Retro-Futurism Now!: An Interview with Tav Falco

Southern iconoclast Tav Falco has been quietly, or not so quietly, blowing minds around the world for over 50 years now with his retro-futuristic vision of frayed roots music, outsider cinema and high/low art-actions, combining a veritable post-modern melange of creative techniques and forms of expression to bring to life his singular personal aesthetic. Equal parts international man of mystery, filmmaker, actor, documentarian, photographer, writer, “anti-musician,” tango enthusiast and art-damaged bon vivant, Falco has circled the globe spreading the gospel of outsider art in a way few have dared try, continuously finding himself immersed in scenes and counter-cultural moments that span the 1960s through today. From an extended and revelatory college life at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville that found him rubbing elbows with Beat writer John Clellon Holmes and other intellectual luminaries, through a brief but heady sojourn to the Haight-Ashbury at the height of the psychedelic era, and explosion on the subterranean music and arts scenes in Memphis in the early-to-late-1970s and New York’s Lower East Side in the early-1980s— then across several time zones and cultural iterations from there— there have been few Southern artists who have managed to stay as fresh and ahead of the creative curve as the self-proclaimed “last gigolo” born Gustavo Antonio Falco in Philadelphia, PA in 1945.

Best known for his work with his ongoing musical concern known as Panther Burns— first started in Memphis in 1979 alongside the likes of Box Tops/Big Star refugee Alex Chilton and producer/musician Jim Dickinson, among other local miscreants, then mutated several times over with a rotating cast of characters that would straddle the No Wave scene and into France and Italy— Falco’s uniquely updated/deconstructed take on rhythm & blues, rock, rockabilly, punk, world music and the avant-garde (just to name a few) has left more than a few heads spinning along the way trying to keep up with is dizzying sonic output. But that’s just part of the story. Having been involved with radical multi-media arts groups like Televista, which he co-founded with poet and longtime co-conspirator Randall Lyons, Falco has repeatedly confounded expectations of what it means to be a “Southern artist.” Having helped document blues, arts and political culture around Memphis, North Mississippi and parts of Arkansas, while also participating in technology-savvy “happenings” and performance art pieces like their infamous and incendiary appearance on the Memphis-based television show Straight Talk with Margaret Thrasher, the group set out to both chronicle important social history from surrounding areas while also invigorating the contemporary Memphis underground arts scene they found themselves operating in at the time. Having also studied photography under the tutelage of acclaimed photographer William Eggleston, whose hands-off, immersive DIY approach to teaching his craft helped his student think beyond the limits of pure technical expertise, Falco has continued to apply the lessons learned during his early years in western Tennessee as a template for creative exploration today. But as important as all of those experiences were in formulating the multi-faceted artist we now know, none of those paths would have been possible were it not for his own inspired imagination, first cultivated in relative isolation at his childhood home in rural Arkansas near the small town of Gurdon— with the help of a few crucial records, radio stations and phonographs along the way— and then blossoming during his time in Fayetteville.

Having launched a recent US tour in support of 2019’s Cabaret of Daggers album and the new Club Car Zodiac EP with his merry band of cosmopolitan travelers from Italy— guitarist/producer Mario Monterosso, bass player Giuseppe Sangirardi, and drummer Walter Brunetti— as the newest formulation of Panther Burns, Falco’s incredible pace of invention continues unabated and will hopefully continue well into the future. Recently relocating to Bangkok, Thailand after several decades living in Europe, there seems to be no slowing down for the feral and cerebrally-challenging auteur whose career arc seems to know no bounds. Having released two genre-defying books— 2011’s psychogeographical history of Memphis, Ghosts Behind the Sun: Splendor, Enigma & Death: Mondo Memphis Volume 1 and 2015’s photo-memoir An Iconography of Chance: 99 Photographs of the Evanescent South— and his newest “film poem” known as the Urania Trilogy, music remains just one of Falco’s many creative ventures, with more surely to come.

