Tav Falco's Panther Burns

Background and early history

In 1977 and 1979, Alex Chilton, attracted by The Cramps' feral, flamboyant rockabilly style, had brought them to Memphis to record sessions he produced that were later released as Gravest Hits and Songs the Lord Taught Us. Chilton had initiated the development of a rockabilly and country-tinged alternative rock music scene in Memphis, beginning with his Cramps sessions and his off-kilter Like Flies on Sherbert sessions recorded in 1978 through August 1979, following a stint working in New York's CBGB punk scene as a solo artist after the breakup of Big Star. This New York period had somewhat converted him to a turbulent and chaotic "punk performance ethos", according to Ross Johnson, writing in The Memphis Flyer. The Cramps sessions were the catalysts inspiring some of the young musicians who eventually helped launch Panther Burns to first start performing in public. Future Panther Burns drummer Johnson first performed publicly in a group called The Yard Dogs led by Alex Chilton in the summer of 1978; he made his first recording session appearance on Like Flies on Sherbert, drumming and bantering off-the-cuff, comical lyrics to "Baron of Love". This Chilton album is sometimes panned in retrospective reviews today by writers expecting Big Star's chiming guitars and tight, power pop recordings, but at the time the album came out, it was praised by critic Robert Christgau and was influential among young Memphis alternative musicians breaking out of the late 1970s era of disco music and slick, mainstream radio rock and starting to create their own punk rock/garage music scene unrestrained by industry dogma.

Falco had focused his 1970s work on video and photographic documentation of blues performers and local culture in the Memphis area with fellow videographer Randall Lyon, in a partnership they called TeleVista Projects, Inc. Chilton, who first encountered Falco while Lyon and Falco were videotaping some of the Sherbert sessions, formally met Falco a couple of months later after witnessing his self-described "art-action happening" during an October 1978 Mud Boy and the Neutrons "Tennessee Waltz" event in Memphis, at which Falco, untrained in music theory, surprised the audience by blowing a police whistle and chainsawing a guitar on stage halfway through a haywire rendition of Lead Belly's "Bourgeois Blues".

Falco's association with Chilton and a small circle of record-collecting musicians helped deepen their shared, longstanding interest in the blues form. Chilton became inspired to work more with his blues and soul roots, after having temporarily been focused more on rockabilly and country music by the late 1970s. At the same time, The Memphis Flyer piece viewed the origin of Chilton's interest in forming the band as stemming from a desire to find "enthusiastic amateurs to play with" in Memphis, due to his recent exposure to Manhattan's budding punk music scene. "We were inept and offensive — just what Alex was looking for", wrote Johnson.

After Chilton completed the Like Flies on Sherbert recordings (for which Falco created some cover art graphics), Tav Falco's Panther Burns group was formed in February 1979 in Memphis by Falco (vocals, guitar) with Chilton (lead guitar/drums/backing vocals), Ross Johnson (drums), and Eric Hill (synthesizer). In the first couple of years Rick Ivy (trumpet), Jim Dickinson (piano), Vincent Wrenn (synthesizer), Ron Miller (bass), Jim Duckworth (guitar/drums), and Jim Sclavunos (drums), soon joined to play important roles. The group took its name from the Panther Burn plantation south of Greenville, Mississippi. The town, in turn, had taken the name in reference to a wild cat whose raids and nocturnal shrieks had so disturbed area residents in the 19th century that they set a canebrake on fire to keep it at bay after all attempts to trap or kill it had failed; the lore of the elusive animal shaking up a sleepy planters' hamlet appealed to the band.

The attention Chilton's early presence brought the band led to an increased interest in blues music, along with the already emerging Cramps-influenced rockabilly interest, in Memphis' alternative music scene at that time. Falco's initial inclusive approach of mixing enthusiastic players without formal musical training together with professional musicians was in tune with those of noted primitive experimenters Half Japanese and the 1970s East Village alternative music movement of performers like Talking Heads, James Chance and the Contortions, and Klaus Nomi in which visual artists and musicians formed bands together. In the beginning years of the band Falco told writers that because of his unschooled musical background, he represented "the possibility of anyone performing who wants to". Though confounding the expectations of some listeners, these musicians considered restoring a sense of unbridled enthusiasm to creative work to be more important than conforming to sterile, rigid industry standards, as reflected in the name choice for the small recording label moniker Falco soon adopted to release and co-release the group's future recordings: Frenzi.

Band description and music styles

According to the band, Panther Burns is "a Southern Gothic, psychedelic country band influenced by Memphis music styles". The original band lineup featured two guitars, synthesizer, and drums, later usually omitting keyboards or synthesizers at live shows. The group's somewhat experimental recordings have embraced and deconstructed a number of influences and genres.

With his signature Höfner fuzz-tone guitar and a stage presence characterized by his Argentine-styled pompadour, pencil moustache, smoking jacket, and urbane manner, Falco infused his shows with theatrical antics and a reverence for the originators of country blues and rockabilly. The band's assorted song subjects and album photography themes have included Memphis scenery, Carroll Cloar's Panther Bourne painting, the occasional reference to historical figures like American rampage murderer Charles Starkweather, motorcycle imagery, denizens of Memphis neighborhoods, tango imagery, and blithe introspection, among other themes.

Falco's treatment of the blues classic "Bourgeois Blues" adds a line from Ginsberg's famous beat poem "Howl". In a 1984 interview discussing his anti-environment concept and music, he said that many outstanding, but lesser known blues and rockabilly artists were "treated like the idiot wind". Similarly, he continued, "the beat writers and theorists like Antonin Artaud were treated like they were crazy. It wasn't until he died that everyone realized he was a genius". Two of his originals, "Agitator Blues" and "Panther Phobia Manifesto", evinced playful humor and a left-leaning, Utopian anarchist political stance. In "Panther Phobia Manifesto", Falco referenced lines from influences as disparate as William S. Burroughs, Screamin' Jay Hawkins, Howlin' Wolf, Rod Serling, French psychedelic band The Dum Dum Boys, and Dadaist poet Louis Aragon, in wishing a "huge firedamp explosion" to closed-minded members of society who blindly follow the dictates of the establishment. Proclaiming that everywhere the Panther Burns go, they are greeted with derision, he riffed from Aragon, "Laugh your fill, the Panther Burns are the ones who always hold out a hand to the enemy".

The group's wide-ranging styles have included Argentine tango music, country music, rockabilly, R&B, soul music, novelty tunes, early rock and roll, country blues, and pop standards of the 1950s and 1960s like Frank Sinatra's "The World We Knew", among others. Set lists have included mutated covers of songs originally performed by such diverse artists as J. Blackfoot, Doc Pomus, Bobby Lee Trammell, Gene Pitney, Reverend Horton Heat, Jessie Mae Hemphill, R. L. Burnside, Mack Rice, and Allen Page (of the small 1950s Moon Records label helmed by early rock-and-roll producer/songwriter Cordell Jackson), among others.

Terms the band says have been inaccurately "foisted upon" the group by media include "rockabilly, wreckabilly, psychobilly, punk, post punk, post-modern, garage, bluesabilly, roots, and permanent wave". The earliest description the band gave itself on a concert poster read simply: "Rock'n'Roll". Media confusion in categorizing led the band to eventually invent its own self-descriptive terms, such as "panther music" and "backwoods ballroom", also at times calling its tumultuous performance style "art damage".

Performing Personnel (alphabetical list)

LPs

EPs

Live Releases

Compilations