Continued from BOMB 103, Spring 2008…

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 about Tav Falco’s pre-New York years in the Spring 2008 print edition of BOMB.

 

LotusBlossom

“Lotus Blossom” by Tav Falco’s Panther Burns
From The Shadow Dancer, Upstart, 1995. Running Time: 3:23

 

Panther Burns at Fondation Cartier, 2007. All photos by Tav Falco, courtesy of the artist.

Erik Morse What was the crowd’s reaction to your entr’acte performance on the occasion of the last show of Mudboy & the Neutrons?

Tav Falco Stone silence…and I passed out. Moments later, after being dragged off stage I awoke with the hysterical screams and cries of a shocked, bewildered, and titillated audience jumping out of their seats. This was my first event as a so-called musical performer.

EM Was there a particular significance to shredding the guitar—as an iconoclastic act of violence or maybe way of creating music out of this industrial din?

TF Since I was a boy on my daddy’s farm in Arkansas, and I blew off the head of a coiled king snake with a shotgun for no good reason, I have to this day abhorred violence in any form, musical or otherwise. This shredding of the Silvertone guitar was intended as a gesture celebrating the temporal and divisive nature of music and the transient aspects of musicians who create it.

EM Your records of the early ’80s like Behind the Magnolia Curtain, were infamous for their cacophonous production, with songs often performed live and in one take—

TF Behind the Magnolia Curtain was in fact recorded in one and two-takes within about 6 hours. There was the presence of the marching drum band from Tate County, Mississippi, whose members were stalwarts in Napoleon Stricklin’s Cane Fife and Drum band. The Drum Corps appeared on 4-tracks marching around studio B of Ardent and were recorded simultaneously with Panther Burns—all of us playing and thrashing at once. We were bon vivants of the swamps living it up on ample doses of fried chicken and short pints of bourbon whiskey. The battle cry raised by lead guitarist Alex Chilton as we waded into each new number was, “Forget it! We’ll fix it in the mix! I’m right behind you, man.” Except there was no real mixing, as much as there was a dumping of the 16-track material onto 1/2-track reels for assembling a master acetate disc. Nor was there any production or anyone really in charge of production, as I remember. As always, in those early days of Panther Burns, it was every man for himself.

EM What kind of relationship did you and Alex Chilton have in the studio and what was your working dynamic?

TF As for our roles in these ventures, the concepts were generally of my instigation, but it was Alex who was the musical alchemist. I am a performer, a provocateur, and only play upon musical instruments. On later recordings Alex twirled the knobs “fixing” everything in the mix, as was his extraordinary talent to do, matched only by his astonishing gifts as one of the few towering guitarists and singers of our age. What writing has been done came later and was by my own hand.

 

William Eggleston in his Pontiac Bonneville, 1975.

EM Why did Panther Burns decide to leave Memphis and migrate to New York at the beginning of the ’80s?

TF Panther Burns was invited to play in New York. Arriving there, we quickly found ourselves positioned as representing unbridled emotional frenzy and sentiment—tribal, anti-intellectual, and by any standard, reckless, as only dixie-fried renegades can be. In New York it was not our progenitors whom we set in relief, but our esteemed, ultra-chilled, and in most cases, professional colleagues.

EM Do you remember your first New York show?

TF The first gig Panther Burns played in New York was organized by Jim Fouratt at Danceteria during the heady, incipient phase of its trajectory. Maybe it was a mafia joint, like Pep Lounge, but who cares. It was a larger room and they had money to burn. On this auspicious event Panther Burns hit the stage around 2:30 in the morning. We came out six strong including a fellow Arkansan, Bob Palmer — then Pop and Jazz critic for the New York Times — wailing on an incredibly dissonant clarinet, while Panther Burns sawed through a brutal 45-minute set of such stridency that the audience seemed riveted in some swaying, yet petrified trance. Afterward, Fouratt came backstage into our dressing room and proclaimed, “That was the worst sounding crock of unadulterated noise I have ever heard…but someone named Geoff Travis from some company called Rough Trade in London wants to talk to you. Shall I let him in?” Some months later when the resulting album was released, a half page review in Melody Maker appeared under the block letter title, “PURE SICK NOISE,” thus corroborating the prophetic nature of Fouratt’s remarks.

Further uptown at Peppermint Lounge, Panther Burns shared an Anti-Nuclear Rally bill with Allen Ginsberg during the period when he was playing the harmonium and backed by Parisian street musicians on electric guitars. I presented the bard with our first album for Rough Trade entitled, Behind the Magnolia Curtain.

EM How exactly did you ingratiate yourself into the Mudd Club and Downtown 81 scene?

TF Before Steve Mass had even thought of the name, Mudd Club, he was traveling through the south, and he had, in fact, dropped by my pad with Anya Phillips, later a cohort of James Chance. It was on this trip south, that the concept of the Mudd Club befell Steve Mass. Part of the Mudd Club’s success was owing to the eclectic nature of Steve’s booking. Even Johnny Thunders went there one night to catch a doubleheader with Panther Burns and Beatster poet John Giorno holding forth on the same bill.

