Biography
Tav Falco pioneered a jagged blend of rockabilly, blues, and splintered noise that stood alongside the Cramps as an early architect of psychobilly, though his approach avoided the horror-film theatrics later associated with the style. Nearly ten years before the Gories or the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion emerged, his raw, splintered blues already pointed in their direction. Born in Arkansas, he arrived in Memphis in 1973, where he entered the local art scene as a filmmaker and performance artist while taking on a series of unconventional jobs. While shooting documentary footage of blues musicians across Tennessee and Mississippi—including a 1974 portrait of R.L. Burnside captured inside the musician’s fabled juke joint—Falco decided to learn guitar, yet his debut stage appearance consisted of demolishing a six-string with a chainsaw.
In 1979 he assembled the initial lineup of the Panther Burns, a name taken from a storied Tennessee plantation; early versions of the group featured revolving personnel that included Alex Chilton and James Luther Dickinson. The band’s first album, Behind the Magnolia Curtain, appeared in 1981 and featured contributions from Othar Turner & His Fife and Drum Band. Positive reviews greeted the release, prompting Falco to relocate to New York City, where his high-velocity roots music found an audience within the city’s active no-wave community and resulted in his sole major-label outing, the 1982 EP Blow Your Top on Chris Stein’s Animal imprint. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s he split his time between Europe and the United States, issuing a measured succession of recordings with continually changing Panther Burns lineups while also working as an actor in Great Balls of Fire, Wayne County, Downtown 81, and Highway 61.
The group returned with its first recording of the new millennium, Panther Phobia, in 2000. During the following decade the band performed at numerous festivals, among them the 2005 It Came from Memphis programs at London’s Barbican Centre, the 2006 ArthurNIGHTS event at Los Angeles’s historic Palace Theatre, the 2007 Fondation Cartier presentation in Paris, a 2008 headline slot at Italy’s Strade Blu Festival in Tredozio, the 2009 Alternatilla Festival in Mallorca, Spain, and the 2010 Barreiro Rocks Festival in Lisbon. Long fascinated by tango, Falco pursued formal study of the form in both Argentina and France, which led to his appearance as a tango dancer in the 2003 French feature Dans le Rouge du Couchant. Beyond performing, he directed and produced several short films, five of which entered the permanent collection of Paris’s Cinémathèque Française in 2006.
Falco has also published work as an author. Together with journalist Erik Morse he produced the two-volume encyclopedia Mondo Memphis, a musical and psycho-geographical examination of his adopted city; his own contribution traces the history of Memphis music from the Civil War era to the present. In 2010, recording under the name Tav Falco & the Unapproachable Panther Burns inside a secluded studio in Saint-Germain-des-Prés, he completed Conjurations: Seance for Deranged Lovers, issued in Europe that May and in the United States in October 2011.
In 1979 he assembled the initial lineup of the Panther Burns, a name taken from a storied Tennessee plantation; early versions of the group featured revolving personnel that included Alex Chilton and James Luther Dickinson. The band’s first album, Behind the Magnolia Curtain, appeared in 1981 and featured contributions from Othar Turner & His Fife and Drum Band. Positive reviews greeted the release, prompting Falco to relocate to New York City, where his high-velocity roots music found an audience within the city’s active no-wave community and resulted in his sole major-label outing, the 1982 EP Blow Your Top on Chris Stein’s Animal imprint. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s he split his time between Europe and the United States, issuing a measured succession of recordings with continually changing Panther Burns lineups while also working as an actor in Great Balls of Fire, Wayne County, Downtown 81, and Highway 61.
The group returned with its first recording of the new millennium, Panther Phobia, in 2000. During the following decade the band performed at numerous festivals, among them the 2005 It Came from Memphis programs at London’s Barbican Centre, the 2006 ArthurNIGHTS event at Los Angeles’s historic Palace Theatre, the 2007 Fondation Cartier presentation in Paris, a 2008 headline slot at Italy’s Strade Blu Festival in Tredozio, the 2009 Alternatilla Festival in Mallorca, Spain, and the 2010 Barreiro Rocks Festival in Lisbon. Long fascinated by tango, Falco pursued formal study of the form in both Argentina and France, which led to his appearance as a tango dancer in the 2003 French feature Dans le Rouge du Couchant. Beyond performing, he directed and produced several short films, five of which entered the permanent collection of Paris’s Cinémathèque Française in 2006.
Falco has also published work as an author. Together with journalist Erik Morse he produced the two-volume encyclopedia Mondo Memphis, a musical and psycho-geographical examination of his adopted city; his own contribution traces the history of Memphis music from the Civil War era to the present. In 2010, recording under the name Tav Falco & the Unapproachable Panther Burns inside a secluded studio in Saint-Germain-des-Prés, he completed Conjurations: Seance for Deranged Lovers, issued in Europe that May and in the United States in October 2011.
Albums
