Tag: Smith’s Olde Bar

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.

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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