RadATL Podcasts & Interviews

Tav Falco and Panther Burns return!

TAV FALCO PANTHER BURNS (L to R): Walter Brunetti, Mario Monterosso, Giuseppe Sangirardi, and Tav Falco. Photo by Jamie Harmon

Singer, guitar slinger, filmmaker, and creative provocateur Tav Falco began his career in a Memphis cotton loft on the banks of the Mississippi River circa 1979, when he chain sawed a guitar into pieces. It was an act of performance art that has resonated across the globe ever since, taking shape amid a cabaret of the Southern rockabilly,  rock ‘n’ roll, and the avant-garde. Over the years, Falco’s notoriously outsider musical outfit Panther Burns has included everyone from Big Star singer and guitarist Alex Chilton to Minutemen and fIREHOSE bass player Mike Watt, and Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds drummer Toby Dammit.

These days, Falco calls Bangkok home. In recent years, Panther Burns’ lineup has solidified around a powerful trio of Italian players, including guitar player Mario Monterosso, bass player Giuseppe Sangirardi, and percussionist Walter Brunetti.


On Tuesday, October 3, Tav Falco’s Panther Burns plays Smith’s Olde Bar, supporting the group’s latest album, Nashville Sessions: Live at Bridgestone Arena Studios. Monterosso, Sangirardi, and Brunetti set the night in motion with an instrumental set of cinematic surf and rockabilly numbers. Savannah-based post-punk outfit Twisty Cats performs as well.

$15 (advance). $20 (door). In the Music Room at Smith’s Olde Bar.

While making his way from Paris to the United States., Falco took a few minutes to answer a few questions about his lifetime of cross-cultural voyages and gaining a deeper understanding of his origins.

I have been told that you are laser-focused on completing the Urania film trilogy. How is the work coming along, and can you talk a bit about how the idea behind the trilogy has evolved as you’ve been working on it? Also, why is this such an important work for you to complete?

Chad, delighted to speak with you again. After much travail, delays due to hardware and equipment issues, interventions of concert tours, and diversions with female interests, I have finished the complete Urania Trilogy of intrigue films. From February through August, I managed to chain myself to the editing bench, flogging it day and night. With the remote collaboration of Steff Galvan, an emerging photographer in Vienna, who proofed my edits and offered invaluable aesthetic suggestions, we brought this feature movie to its inevitable conclusion. I say inevitable because there is much of Fate involved – its long, reaching arm overriding any one’s efforts who dares create a narrative flow from nothing more than fragments and shards of a filmic idea.

The film begins on the banks of the Arkansas River, then swiftly decamps to the merry/sinister capital of old Vienna, onward to the alpine lake region of Austria on the mystic Traunsee – the Lake of Dreams. The final dénouement plays out in a hotel room on the Grand Canal of Venice. It seemed like those ghostlike fragments sitting in their film cans decomposed – as if they hardly existed. On the screen, the retrieved images appeared thin and spectral. Once I began to assemble those fragments into a kind of Orphic flow, the movie suddenly began to live… and to breathe. It is alive, I thought. And it was and is alive with a life of its own. A pale Frankenstein that once again exposed to light, took form and gesture larger than Fate. I began to realize that I was merely the servant of this film. I became its priest at the altar serving its rights of creation. The film has its own destiny and rituals to be honored. Each scene has a secret that had to be discovered lurking within the black and white tonalities, gestures, and movements. Inside each scene is an intelligence hidden and buried that I had to find. A riddle that only an oracle or a muse could unravel.

Soon I became an animal chained to the keyboard. I tutored myself technically, but no film theory or scholarly method could offer guidance. As Werner Herzog wrote, “Film is not the Art of scholars, but of illiterates.” I excavated this movie from chaos, from extinction. Now that the trauma of it is over – the trauma of revelation, I realize I’ve conjured a film that is living and breathing, yet it is a dead thing. That is the nature of anything photographic. Once the living image is captured, it is frozen in time. It dies. That is the dichotomy of film. Motion pictures are a living dead thing.