 

Black & White Lounge, Memphis, c. 1977.

EM You’ve spoken on the relationship of your work alongside No Wave musicians like Arto Lindsay. At first glance it’s hard to see any kind of connection between a blues-based group like Panther Burns and the atonal shredding of DNA. What drew you to their music?

TF Certainly Arto Lindsay impressed me as an artist and as an individual, as did Tim Wright, the bass player of DNA, who along with scenester Kai Eric, had personally introduced me around New York and to TV Party in particular. The curt, 45-second musical implosions delivered on stage by DNA as “songs” at CBGB were the kind of extreme, atonal primitivism that appealed directly to my sensibilities. Yet inherent in the yowling vocals and the fearsome electric instrumentation of DNA lurked an intellectual gradient that has sardonically turned in upon itself. Something like ouroboros: the image from antiquity of the snake biting its tail.

EM So it was more a spiritual kinship than a musical connection?

TF What you had were musical groups such as John Lurie and the Lounge Lizards or James Chance and the Contortions working out of an often atonal bag blatantly inspired by ’60s jazz titans and pioneers ranging from early Paul Bley to a spread of “cool jazz” artists from the period. DNA and Arto Lindsay were perhaps the closest to outright celebration of pure noise in heightened moments of their performance, connected, in my perception, to such experimenters from the ’60s as LaMonte Young. These are musical connections, yet music, whether noisy or sans bruit, is a spiritual art form in itself, is it not? We can distinguish No Wave in degree from its musical antecedents in terms of spirituality or absence thereof, by its supreme lack of emotion and its bloodless attempts to adopt a posture of narcoticized cool, au contraire to its other manifestation, i.e. the flagrant transports of emotional frenzy produced by thrashing instrumentation and extreme vocalizations as in the case of Arto and Chance.

 

Preacher, Court Square, Memphis, 1973.

EM When discussing Panther Burns’s contribution to the New York No Wave scene, you had said that the rebirth of great music in the early ’80s was a product of the ’60s. How did you see the interrelationship between these two different eras of music?

TF The essential connection between the fertile scene of the early ’80s, especially in New York and San Francisco, and the era of the ’60s was a sense of experimentation. The notion of the errant individual; the idea that anything is possible with or without training, resources, money; the job of breaking down barriers between art forms and between social strata were the driving forces that connected these periods. Out of this experimental scene in New York surfaced performers as diverse as the gifted and supremely inventive Ann Magnuson, Klaus Nomi, Suicide, and later Antony and the Johnsons.

EM Are the songs you write influenced by filmmaking or particular genres of cinema like the works of Antonioni, Jodorowsky, Lynch, or Maddin? Do you write or record your music with any cinematic perspective for the way guitar timbres or textures might be mixed?

TF As Marshall McLuhan pointed out, new art forms or technologies have the capability of wrapping around an earlier art form or technology. Like television wrapping around film or digital wrapping around analogue. Before filming Born Too Late [a black and white short film of one of my songs which was conceived as a filmic audio track] in Budapest at Club Fésék, I had met Alejandro Jodorowsky in Paris and was invited to his home one evening. I had the notion of asking him to direct the film. He demurred, but not before giving me a number of his ideas for realizing the song in a highly surreal cinematic syntax. You see, I already had the film made thematically within its musical & lyrical narrative. So filmically, the content could be treated 10-ways from Sunday. The point was how to treat the song concept contextually: as a segment of digitized sterility, or as a piece of noisy pre-television filmic dreck.

EM Wow! Jodorowsky remains one of the most inventive and unconventional filmmakers I’ve ever had the pleasure of encountering. El Topo and Santa Sangre are masterful excursions into color, mood, violence, and the carnivalesque. Had Artaud lived to be a senile, buck-toothed nonagenarian, he might have keeled over at what Jodorowsky had accomplished in light of all of his theories. . . .

TF By the time I met Jodorowsky, he had withdrawn from filmmaking and was concentrating on the creation of his comic books. When I returned to Paris to live, his son Adan and I became friends. As a child, Adan appeared in Santa Sangre; he has now emerged as a kind of post-modern Yves Montand with a brilliant and popular show of original material in French and with an ace combo backing him.

EM I understand you’ve also met and corresponded with Guy Maddin. How did you discover him?

TF We met in Paris at the vernissage of his Dracula: Pages from A Virgin’s Diary. We became immediate friends. His Dracula with the Royal Winnipeg Ballet is the most poetic and poignant treatment of the legend ever filmed…divinely conceived and executed in black and white on a variety of film formats. Guy Maddin is irrefutably an inspired genius on the level of F.W. Murnau.

 

Tav Falco’s House & Ford, Memphis, 1974.

 

Web Extra!

Return to the top of the page to listen to "Lotus Blossom" by Tav Falco’s Panther Burns!

 

 

Read the print edition interview of Tav Falco by Erik Morse in BOMB 103, Spring 2008, now available on newsstands everywhere. Subscribe today and receive your FREE copy!