With his tour wrapping up with several more Southern dates, including a final show in Memphis on Oct. 10th at B-SIDE Bar as part of a birthday celebration for Mario Monterosso, I sat down with Falco for a wide-ranging phone interview to talk about his roots in the Deep South and the continuing influence they have had on his life and career. From being a one-time football jock and brakeman on the Missouri-Pacific Railroad, to capturing historic footage of hill country bluesman RL Burnside and appearing with Alex Chilton on Straight Talk, and so much more, it’s a fascinating look into the mythical mind’s eye of one of the South’s last great avant-garde artisans and the surprising cultural milieu that gave birth to him.

Here is what he had to say.

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AV: You're getting ready to start the final Southern leg of your Rogue Male Tour and I wanted to talk to you a little bit about your roots here in the South, starting with being raised in rural Arkansas and then attending college in Fayetteville, where you made some of your first real inroads in terms of a creative life and working with writers and poets— as well as other artists and in theater— before eventually moving to Memphis in the early-70s. In what ways did your time in Arkansas help shape your creative impulses and imagination?

Tav Falco: Well, growing up in the backwoods of Arkansas without anyone to really talk to or playmates, or anything of that nature, I created my own friends. And I went down to a brook every day on the farm and I played— I guess you'd call it playing— but I met with my friends. And I was gonna take them home, some of them, to meet my mother. And she told me later that I had intended to bring some of these friends home to our farmhouse, which was just up the hill from the brook— a little brook rolling through the farm. And it was kind of reedy and grassy and mossy, banks not more than a couple of feet wide. But apparently I had a number of friends there and that was the beginning, I think, of my creative impulse. There was no music in the family. No music being played, other than I found my father’s— my stepfather’s— Navy phonograph that he took when he left the United States Navy. He was a naval officer and he had this battleship gray phonograph, and while he was at work in the little town nearby, I would put on old records— shellac records— that I found in his collection, that wasn't really a collection. His records he'd thrown together and taken from service. So, my favorite to play at full volume on the farm on that phonograph was Richard Wagner's “Ride of the Valkyries.” And I used to play that a lot and the drama of it was transporting. So that was the first music. Then later I had a radio, a very crude radio. It looked like it was from the 40s or something. And I would tune into AM radio and hear— I guess the first song I heard was Wilbert Harrison singing “I’m Going to Kansas City” [ie- Harrison’s version of Lieber and Stoller’s “Kansas City”]. I liked that melodic kind of R&B, rock and roll sound. I liked it and I felt it. And then of course later going down to Shreveport, Louisiana with my mother, I asked her to take me into a Stan’s Record Shop, and there she bought me Elvis Presley singles and some other Sun singles. And by then I had a Sears phonograph— gray and white— and I was playing those singles. And then the spin the bottle parties started happening with girls in the school, in the high school. And so all of it took off from there, you know, the Platters, Roy Orbison, Jerry Lee, and listening to all of this. It was a beautiful childhood growing up in that. And in those days, the school was the social hub of most everything outside of the church.

(Wilbert Harrison performing “Kansas City” live Saturday Night Beech-Nut Show, May 02, 1959.)

AV: Right.

Tav Falco: And I was not a Protestant, so I didn't go to the church. I went to a Catholic church in the county seat with my mother. In those days, Catholics down South were pretty much anathema. Nobody wanted a fish-eating Catholic, nobody wanted to get near them. So my mother overcame all of that and she became accepted in the community and socially quite successful and well-loved, and enjoyed various sororities and things— you know, ladies auxiliaries, Eastern Star and all of that stuff— all of those that you have down South for ladies. She sold Tupperware at one point and my father sold Gravely tractors. The kind that they look sort of like a wheelbarrow, but they're self-propelled, and he sold those to farmers who couldn't afford a big tractor. So that's what it was growing up down South. Small towns were the real backbone of the American South— the open door policy, the country living that carried over from the 19th century. And so, you know, I'd hear blues occasionally. Later I got a job as a brakeman on the Missouri Pacific Railroad. Probably should have stayed with that job. Know what I mean? [laughs] On the train we would roll through in the late afternoon Black neighborhoods and I'd see people, young men, out on the porch playing electric guitar in a Jimmy Reed style. Jimmy Reed was hugely popular in Arkansas, as was Bo Diddley. So we were listening to that alongside Johnny Cash and that stuff.

