Tav Falco

Tav Falco commanded a visceral, unruly blend of rockabilly, blues, and jagged sonic abrasion. Alongside the Cramps, he ranked among the first to shape the style later labeled psychobilly, though his approach omitted the theatrical horror-film trappings that later acts adopted. Nearly ten years before the Gories and the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion emerged, his jagged, forceful blues delivery foreshadowed their sound. Born in Philadelphia and raised in Arkansas, he arrived in Memphis, Tennessee in 1973, where he first presented himself to the local artistic circles as a filmmaker and performance artist while taking on assorted temporary work. While shooting documentary footage on blues musicians across Tennessee and Mississippi, including a 1974 portrait of R.L. Burnside captured inside the musician’s storied juke joint, Falco felt compelled to learn guitar; his initial public appearance with the instrument consisted of demolishing a six-string using a chainsaw.

In 1979 he assembled the original lineup of his group the Panther Burns, whose name derived from a well-known Tennessee plantation; early versions featured revolving personnel that included Alex Chilton and James Luther Dickinson. Falco’s debut album, Behind the Magnolia Curtain, appeared in 1981 and featured contributions from Othar Turner & His Fife and Drum Band. The record earned positive critical attention, prompting Falco’s relocation to New York City, where his high-energy roots music entered the city’s active no wave milieu and resulted in his sole major-label project, the 1982 EP Blow Your Top, issued on Chris Stein’s Animal imprint. During the 1980s and 1990s he began splitting his time between Europe and the United States, issuing a measured succession of recordings with changing Panther Burns configurations while simultaneously maintaining an acting career that included minor roles in Great Balls of Fire, Wayne County, Downtown 81, and Highway 61.

The Panther Burns delivered their first new-century recording, Panther Phobia, in 2000. Throughout the following decade the group performed at numerous festivals, among them the It Came from Memphis series at London’s Barbican Centre in 2005, the ArthurNIGHTS event at Los Angeles’s historic Palace Theatre in 2006, the 2007 presentation at Paris’s Fondation Cartier, a 2008 headline slot at Italy’s Strade Blu Festival in Tredozio, the 2009 Alternatilla Festival in Mallorca, Spain, and the Barreiro Rocks Festival in Lisbon in 2010. Falco also pursued his longstanding fascination with tango through studies in Argentina and France, an immersion that led to his appearance as a tango dancer in the 2003 French film Dans le Rouge du Couchant. Beyond performing in motion pictures, he produced and directed several short films, five of which entered the permanent collection of Paris’s Cinémathèque Française in 2006.

As an author, Falco joined journalist Erik Morse on the two-volume encyclopedia Mondo Memphis, a musical and psycho-geographical examination of the city he cherished; his own contribution focused on Memphis music history from the Civil War period onward. In 2010, Falco and his shifting ensemble, billed as Tav Falco & the Unapproachable Panther Burns, recorded Conjurations: Seance for Deranged Lovers inside a private studio in Saint-Germain-des-Prés; the album surfaced in Europe in May of that year and reached the United States in October 2011.

Falco maintained an intense schedule in 2014 that encompassed touring with Panther Burns, remastering his complete catalog for expanded reissues, overseeing a new edition of the Mondo Memphis volume, and directing the film Urania Descending, which premiered on the festival circuit in October. His Panther Burns followed with Command Performance, a fresh set issued in February 2015 on Twenty Stone Blatt Records that contained both covers, including the late Alex Chilton composition “Bangkok,” and original material performed by yet another configuration of the group. Later that year Falco formed a fresh Panther Burns lineup featuring Mario Monterosso on guitar, Mike Watt on bass, and Toby Dammit on drums; the musicians embarked on an American tour and reconvened in Memphis in 2017 to record Falco’s first seasonal project, A Tav Falco Christmas. Together with producer and guitarist Monterosso, he assembled an Italian edition of Panther Burns for sessions in Rome. Entering the studio with politics and history in view, the band recorded a collection of originals and covers spanning eighty years of American popular music as a commentary on U.S. president Donald Trump, whom Falco labeled “The Puppet Head Orangutan of Malignant Rage.” Released on Black Friday/Record Store Day in November 2018, Cabaret of Daggers included the original “Red Vienna,” co-written with Monterosso, which traces fascism’s ascent in Italy and incorporates references to Franz Ferdinand, Leon Trotsky, Sigmund Freud, and Gustav Klimt as cautionary examples for contemporary audiences confronting resurgent authoritarian currents. The album also presented a studio version of the live staple “New World Blues” alongside reworked jazz interpretations of Chet Baker’s “Born to Be Blue” and Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit.”