The Panther Burns original lineup at the Well, 1979. From left, Alex Chilton, Eric Hill, Rick Ivy, Tav Falco, Ross Johnson. (Courtesy of Ebet Roberts)
Gurdon, Arkansas, where Tav says he’s from, is actually the biggest town near where he grew up—it’s held a population of around 2,000 for about a hundred years. It was a railroad stop between Little Rock and Texarkana, and before Tav pursued music, the tracks were his path out of town. “I worked all the branch lines of what they call the dark railroad—where there were no electric signals. Everything was done by lantern and hand signals.”
In the 1950s, when his father was away from the family’s farm, young Gustavo would play a 78 of Wagner’s dramatic “Ride of the Valkyries” at full blast on the old man’s navy phonograph. His mother bought him a Bakelite AM radio and the first song that came through it was Wilbert Harrison’s “Kansas City.” When his family passed through Shreveport, Louisiana, he’d purchase records by Elvis, Johnny Cash, and the Sun artists. He never lost his appreciation for the music around him, sharing his stage with artists that Memphis had pushed aside. Charlie Feathers, the female rocker Cordell Jackson, Jessie Mae Hemphill—the She Wolf who was the last in her family’s line of Mississippi hill country musicians—Otha Turner, and many others; Tav alerted a new generation to their existence.
We collaborated on the music video for “Memphis Beat,” and film is how we actually met: In the late 1980s, I had some sixteen-millimeter stock and he had a camera. I earned his respect when his car came at me and I kept filming, taking a hit from an open door and rolling (physically and cinematically)—getting the shot, protecting the camera, and bleeding from my head. It was, in a way, a metaphor for being in his audience.
Panther Burns Forever Lasting
Previously unpublished, 1994
ROBERT GORDON: When did you first come to Memphis?
TAV FALCO: Little Rock to Memphis, zooming across the Arkansas delta on a caboose, 1964. I was a brakeman on the Missouri Pacific Railroad. Coming up to the river atop the trestle, a long wait to get clearance over the Mississippi on the one-track Harahan Bridge into Memphis. Below was this alluvial soil stretching out into the Arkansas quasi-delta there. I came rolling through these little Arkansas towns and music was already in the air. I could feel it.
RG: What did you find when you got here?
TF: For one, there were more black people than I’d ever seen in one concentration. Good-looking black people. Well dressed. Everything really snapping. There was a pleasing intensity in the air.
During the summers, 1965 or so, I was braking on the Missouri Pacific Railroad and going to the University of Arkansas during the school year. In Memphis, a woman named Mae ran this boardinghouse near the yard. Her husband worked for the railroad and she used to live in Gurdon. I had a school friend staying there. I walked up, there’s Mae on the front porch in a calico dress, barefooted, in a rocking chair, she was chain-smoking Pall Malls and I swear, man—with one foot she was turning the crank of an ice-cream churn. She said, Yeah, we got a room for ya. My friend who was staying there said, You gotta be careful around Mae, she can read your mind.
In Memphis, I bought a Silvertone solid body electric guitar for five dollars and played that at home until I met Randall Lyon and I traded for a small open-reel tape recorder. And then I wanted to record things.
RG: Randall is such a great character. Tell me about meeting him.
TF: I met an Arkansas poet up in the Ozark Mountains. He was shuffling between the university in Fayetteville and communes around Eureka Springs and certain other Ozark outposts. He was turning me on to Djuna Barnes and Carl Jung and Eastern philosophy, and he had stories of Furry Lewis and Bukka White in Memphis. And this young poet’s name was Randall Lyon.
I met Randall in my college dormitory, 1964. He was visiting a literature major and he’d just gotten out of army intelligence, Vietnam. Randall looked like a big baby. A big angel, maybe an evil angel. With real smooth skin and all this baby fat. And had a brilliant way of speaking. He was consumed by poetry and literature and art, talking constantly and laughing. He lived in a garret in Fayetteville. You walked through the curtain and there was Randall in his lair, surrounded by books and candles and weird tapestries. He was part of that bearded, sandaled, intellectual youth culture that Billy Graham was railing against. His ideas were radical and genuine. He brought Buckminster Fuller to Fayetteville. Through Randall I had an idea of what might be—far off in Memphis.