AV: Did your parents encourage your creativity?

Tav Falco: Well, I was interested in visual art growing up and I did get a plastic trumpet from Sears that I thought I could play like Harry James on. I didn't get very far. And I started drawing and making pictures with charcoal and pencils. And I did that for a while and got in some student magazines with it, but I wasn't very good really. You know, we had no art instruction in our schools at that time. They didn't have art in the backwoods of Arkansas schools. Not when I was going. They didn't have foreign language either, but I was able to study Latin. We had a wonderful teacher who taught Greek and Latin. And right up to her retirement I was able to take two years of Latin, but art I didn't get. It would've been great to have studied drawing at least. There was a band in school and you could learn music by playing in the high school band, but that was the only music offered was the band. So if you wanted to go marching around on a football field, you could learn music. If you didn't wanna do that, you didn't get to learn music. I wish I'd have done that instead of trying to be a glamorous football-carrying student who could go to the homecoming ball with a beautiful girl. Which I did.

AV: You played football?

Tav Falco: Yeah, I played six years.

AV: Oh, wow.

Tav Falco: Yeah, broke my nose twice, collarbone once. Wasn't worth it. Really wasn't worth it for them either. They weren't that beautiful. It was only when I started playing rock and roll that I met the real pretty ones. And that was pretty much the attraction to get into this in the first place.

AV: To meet beautiful women?

Tav Falco: Yes. And still is. [laughs]

AV: I was gonna ask you, before you became a professional musician— or “anti-musician”— about your time in Fayetteville and going to the university there and meeting people like John Clellon Holmes, and maybe how your university life influenced you creatively and some of the people you ran across there.

Tav Falco: Well, at the University of Arkansas is where I was exposed to not only one kind of thinker and artist, but several different kinds of thinkers and artists. Thinking people, literary people, theater people, language people, music people. I became friends with jazz collectors and then blues collectors. So during the blues revival in the 60s, I started developing an interest in country blues there at the university and started listening a lot to that. And also to R&B, especially Bobby “Blue” Bland. ’64 and ’65 he was hugely popular in Arkansas and at the university. Bobby Bland was— you know, Two Steps from the Blues, that album produced by Don Robey at Duke Records, and Here's the Man!!!, also a Don Robey production— I don't think there's a finer R&B record ever recorded in the history of music than those two albums. Totally magic. And how Robey got that sound…well, it's a mystery and I guess should remain one. I think in large part it was— well, a combination of things, of course— but the brilliant horn section that he had, the recording equipment that they had, the echo that they had in those days— the tube-type recording equipment, that warm deep sound that he recorded— this lush echo on the entire tracks of Bobby Bland. And then of course, Bobby himself with this high-pitched sissy voice that real blues people value. I mean, Jackie Wilson had it a little bit, but Bobby Bland, he was the one. He was the man that had that high mistreated voice, the sissy voice. The mistreated sissy. I mean, that's the blues. It’s where the pain is. And he knew what it was and he knew how to sing it and his audience felt it. Really felt it. So I saw him in Memphis at the North Hall after I left the University of Arkansas. Finally graduated after a lot of in and out, including a diversion to the Haight-Ashbury psychedelic period. Highly psychedelic, which also opened a lot of doors, and my consciousness, and that's also a product of my university experience. So when I finally got through the university, I went on to Memphis and went down there, and this was like going to the moon, going to the big city. So I crossed that Mississippi River and there I was into a completely other realm from the Ozark Mountain academic tower of university fine arts. And most people in Memphis could care less about any kind of university experience. Didn't get you anywhere there.

