the space that serves as the watering hole's stage. The kind of men who never arrive alone, and sweat easy violence.
"Guess the show across the street's over," deadpanned somebody next to us at the bar.
We all knew what he meant.
I practically lived at downtown St. Pete's State Theatre for five or so years, working, writing, playing and partying, and I know which acts bring out the skinheads.
I don't use that term in reference to its integrated, working-class British origins — yup, first-wave skins were a left-leaning, multiracial bunch — but rather with the wholly negative connotations it has since unfortunately accumulated. I use it in the way the public recognizes it, much to the chagrin of the pockets of anti-racist skins scattered around the world: to delineate a certain type of thug.
Some are true neo-Nazis; most aren't. Some aren't even really racists — the vast majority of people beaten up by them are white, and either too drunk or too stupid to stay out of their way — and many have long since stopped shaving their heads and sporting white laces in their Doc Martens. The three characteristics uniting this loose-knit subculture, more than anything, are: 1. The credential of having associated with racist skins, however briefly or superficially, at some point in their young lives; 2. A tendency to enjoy fighting unfairly; and 3. A love of street-punk and hardcore music.
Ironically, many of the bands that attract these men are from the seminal, socially aware, multicultural ska and punk scenes of England's mid-to-late '70s. Such is the case with The Business, a British group whose nearly three decades of existence has been plagued by concert violence and allegations of racism. It was The Business that played the State last Saturday night, along with Roger Miret & The Disasters, another band with vague, tenuous and often misinterpreted ties to skinhead culture.
And, as always, with the hundreds of fans who didn't want any trouble came a comparative handful bent on making some.
Things at the Emerald remained relatively business-as-usual for the remainder of the evening. Those in the crowd who didn't know the hard faces or recognize the tattoos, T-shirts and habitual flocking enjoyed a couple of rollicking sets by local rockabilly group The Psycho DeVilles. Those of us who did tried to ignore the sudden change in mood while simultaneously waiting for the other end of the bar to explode into violence.
It didn't, however. One or two guys wandered in front of the band and gave the sieg-heil straight-arm salute, just in case anybody wasn't clear on exactly who the big, drunk dudes with the stubble-cuts happened to be. But that was all. I drank my embarrassingly colored and lime-accessorized Ketel One and cranberry. Psycho DeVilles frontman Hot Rod Walt stood on the bar and played some noisy beer-bottle slide. Some really cool guy missing most of one of his fingers showed us a great magic trick. Joey N. went home without saying anything potentially apocalyptic to the big, drunk dudes with the stubble-cuts.
Last call came, and found those of us left spilling out onto the sidewalk for the usual 10 minutes or so of pre-adjournment smoking and shit-shooting. A few of the skins stood around, doing likewise, waiting for the ones still inside. We were just getting to the hugging and see-yas when a dirty little car screeched to a halt at our feet, and a tall guy with longish hair and painfully tight pants hopped out.
"Get everybody," he hollered at the guys standing by the door to the Emerald. "The ruckus is happening. Right now!"
The tall guy, who looked about as much like a skinhead-associated brawler as I look like a circuit-court judge, folded himself back into his car, spun it around, and headed up Central Avenue in the direction of a group of people milling about in front of the Uptown. Some of the guys around us immediately began running after the car. Others went back into the Emerald, where they apparently underwent some sort of instantaneous mitotic multiplication, because twice as many similar-looking dudes came back out to follow their brethren.
Our lazy goodnights became a little more hurried. We were halfway to our car, parked across the street, when the gun went off.
The frenzied activity in front of the Uptown was already breaking up as we sped past. A few men were still grappling with one another, but most were bolting to cars or in various directions. The flashing red-and-blue lights were already visible, seven or eight blocks up and coming fast.
I didn't see anyone lying on the sidewalk.
This article appears in May 17-23, 2006.