One can contextualize film, or any expression, and call it Art. But if it is contextualized again and again, context swallows art and eventually excretes it. Then what you are left with is excrement. Let’s not make art of my movie. It is a lyrical ribbon of images that lives and dies on the screen telling its own story on its own, however imperfect terms. My cabal of musical alchemists have created themes to serve this commanding filmic ghost that stalks across the screen like a corsair hurling deception, vengeance, and betrayal at the audience – while seducing the viewers’ senses with a vital elegance.

Is there any overlap with the work you’ve been pouring into the film trilogy and with what we hear on the Nashville Sessions: Live at Bridgestone Arena Studios LP? Is it difficult for you to mentally toggle between filmmaking and making music? Is there a difference for you? Do you feel like either one of these avenues helps you achieve a more mysterious version of yourself?

My intent is not to achieve a more mysterious version of myself. Either someone is mysterious, or they are not. Yet I am an enigma, even to myself. Somethings are meant to be a mystery. Why tamper with that, and shine flashlights up every nook and cranny of the human psyche attempting to make logical that which is ineffable? I don’t know what I am doing, and I don’t want to know. That I learned from Fellini. As I’ve said before, I have only one song to sing whether intoxicated within the imbroglio of film, or intoning music before the microphone, or writing with a pencil. The new live album of the Panther Burns stage show is a manifestation of that one song – that lone, subjective eye.

TAV FALCO: Photo by Jamie Harmon

How did you get involved with Sirius XM’s Outlaw Country station to record this latest release?

Like most of what we do, the project came about through a process of association. Over time we’ve been invited to appear on a number of SiriusXM Radio shows in their studios at Rockefeller Plaza when we were passing through New York. Outlaw Country was the most recent show where our incendiary impulses were recorded for their honky tonk, hillbilly listeners. Before that, it was truckers’ radio show. I asked if they were sure they wanted an esoteric band like Panther Burns for that road gang radio broadcasting. The programmers said, yup. We know who you are. Jeremy Tepper, the erudite producer of Outlaw Country, recorded us in Nashville for a Halloween special. When we heard the mixes, we sent them to our label ORG Music in LA who became stoked to release the broadcast as an LP.

Will you be performing with the same lineup that plays on the record?

The very same Panther Burns band of Italians will be on tour as appeared on our previous album Cabaret Of Daggers and on the new Nashville live album: Mario Monterosso, electric guitar; Giuseppe Sangirardi, electric bass; Walter Brunetti, drums, cow bell, and tambourine.

When you consider the song list on the new album, is there a song or songs that you think of as your favorite here, or is there a song that really resonates with you now, maybe more than the others?

“The Ballad Of The Rue De La Lune” is a kind of true romance story I never seem to tire of hearing. Probably the more meaningful of any on the record.

What is your favorite thing about playing music with Mario Monterosso?

Mario Monterosso has the mind and ears of a producer and an arranger. He has the soul of a volcano, and the poetic depth of the Gulf of Tirania in his guitar playing. He saw me on stage in Catania as a teenager. Mario is far more than a brilliant musician, and he understands my vision. What more can you ask for?

Over the years, you have lived in rural Arkansas, Memphis, Paris, Vienna, and now Bangkok Thailand. There’s an old expression that says: “No matter where you go, there you are!” As you have moved from city to city around the world, and experienced these vastly different cultures on a day-to-day basis, what have you learned about yourself? What have you learned since leaving Memphis?