Randall Lyon. “You walked through the curtain and there was Randall in his lair, surrounded by books and candles and weird tapestries. He was part of that bearded, sandaled, intellectual youth culture that Billy Graham was railing against.” (Courtesy of Tav Falco)
Randall and I came to the big city armed. And Memphis was explosive. It’s always been this cross-cultural town. It’s not people from Memphis but people who come here. Teenie Hodges’ll tell you this and blues people will too. It’s people from other places coming here and doing things.
RG: You realized that at the Memphis Country Blues Festival, right? What year did you first see that?
TF: The Memphis Country Blues Society organized the first Memphis Country Blues Festivals in the Overton Park band shell in 1966, and I was at the first one. I came over from Arkansas and this really turned my head around, hundreds of people coming from all over the country, getting this firsthand, immediate experience and knowledge. I got to be within twenty-four inches of Furry Lewis’s hands, saw him reach a crowd of thousands of people, the man with the wooden leg that was cut off on the Illinois Central in 1917 and he then became a Memphis street sweeper, a very lyrical, crowd-pleasing, warm bluesman who had so many girlfriends it was unbelievable. I saw Sleepy John Estes from Brownsville, Tennessee, and Hammie Nixon with him blowing jug. Bukka White was playing the dobro guitar with a jackknife and singing “Parchman Farm Blues.” And Nathan Beauregard doing “Highway 61 Blues,” ninety-one years old and playing electric guitar solo like I’ve never heard anybody play. Mississippi Fred McDowell, the most gothic bluesman I’ve ever heard. And Ronnie Hawkins, he hit the stage with the Jim Dickinson Blues Band.
Furry Lewis and friend. “A very lyrical crowd-pleasing warm blues man who had so many girlfriends it was unbelievable.” (Courtesy of Tav Falco)
RG: What of the tape recorder?
TF: The Beat writer John Clellon Holmes came to Fayetteville. He had a whole library of tapes instead of records. And I thought, I’m gonna take this recorder to Memphis and maybe I’ll get to do a little work. And then later I moved to Memphis, 1973.
I wasn’t railroading anymore. I was living a very bohemian life, a disaffected student. Running barefooted a lot. Overton Square was really happening then. Burkle’s Bakery, the Perception bar—I’d hear Furry Lewis there or Gimmer Nicholson. Beatnik Manor was right there, and John McIntire opened the Bitter Lemon, very elegant, very beautiful art nouveau–cum–hungry i San Francisco beatnik woodcut graphic style.
RG: So you made this leap.
TF: I moved here and lived on pimento cheese sandwiches from Leonard Lubin’s White Way Pharmacy. I was this strange hophead Arkansas mountain boy driving a 1950 Ford that sounded a little too loud by Memphis standards. I was accepted, but I think Arkansas people in Memphis are always regarded with circumspection.
And then I got a job with William Eggleston.
RG: This was 1974ish. So Bill is just entering the national consciousness. What did you know about him?
TF: People were talking about this elegant southerner living in a quasi-decayed Italianate pseudo-mansion with an Arriflex movie camera in a wicker basket in his darkroom. And he was making a lot of pictures and wore suits tailored on Savile Row in London except when in khakis going through strange neighborhoods in Memphis and Mississippi making Leica pictures.
Photographers Maude Schuyler Clay and William Eggleston. (Courtesy of Tav Falco)
So finally I rode up to Bill’s house on this Norton motorcycle I had and knocked on t
he door. He hired me right there. We got in his Bentley and bought darkroom supplies and I started to work. I was doing black-and-white printing. His whole approach was literary. It’s not the one picture but it’s the five hundred pictures that you have to consider, a novel in progress or a novel of pictures. I worked with Bill a couple years. He introduced me to Garry Winogrand and Lee Friedlander. So for me, there’s been no separation between literature and theater and visual arts and blues and rock and roll and jazz. And this is my formative experience.
RG: What a great time to be with Bill! This is when he’s shooting Stranded in Canton. He’s got a portable video camera—itself a rarity at the time, to be able to get video and audio on a single unit. And he’s adapted it for low-light shooting. What do you recall about that?
