Beifuss
the 1970s and ’80s, Falco returns to the city by the river for a Tuesday night performance at Lafayette’s Music Room in Overton Square. The show promotes not just Falco’s latest album, “Cabaret of Daggers,” but recognizes the 40th anniversary of his band, Panther Burns, which debuted its underground sound in an above-ground location — a cotton loft at 96 S. Front St. — on Feb. 10, 1979.
“We’re calling the show the ‘40th Anniversary Howl’ because panthers howl, they howl in the night,” said Falco, reached by phone while traveling through the Arizona desert en route to a gig in Las Vegas.
“It’s a mystery as to what they’re howling about, and there’s also a mystery, an enigma about the Panther Burns,” said Falco, who now makes his home in Vienna, Austria. “There was a Howlin’ Wolf, there was a Muddy Waters, now there’s a Panther Burns — even if we come from the more self-conscious generation that came after those great artists. We prowl in
YALONDA M. JAMES/THE COMMERCIAL APPEAL
their shadow.”
“He’s very persistent,” said original Panther Burns drummer Ross Johnson, marveling over Falco’s success in transabout forming an art project into an identity. “Everybody always wants to talk his lack of skills, but after 40 years, he has skills.”
Added Johnson: “He sees himself as heroic, and he is, and I’ve got no argument with that.”
Still, even heroes may encounter heartbreak when they return to their hometowns.
Two weeks ago, during a stop in Memphis, a thief or thieves stole Falco’s IDS, his passport, his stage wardrobe, some filmmaking equipment and, crucially, the artifacts that would form the basis for a Panther Burns exhibit at an alternateuniverse Rock and Roll Hall of Fame: Falco lost his signature 1966 blackpainted Höfner electric guitar — a classic that had been essentially his sole instrument since he bought it 37 years ago in Memphis — and what he calls “the Panther Burns flag,” which had served as the screen-printed fluorescent-ink backdrop for every Tav Falco show since 1996.
“It was a career misadventure,” said Falco, who said his bags and gear vanished after being curbside for just a few minutes while outside the house of a friend who was taking him to the airport. He said he didn’t blame Memphis, but the theft made him “sad” because it spoke to what he calls “the desperation” that leads people to crime in a country as wealthy, at the top, as America.
But, of course, “The show must go on,” Falco said. Johnson took Falco to Lansky Brothers, where the Panther Burns leader was re-outfitted with appropriately cool stage attire by the Elvis Presley-beloved “Clothier to the King.” Meanwhile, John Lowe, owner of Xanadu Music & Books, was able to find Falco a replacement vintage Höfner. “I just got lucky,” Lowe explained. “I Googled it, there was a place in Texas that had one, I was like, ‘Here it is, order it up.’ “(Falco is offering a $500 “no questions asked” reward for the return of his guitar and accouterments; those with information should contact Xanadu.)
Occasional miscreant notwithstanding, Falco has no trouble finding allies such as Johnson and Lowe in Memphis. A photographer, filmmaker and author as well as a musician, Falco — he doesn’t discuss his age, but the
Encyclopedia of Arkansas gives him a 1945 birthday — has been an icon of unpopular culture and the landscaper of a purposeful “anti-musical environment” ever since he called public attention to himself in 1978 by chainsawing his guitar into pieces onstage during an art-music “happening” at the Orpheum.
At least one out-of-town writer recounting that incident has misidentified the theater as “the Orpheus,” which isn’t entirely off base: Falco cites Orpheus — the musician and poet of Greek myth who descended into the underworld and used his music to defy death — as something of a role model.
“To really be in the Panther Burns and to partake of the Panther Burns tone and aesthetic, you have to merge with this vision, this Orphic vision, which has a lot to do with the whole idea of going down into the underground, into the dark waters of your unconscious,” Falco said.
Although “Cabaret of Daggers” is the first album credited solely to “Tav Falco,” the musician continues to believe much of his most powerful art has been manifested through the collaborative romance of Panther Burns (the band is named for a small community in westcentral Mississippi).