AV: Right…

Tav Falco: But I wasn't expecting it to, because I was interested in film and music, and recording it, and photographing, filming. And so I went there to meet artists, mainly visual artists. So I went on to Memphis for that. And various things happened. We put together an art-action video group and art-action theater troupe, and one thing led to another and I picked up the devil's six strings there in Memphis. But, back to university, I was in John Clellon Holmes first class he ever taught anywhere. And his wife Shirley came to every class. She was a central figure in some of his books. This man also turned Jack Kerouac onto finding himself, because Kerouac was writing pretty much in the vein of Leo Tolstoy at that time when he was on a football scholarship at Columbia in New York, and Holmes was in that sphere. You don't read a lot about Holmes today. You read about Lucien Carr and Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso orbiting around this early Columbia cabal of writers who became known as the Beats. They were known as the Beats later. In fact, it was Holmes who was more of a writer's writer and who was— I wouldn't say more intellectual— but he was, I guess, more trained in writing, in a sense, but yet he was the jazz writer. He was like a finely tuned jazz musician writing what Jack Kerouac later called “spontaneous bop prosody.” Holmes had wrote an essential essay— and quite a brilliant essay— “The Philosophy of the Beat Generation.” And a lot of people think a journalist in San Francisco from a major daily, I can't remember which one, came up with that term “the Beat Generation.” And maybe he did, but I'm sure he read Holmes's essay first. Holmes was totally committed to literature and into a responsibility to his students, even though he worked totally outside of the academic format in his classes. He refused to give tests or any kind of quizzing. What you had to do was read the books and talk about 'em right in the class. And that was it. So he got a little grief from the English department, but the poet James Whitehead, who brought him there, knocked all that down and Holmes had the kind of class he wanted. And so he had a very attentive students. And I was pretty young at the time, and we'd go to little parties at his apartment and he and Shirley would play John Coltrane. He had all this jazz on open-reel quarter-inch tape, and a big tape machine. And he would put on a big ten-inch reel and we'd listen to jazz. And he was a heavy drinker and smoker, so he was pretty much a New York guy— he was from Old Saybrook, Connecticut— but basically a product of New York and the literary scene in New York. And Shirley too, even though she was from Shreveport. And he wrote a book called Get Home Free, which is about Shirley in Shreveport and some of her Black friends. She was a white woman. Very beautiful, very sexy. And anyway, he wrote this book without ever having gone to Shreveport. And it was a brilliant book. Later he did go, but you know, he went to Naples and he wrote essays about his experience in Naples. But that's just one example. I met people in theater and I met people in art and I met architects. I met Fay Jones, the Arkansas architect, and we had interesting conversations. I met Donald Roller Wilson, surrealist painter and quite talented, and a brilliant renderer, almost like he had the rendering talent and imagination of like Dalí and Magritte, you know? So it was a stimulating environment there. Very stimulating. It was not unsophisticated at all. You know, Arkansas has been a place for experimentation and a certain kind of political tolerance. You might not think that today, but it had the communist labor college, Commonwealth College in Mena, Arkansas, that's in all the books read about. And full of so many incongruencies, because Governor Orval Fabus attended that college as a young man. And then went to the University of Arkansas and joined a fraternity. And his father was a pacifist in the Ozark Mountains during World War I. Was arrested for passing out pacifist literature and agitating. And then with the Fabus we know today, is considered a George Wallace-type populist racist. He was not that way at all. I interviewed him with our video group. We went up to his house in Huntsville after he was governor and made a video interview with him. Very, very charming man and very sharp.

(Interview with John Clellon Holmes about Jack Kerouac from the documentary And the Beat Goes On, 1986.)

AV: So a lot of paradoxes sort of floating around.

Tav Falco: Yeah, a lot of paradox in Arkansas.

AV: And I think of you as being paradoxical in some ways, so it seems like there was a lot of inspiration coming from those early days. Because a lot of people focus on your early Memphis days, but that was just as important it seems like in terms of first formulating you as a creative.