TF: He hung out with some very gothic people in Memphis and New Orleans. Eggleston shot Johnny Woods, the Mississippi blues harp player, and Furry Lewis with a very advanced low-light-sensitive, black-and-white, extremely high-resolution camera that he designed and built at MIT. Memphis has always had this overlap between musicians and visual artists that you see in places like New York or San Francisco. Stranded in Canton was shown around various galleries in the world. I think you can still get that from Castelli / Sonnabend. And during this time, Bill, with his Memphis entourage, savaged a few art galleries where these were shown.
RG: You performed with his girlfriend Marcia Hare, right?
TF: Around 1973 or ’74, after moving to Memphis, Randall Lyon and I and Connie Edwards and Marcia Hare—the go-go dancers for Mud Boy and the Neutrons—formed the Big Dixie Brick Company. We performed on most Mud Boy shows, and we helped create the Dream Carnivals, these ecstatic unleashings of unconscious sub-Freudian urges in a very electric theatrical musical context. A rock and roll Dionysian context. Randall was doing his Guru Biloxi characterization, dressed in a very flowing Blanche DuBois-in-her-terminal-stages-of-dementia type presentation. He would sing “In My Girlish Days” from Memphis Minnie’s repertoire. I did the three-legged man wearing one of John McIntire’s fezzes. And we were not above whipping our audience with twigs and other direct hands-on confrontation.
RG: John McIntire seems to have fueled a lot of the seventies scene around here.
TF: He had all the props, the films, the images. And a lot of ideas. He was the real guru of this thing. He could calm and guide you if you were freaking out. It was good to be around McIntire, pick up on his vibe. I’ve still got a sixteen-millimeter movie camera, a 1941 model, one of two he had. I bought the trashy one. Once you get the image off the film, it looks like a 1929 camera. McIntire sold it for fifty dollars and let me take eight years to pay.
Televista did a series on him when he was building that monumental sculpture downtown, The Muse.
RG: Your production company, Televista, captured that great video footage of R. L. Burnside in his Mississippi juke joint. I still think it is among the most riveting documents I’ve ever seen.
TF: That was 1974. I formed Televista with Randall Lyon. We were inspired by Jean Rouch and Dziga Vertov, the handheld camera filmmakers, and also influenced by William Eggleston’s approach, which was quite different from his photographs. There’s a powerful emotional gradient that Bill was going for in Stranded in Canton. Televista was also into early telecommunications, setting up video networks with other highly alternative video groups, of which there were only a few: Electronic Arts Intermix in New York, Relay in San Francisco, and Open Space in Canada.
R. L. Burnside’s chalk house outside Como, Mississippi. (Courtesy of Tav Falco)
As I began to play guitar, we were making videos with people like R. L. Burnside, and I got very much under the influence of this trance music that he was playing in Como, Mississippi, and this lodge ’tonk that he had out in the country. We made some videos there, all-night things, hours and hours that we edited down in Eggleston’s makeshift video-editing facility. And I got very much under the influence of what he was playing, these one- and two-chord trancelike songs that would last fifteen minutes.
Televista made quite a few art actions and videos and had a little archive going. But Televista had no real commercial prospects. It only ever lost money. I did get a small grant from the National Endowment, but money was a subversion for us. We did our best work before we got that grant. We were doing installations with video playback. Randall was making music, along the lines of Stockhausen and atonal La Monte Young things. We were into the orphic vision.
RG: I’ve always heard that the start of the Panther Burns was at the Tennessee Waltz, when Mud Boy decided if the Band could have a last waltz and retire, so could they. [They didn’t.] And they put on that big show at the Orpheum, 1978.
TF: That was the first time I ever sang in public. I asked Dickinson if I could do a song between their sets. There was this rock and roll thing going down so I went out solo. I had my own big black-and-white television monitor and Bill Eggleston’s son was shooting video to it. I had my own amplifier that I was running the guitar through. I was independent, freestanding—nobody could fuck with me. I also had an electric chainsaw and an electric Skilsaw. And I started this strange guitar playing—nobody else was playing like that that day, believe me. I began my treatment of the “Bourgeois Blues.” It was powerful sounding.