Cross-cultural voyages firstly open a deeper understanding of where one comes from, where one has grown up. When one lives day to day in another culture different from the last, the senses also deepen. Perception of languages deepen. Language itself becomes abstractly wonderous – how sounds and utterances become attached to meaning; how each culture has divined its own languages, meanings, rituals, and of course, its music. It is true that music is a universal language; and even though it has elaborated harmonic structures, it is an abstract one. Another abstract mystery. From this vantage, I know Memphis better now than when I had lived there for 17 years. After a certain age it is not possible to fully adopt another culture; I will always be an American living wherever – I cannot change that nor intend to. Also, I have learned that contrary to what becomes instilled in the minds of many, i.e., borders, flags, war paint, and propaganda, betray cultural identity rather than protect it. —Tav Falco, Paris 2023

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Tav Falco: L’Ultimo Gigolo on the songs that make up Panther Burns latest EP, ‘Club Car Zodiac’

Tav Falco and Giuseppe Sangirardi. Photo courtesy Prime Mover Media.

Tav Falco is something of a renaissance man. The singer, guitar slinger, author, and provocateur began his extraordinary career in a cotton loft on the banks of the Mississippi River in 1979. It was there that he chain sawed a guitar into pieces during a performance art act. Since then, his notoriously outsider musical outfit Panther Burns has included everyone from Big Star singer and guitarist Alex Chilton to Minutemen and fIREHOSE bass player Mike Watt and Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds drummer Toby Dammit.

These days, Falco calls Bangkok, Thailand his home. For Panther Burns 2022 U.S. tour, the group’s lineup is rounded out by bass player Giuseppe Sangirardi, guitar player Mario Monterosso, and drummer Walter Brunetti. 

Over the decades, the Arkansas-born auteur has mastered a singularly primitive motif. Blues rhythms carry his less-than-pitch-perfect singing, creating an off-center momentum in which songs feel as though they could tumble apart at any moment. But he always reins them in, creating a marvelous avant-garde tension on the stage. In recent years, his sound has expanded to incorporate elements of cabaret and tango performances, which underscore his latest five-song EP, Club Car Zodiac.

Before his cabaret-infused blend of Memphis rock ‘n’ roll takes over the the Earl for an evening of music and mystery, Falco took a few minutes to talk about how the new EP came together.

Panther Burns are back on the road after surviving the global pandemic!

Yes, and these are the first shows that we have played since the height of the pandemic, when we played a contagion-controlled event at the Il Castello Della Spizzichina in Italy, and that was July 31, 2021. Now, we’re out supporting our Club Car Zodiac EP, which came out for Record Store Day’s Black Friday, and it’s a highly personal recording.

What makes this such a personal recording for you?

I wrote three of the songs, “Dance Me to the River,” “Tango Primavera,” and “La Brigantessa,” which I sing in English. I wrote “La Brigantessa” for a cabaret artist in Rome, Adèl Tirant. I saw her perform with La Conventicola degli Ultramoderni. When I met her I was so impressed with her that I wrote this song for her. In Italian, “La Brigantessa” translates as “a lady thief.” We got to know one another and she sings the chorus of the song that you hear on the recording. I am so very happy with how that recording turned out, and I hope people will listen to it. 

The lineup on the record also includes Mike Watt playing some bass. You also have Didi Wray playing guitar. Were you all in a room playing and recording together or were these songs done remotely? 

Mike Watt initiated this recording during lockdown. He said, “Let’s do a couple of songs and put out a single.” I thought, why not? So we recorded the entire record remotely. When I got into it I wasn’t happy with the vocals I was getting. So I ordered a large diaphragm microphone, and once that came the vocals started happening for me—and my software. So I said, “This is sounding pretty good, I’m gonna do some more songs for this record. I wrote one, called “COVID Rebel Girl.” It was highly electrified, but that one did not make it onto the record because everyone but Mike Watt thought my playing on the song was just way too bizarre. 

So it’s just five songs, but it’s a rather dense recording. Didi Wray is a tango surf guitarist from Argentina. She plays on “Dance Me to the River.” That is a very personal song; lockdown was a very lonely period for me, and I delved into my interior life. I brought out a lot of what was floating around in the dark waters of my unconscious. That song is set in Paris, on the banks of the Seine. It’s a personal statement about separation, betrayal, unrequited love, a sense of loss, bewilderment, and general confusion. It was the end of a period of my life that had gone on for quite some time—the shattering of a relationship—and I wanted to treat it artistically. Doing that was a kind of catharsis. 