Tav Falco: Yes. Well, I didn't move to Memphis until ’73. You know, I'm a product of the ‘60’s, and most of that period I was in— it took me a long time to get through the University of Arkansas. It took me nine years. So most of my formative period was at the university. And what I took from Fayetteville to Memphis— that manifestation began in Memphis, that's when things became concrete— even though we had done, along with the Arkansas poet Randall Lyon, an adaptation of William Burroughs’ Nova Express at the university theater, which was pretty much condemned. It lasted one performance [laughs]. And we did the shipwreck scene, with, you know, fingers getting chopped off and people trying to get in the boat, and revolvers swinging free from braziers and people being strapped down. And we had art sets by Alan Barber, avant-garde artist who went on to have quite a career. After he left there— he was not an Arkansas person, but he was at the university for a while in the art department. And we had people who had survived Dachau who were on the art faculty who knew what they were doing. We had a sophisticated faculty. We had Harvard people from the South who had graduated from Harvard teaching there at the university, a number of them. And they also knew what they were doing and you felt they had a personal commitment to critical thinking among the students and acolytes there. And to help others discover aesthetics— the idea of an aesthetic— and to forge your own aesthetic. Not someone else's, but to expose yourself, to understand, to perceive, and then to forge an aesthetic and work from that. Because it doesn’t— you know, if it's like for me, I do one song. I sing one song. Whether it's in writing or film or in the band. It’s all a subjective persona. And everything that I perceive goes through that persona. And that's what I use. It could be a song, could be a poem, it could be a guitar line. That's what I learned…

AV: You are what refracts those things through your own personal lens.

Tav Falco: Yeah, and that's all people are really interested in anyway from an artist. It’s the secret eye of the artist and what he sees and what he feels. And everything else is discipline and technique. And yeah, I wanna know technique, I try to discipline myself. I want to learn how to produce in the best way I can with writing or in film, but I know that that's the tool to express something else. Because I don't care for virtuosity simply for virtuosity’s sake. I'm into art art for art's sake. And so that's what you have to find out to be an artist. Otherwise, if you don't draw from within, within your unconscious— particularly within the dark waters of the unconscious— you're just a kind of technician or a mechanic. Which is okay— it's okay. It's okay to play bluegrass, like with every note in place and play it with a blinding velocity. But if you don't put the soul in there, nobody wants to hear it more than once or twice. At least I don’t.

AV: You mentioned that those sort of impulses that you were honing and crafting in Arkansas and Fayetteville manifested themselves in Memphis after you moved there in ’73 and falling into this really heady underground music and art scene and starting to hang out with people like Alex Chilton and Jim Dickinson. And there's the Televista group, and also meeting and working alongside people like William Eggleston. I know that was a very dynamic, inspiring time in your life— and just in Memphis in general— and you've written about this, but can you take us back to what all was happening then in terms of the local scene and these people all sort of coming together and these entities coming together? There were a lot of crosscurrents happening there at that time.

(Student documentary on buZ blurr from 2015.)

