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Issue 104 Summer 2008
THE BOMB BLAST
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Listen to a song from 1995’s The Shadow Dancer by Tav Falco’s Panther Burns!
Rural Burnside in his honky tonk, Como, Mississippi, 1974. All photos by Tav Falco.
Like many of the musicians, scholars, carnies and flaneurs that inspired him, Gustavo “Tav” Falco is a Southern provacateur grifting his audience with the ol’ song-and-dance act before shuffling out the back door with a wink and a nod. His historico-musico revue, The Unapproachable Panther Burns, originated in 1979 at the nadir of Memphis’s postmodern, post-Beale, post-Sun, post-Stax era, when the Mississippi town had seemingly disappeared from the cultural map and shriveled into an obsolescent landmark. Only groups like the Dixie Flyers, The Hot Dogs, Mud Boy and the Neutrons, Big Star, and Panther Burns were intent to keep the fires burning with or without commercial success, and their contribution to experimental pop music, dirty rock ‘n’ roll and the blues revival have been incalculable.
Falco spent his formative years in the country between Gurdon and Whelen Springs, Arkansas, before landing in Memphis in the late 1960s. Founding the art-action group TeleVista in which he worked alongside arch provacateur, Randall Lyon—both under the tutelage of famed photographer William Eggleston—Falco spent the next decade filming and photographing the city’s legendary cadre of blues, rockabilly, and country musicians, expanding his lens to the outer realms of the Mississippi hill country and the Delta. In his travels he documented Sam Phillips, R. L. Burnside, Charlie Feathers, James Carr, Cordell Jackson, and Jessie Mae Hemphill to name but a few. Throughout his thirty-year career in photography, video, film and music, Falco has merged the grainy portraiture of a gonzo documentarian with the spellbinding mythos of a backwoods raconteur. None is more illustrative of this raison d’etre than the band he founded with fellow musician and Memphian enfant terrible Alex Chilton—The Unapproachable Panther Burns. A reference to an ol’ Mississippi tall tale, Panther Burn was a large 19th century plantation outside of Greenville where legend had it a malcontented panther stalked and terrorized the local population until it was corralled into a cane break and set aflame. According to witnesses, the screams coming from the panther were an unholy amalgam of animal lust and divine transubstantiation, which continue to curse the plantation.
I began corresponding with Tav—who now lives in Vienna—in the summer of 2005 shortly before my first excursion to Memphis to begin research for my own book. Since then, we have discussed, debated and pontificated on every topic from the history of the blues to Louis Feuillade’s silent serials; from screen sirens of the Italian New Wave to the traditions of Knecht Ruprecht and Krampus.
After an initial burst of sight and sound in Memphis with the assistance of a chainsaw, Tav Falco and his newly christened Panther Burns migrate to New York between 1978 and 1980. Read the continuation of their print interview in this exclusive online feature.