Then there is “House of the Rising Sun.”

Yes, and that is a song that I have always wanted to do. In fact, most vocalists attempt their version of it at one time or another throughout their career. I thought it was time for me to do my own version. I did ok with it. I’m not unhappy with that track.

“Tango Primavera,” is the last song on the EP, and it’s a rewrite of an Ettore Petrolini recording from the 1930s, the cabaret artist from Rome. 

Petrolini has a song called “Tango Roman,” which means Roman tango. I heard it performed in Rome by Maria Freitas in the cabaret La Conventicola degli Ultramoderni. 

Maria performed that in the same cabaret that Adèl Tirant performs in and Mirkaccio Dettori plays the piano. 

I had done a small show there with Panther Burns, and I became enchanted with this cabaret in the San Lorenzo district, which is the working class district of Rome, where Pier Paolo Pasolini lives.

I went back to Rome after the tour and said, “I would like to perform here.” They asked, “What would you like to do?” I said, “I would like to sing and dance with a dancing cane and a Matta Low hat—the straw hat, like French singer, actor Maurice Chevalier wore.

So I started working on some songs and rehearsing, and I came across “C’est mon Gigolo,” in French, by the 1930s cabaret artist Damia. So I got an English translation from some radio people in Paris, and I put together an arrangement in French and English that I brought to the cabaret. We do it in three languages now: French, English, and Mirkaccio sings it in Italian. It is the original gigolo song, not the one that Louis Prima had a hit with in the ‘50s by grafting together the original song with “I Ain’t Got Nobody.” I’m not interested in that. I’m interested in the original, which is a very dark and expressionistic song. It’s an admonition to the gigolo of what will happen in the end. 

I also brought in the Irving Berlin number “Puttin’ On The Ritz,” which has some racial overtones in today’s world. But that’s the song. I sing it, and anybody who’s heard it won’t deny that tune. And I do “Brazil,” which I do with Panther Burns, and “St. Louis Blues,” the W.C. Handy number that I recorded on Behind the Magnolia Curtain. After this tour, I will return to Rome and continue doing that under the adopted persona, L’Ultimo Gigolo, the Last Gigolo. That is my character, and I’ll bring it to America in 2023, probably as a Cabaret of Daggers, musical theater piece. We’re developing that in Memphis, with Mario Monterosso who will be the producer, as he has been the producer for my last four albums, and the lead guitar player and arranger in Panther Burns and on Tav Falco solo records. 

Mario has a new record out called Take It Away on Org music. It’s a record of instrumentals from which he’ll be playing six tunes in Atlanta, prefacing the Panther Burns performance. Don’t miss that! It’s really outstanding what Mario is doing with these instrumentals. 

TAV FALCO: Photo by Eugene Baffle

I did an interview with Robert Gordon during the pandemic, about his book, It Came from Memphis ... 

Yes, I took the photograph that appears on the front cover of that book.

That photograph came up in our conversation. Robert said that you gave him some advice about writing, filmmaking, and anything else, and that was to just jump in and do it. 

I think he’s talking about what I learned from William Eggleston. I was learning photography from William, and I asked, “How do you do this, Bill?” He said, you just have to jump in the middle and work your way out. That’s what Robert’s referencing, and that is true. 

It’s good to prepare. Technique is important. Learn your instrument and learn your craft: If you are an actor you learn your body and your voice, but that will take you so far. You can learn from a mentor. You can learn in a school. You can be self-taught. You can start from the beginning of an itinerary that’s going to take you to a certain level of ability and control. Or you can just jump in the middle and figure it all out. That’s the way I did photography. That’s the way I did music and theater, and to an extent, film. It may not be the best way, but it’s one way. 