Home of the brave
Land of the free
I won’t be mistreated
By no bourgeoisie.
I worked up this frenzy, then I start blowing this police whistle and with the chainsaw I start ripping into this guitar that’s still going through the sound system. The sound, man, it was complete sound, extremely chaotic. People were screaming and they’re going crazy and I rip through that guitar.
When Alex came over a couple of months later, he recognized me immediately as the guy that was on stage.
RG: Well how did Panther Burns actually become a band with you and Alex Chilton and others?
TF: I lived on the proletarian end of Cox Street, not on the mansion end. My upstairs duplex cost fifty-five dollars a month. The bathroom had no floor, just ceiling rafters. I got a job doing titling in a film lab and worked with Mitchell and Arriflex and Bolex cameras in a graphic context.
My friend Amy Gassner was on the phone at my house and she said this guy wants to bring his guitar and play. He brings an acoustic guitar and I’m playing this funky electric through Lee Baker’s Stromberg-Carlson hi-fi amplifier. This guy’s got real short hair and kind of freaky looking, and he starts playing “96 Tears” and he sings great. This guy’s Alex Chilton. I really didn’t know who he was. I was playing this fractured Burnside-style blues and he was playing rock and roll. So there was this rapport between me and Alex.
That night we got to be friends. Alex says, Let’s start a band. Televista was out of money. They were trying to repossess our video equipment, so I was getting more underground. So I said, Okay. And we went to one of Sid Selvidge’s performances at Jefferson Square and did a couple of numbers. That was the first ever Panther Burns movement action. I think we did “Bourgeois Blues” and “Train Kept A-Rollin’.” And at seven one morning they did break down the front door and confiscated all the video equipment. Televista was over and the Panthers Burns had begun.
RG: But you’ve fallen into a band with Alex Chilton, you find out who he is—that’s got to be exciting.
TF: At this point it was a Memphis thing. I’ve seen bands and bands and bands in Memphis. I thought, That’s gonna be groovy, but I didn’t imagine we were gonna play out much. We got Ross Johnson on drums and Eric Hill on a very crude synthesizer—see Eric didn’t know music, I didn’t know music, and Ross didn’t. Alex knew musical form and he thought it would be more interesting this way. New York had this No Wave scene. It was the feeling that mattered, the aesthetic more than virtuosity.
RG: Y’all blazed the trail in Memphis for the 1980s counterculture scene, the DIY punk rock that was so unlike the popular southern rock Molly Hatchet scene or the people drinking Singapor
e Slings in fern bars.
The Antenna Club, previously the Well. Home to Memphis’s alternative rock scene from 1977 until sometime in the 1990s. (Courtesy of Dan Ball)
TF: We rented a cotton loft, 96 South Front, for the first Panther Burns show. We were really inspired. That show must have been the rawest, most ripping, and hideous sounding Panther Burns show ever. On our tenth-anniversary single, the B-side is “Red Headed Woman” from our debut, and you can hear just how bizarre and outside it is.
We made a little money that night, more than I’d made in months. The next show at 96 South Front had blues lady Van Zula Hunt and barrelhouse piano man Mose Vinson. And Panther Burns. The third show was with Charlie Feathers. Record collectors have supplied me with a lot of ideas, I’m glad they’re out there. And we made all our own posters, printed by this émigré from central Europe, he understood us right away. “Oh the anarchists—get special price.” Eventually we, along with the Randy Band, took over this little country and western bar called the Well and pretty soon it became the Antenna Club.
RG: I approached you at the Well after a set, over on the side of the stage. Your girlfriend or someone approached and whipped a Heineken bottle right at your head. You ducked, it smashed behind us, and I ducked out.
TF: I escaped the ice picks and the flying Heineken bottles. But it’s tough for a band in their hometown to survive, so we had to start traveling. The Cramps invited us to New Orleans and then to New York. Rough Trade Records was at our first big headline gig in New York and immediately gave us an album deal. For Behind the Magnolia Curtain I brought the fife and drum bands that exist only in Tate and Panola counties in Mississippi, Otha Turner playing hand-cut cane fife. That polyrhythmic percussion really distinguished the album. Then New Rose, a label in Paris, brought us to Europe.
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