“It is a shared vision,” said Falco, adding that when he formed Panther Burns with Memphis musician Alex Chilton (the former Box Tops lead singer who had abandoned pop fame for the protoalt-rock of Big Star and a thorny solo carer), “the idea was to have a balance between non-musicians playing instruments” — as Falco was, initially — “and real musicians who were practically virtuosos, as Alex was on the guitar.”
If such a “shared vision” sounds exclusive, the history of the band frequently identified as “the Unapproachable Panther Burns” says otherwise. Since its 1979 debut, when the roster consisted of Falco, Chilton (who died in 2010), Johnson and Eric Hill on synthesizer, no fewer than 85 “performing personnel” have participated in Panther Burns, according to the group’s Wikipedia page.
Falco introduced Chilton as “Axle Chitlin“during another 40-year-old Panther Burns milestone, when the band made its television debut on a now infamous episode of WHBQ-TV’S “Straight Talk with Marge Thrasher,” a local weekday morning program.
Falco has referred to his art as “an unholy amalgam of animal lust and divine transubstantiation,” but on that particular morning, Thrasher (who died in 2012) delivered a different verdict. “That may be the worst sound I’ve ever heard come out on television,” she said, after a Panther Burns cover of “Train Kept Arollin’.”
Responded Falco: “I don’t think anyone else is playing music like this in Memphis or maybe anywhere else in the world.”
Said Thrasher: “I don’t think they are, either.”
Whatever the evolution of that sound, Falco’s values have remained remarkably consistent. In 1979, Falco told Thrasher: “I’m not that concerned about the marketplace . ... I’m more concerned about a communications environment.” This week, on the phone, he told a reporter: “I’m here in music and film and writing and pictures to express something outside of the demands of the marketplace, outside of everything other than your own criteria. I have to live up to that.”
Although the “Panther Burns tone and aesthetic” never made anybody rich, it proved influential on subsequent
If you go
What: Tav Falco’s Panther Burns When: Today, doors open at 6 p.m. for the 8 p.m. show More info: 901-207-5097, lafayettes.com/memphis
Tav Falco Where: Lafayette’s Music Room, Overton Square Tickets: $15
“To really be in the Panther Burns and to partake of the Panther Burns tone and aesthetic, you have to merge with this vision, this Orphic vision, which has a lot to do with the whole idea of going down into the underground, into the dark waters of your unconscious.”
generations of punk, garage and avantgarde rock-and-rollers. The encyclopedic Allmusic.com website identifies the band’s 1982 album, “Behind the Magnolia Curtain,” as “a timeless classic” and “one of the great recordings to emerge from the post-punk era,” while The New York Times wrote that Falco “hasn’t let his increasing technical expertise and idiomatic mastery compromise the clarity of his vision.”
The current Panther Burns lineup — the band that will take the stage at Lafayette’s — includes three musicians from Rome who discovered the group long after it made its first recordings. Joining vocalist/guitarist Falco will be Giuseppe Sangirardi on bass, Walter Brunetti on drums and Mario Monterosso — who has relocated to Memphis — on lead guitar.
As that continental roll call suggests, the Mississippi Delta and Memphis “wreckabilly” foundation of much of Falco’s music has expanded through the years to embrace such diverse international styles as French cabaret and Viennese waltz. (During the band’s belated Beale Street Music Festival debut last year, Falco became undoubtedly the first performer in Memphis in May history to name-drop both Pee Wee’s Saloon on Beale Street and Fantomas, “the fin de siècle demon” of French popular literature.) At the same time, Falco has been on a literal as well as musical journey, studying tango in Buenos Aires and living for most of this century in Paris and Vienna.
All of which has brought him home, in a way: “Cabaret of Daggers” includes not only a cover of Billie Holiday’s timely-as-ever “Strange Fruit” (which Falco calls “the supreme American lynching protest ballad of all time”) but a Falco original, an uncharacteristically blunt epic protest anthem titled “New World Order Blues.”
Whoever his collaborators and whatever his inspirations, Falco’s sound remains unmistakable. “We interpret the music, we deconstruct the genres, but we’ll always be a rock combo from Memphis, in a sense,” Falco said. “Even if the band is from Rome.”
John Beifuss covers entertainment for The Commercial Appeal. Contact him at john.beifuss@commercialappeal.com.