In doing that you learn to rely on and to draw from intuitive sources rather than a dogmatic plan of some kind. Only now, after all this time, am I looking at music theory. I’ve started to study that because, Chad, I do not know a note from a molecule, at least not until recently.

Now I have an understanding of the concepts that go all the way back to the classic modes of music and poetry. It’s exciting, but I don’t know if it will help me as a musician or as an artist. It may help me on an intellectual level of some kind, and maybe on a subliminal secondary level. But I don’t see it having any direct effect on what I do. It might help me choose the chords that are more pleasing without having to do trial and error all the time, which is how I normally do it.

I want to communicate with musicians, and I want to do so in the language that I understand. And I want to have a better understanding of musical structure and dynamics in terms of notation, frequency, vibration, and how the musical scale and tonal parameters of music are understood. I’m making progress, but putting it into practice is not so easy.

Tav Falco & His Panther Burns, Twisty Cats, and Georgie Harris play The Earl on Friday, September 23. $18. 8 p.m. (doors). 8:30 p.m. (show).

Catch Panther Burns again at Fleetwoods in Asheville on Sept. 24 and in Chattanooga at Cherry Street Tavern on Sept. 25.

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INTERVIEW: Robert Gordon revisits ‘It Came From Memphis’

On Thursday, November 12, I spoke with Grammy and Emmy-winning author and filmmaker Robert Gordon about the updated 25th anniversary edition of his book It Came From Memphis (Third Man Books).

Originally published in 1995, It Came From Memphis tells the stories of bold and outlandish characters who brought life to the city’s cultural outer limits—characters that likely won’t won’t be found in other books. Yet each one embodies the indelible spirit of Memphis’ haunting beauty. From the 1950s through the early ’80s, DJ Dewey Phillips, professional wrestler Sputnik Monroe, and groundbreaking artists, musicians, and outsiders such as Alex Chilton, Furry Lewis, Tav Falco, Misty Lavender, Jim Dickinson, and more, are bound by an impressionistic thread, forever weaving them together in time and place. Gordon’s blend of interviews, spellbinding ruminations, and first-hand accounts come together in tales filled with gritty realism and spectral Southern ambiance.

A Cappella Books hosted our Zoom conversation. Press play above, and head over to A Cappella’s website for a copy of It Came From Memphis with a bookplate signed by the author.

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Tav Falco’s Panther Burns celebrate 40 years of howling at imperialism — Flagpole feature

Tav Falco photo by Peter Lee.

To the best of his recollection, it was sometime in the early 1980s when Tav Falco last tried to play a show in Athens. His band Panther Burns was a young, Memphis, TN-based rockabilly outfit, born in a cotton loft on the Mississippi River in 1979. In the beginning, Falco boasted little musical skill or experience, aside from chainsawing a guitar into pieces during an act of performance art. Yet he paired up with guitarist Alex Chilton of Big Star to create an “art-damaged” balance of their respective abilities.

Over the ensuing four decades, the Arkansas-born auteur’s career has flourished. On songs such as “Brazil” from 1981’s Behind the Magnolia Curtain LP, or his cover of “Strange Fruit” on 2018’s Cabaret of Daggers, Falco has mastered a singularly primitive motif. Blues rhythms carry his less-than-pitch-perfect singing, creating an off-center momentum in which songs feel as though they could fall apart at any moment. But he always keeps them together, creating a marvelous tension—at least when the group is allowed to play.

That fateful trip to Athens began when Falco and Chilton, along with original drummer Ross Johnson and bass player Rene Coman, piled into a ’64 Thunderbird and set out for a three-night run of shows in Nashville, Athens and Atlanta. The group hadn’t made it an hour outside of Memphis when Johnson “got scared” and turned the car around. When the rest of the band made it to Nashville, they recruited a “drunken hillbilly” named Alvin to play drums. Read the full story at Flagpole.