Tav Falco: Yes. Well, I can preface that too— and preface my Fayetteville experience— by saying that in the town near the farm that I grew up on was an artist named buZ blurr (aka- Russell Butler), and he became an important male artist during the Fluxus period and was working alongside Fluxus artists in New York. And he’s had an important, essential, seminal career as an artist and as a conceptual artist. And he's had a fertile career and he's quite active today. And he opened some doors to my thinking too, before I even went to the university. So he was a mentor and still is. And he's highly informed, highly aware, and highly, deeply expressive of his interior life and his perception. And he's also a brilliant renderer. He always has been. He’s been able to draw ever since I've known him. He has a kind of inherent talent in his hands for drawing and he can draw portraits, he can draw people, he can draw objects, and it's remarkable. So anyway, going on to Memphis— making that transition— I kind of got hot in Fayetteville with the police after a while. Because not only did we do that Nova Express deal at the university stage, we also did it off campus at the Ark Theater upstairs. And the police raided that because they heard there was nudity, and indeed there was [laughs hysterically]. So the sheriffs came in the front door, and Randall and I and our model in a fur coat with nothing else on, she and the three of us got out the back door and avoided the arrest. And then there were some drug things. A lot of this was fueled at that point by— there was a lot of psychedelic experimentation— and a lot of people were very, very high. And we also got hot on account of that, too. So within a few days I moved everything to Memphis and out of a cabin I was living in on Markham Hill just above the university, out in the woods. And I put it all into my 1950 Ford, what I could get in there, and stuffed it with all I had. It had a 1948 Mercury flathead motor in that Ford that was put in by a hot rodder with three deuces— three two-barrel carburetors on it. So, I flew on down pretty quickly in that car. I found an apartment for $50 a month— garage apartment— I moved in there and I didn't get off Cox Street for 14 years. And then I moved into a working class district after that for another three years. Memphis at that time was a little like New York in the East Village in the 1980s— that art explosion in the East Village. So it was a small scene and you got to know everyone rather quickly in Memphis. And, like it was in New York later, there were visual artists, musicians, filmmakers, all working alongside each other. Everyone knew each other and there was a lot of overlap. Graphic artists were important. The graphic artists, strangely enough, even though they did commercial work, seemed to be on the cutting edge of everything. They seemed to be totally into foreign cinema that was important at the time, the Nouvelle Vague. They were into new music that was being played, new jazz that was going on. So they had an influence too. And there were labels in Memphis at the time— Stax was going, Sam Phillips International was going, Hi Records. Of course Hi is still there, but I guess it's the only label left in Memphis. And there were several recording studios. Ardent was just starting, Sonic Studio of Rowland Janes’— several recording studios. But in those days, you had White producers and Black producers at Hi producing hillbilly music and producing R&B music in the same place. So that was exciting that Memphis always had this crossover overlap, this rapport, between Black and White musicians. And you didn't always find that in the South. You had to go to a place like New York for that. But when it comes down to it, after all the racism and tragedy we've had in the South, there's still been a lot going on between the White race and the Black race in the American South. And sharing the same bed, sharing the same children. And oftentimes, not in an exploitive way— not just the planter having children with the Black women on the plantation because he felt he had a right to do it.

AV: Real love.

Tav Falco: I'm talking about honest couples coming together, and marriages coming out of it. You don't hear a lot about that, but there was certainly plenty of it, I wouldn’t say a lot, but there was plenty of it. And a lot of people down South and in Memphis didn't stand with the Confederacy ideologically or politically. If you have a chance to read through my book, Ghosts Behind the Sun: Splendor, Enigma & Death: Mondo Memphis Volume 1— you can get that at Barnes & Noble and Amazon and in some bookstores— I treat all of that in the book. I start before the Civil War in Memphis and I go up to throughout my tenure in the city. I talk about everything we're talking about right now. And in fact, I start the book in my escape from Fayetteville in that 1950 Ford. That's the opening chapter.

AV: In terms of meeting people like Jim Dickinson and Alex Chilton, were these people that you met just hanging out, going out seeing music?

Tav Falco: Well, I met bluesmen that way who were around, but I didn't really hang out with them like Lee Baker— the lead guitar player for Mudboy and The Neutrons. He was very close to Furry Lewis. I met Furry, I met Bukka White, and saw these men play with Houston Stackhouse. I didn't meet Muddy Waters, but I saw him play more than once. Howlin’ Wolf— had my picture taken with him. But through Televista, our video art-action group that I formed with Randall Lyon, we started making a lot of videos on cultural phenomena in the area, and also collaborating with some avant-garde art-action groups. Because we also did some happenings. Actually we started doing happenings in Fayetteville. Before coming to Memphis Randall and I— you know, it was during this period of Red Grooms and a lot of the New York people were into happenings— and we liked that kind of spontaneous art-action theater piece. So we carried that ethos on into Memphis, and we were the only people doing that kind of thing in Memphis.

AV: It was very radical at the time for that.

Tav Falco: Well, there was certainly a radical tangent to what we were doing. You know, I was listening to country blues on the one hand and Paul Bley free jazz on the other and Karlheinz Stockhausen. So, we came to the traditional through the avant-garde.

AV: I was gonna ask you about that because I consider you sort of a retro-futurist with one foot firmly in the past and one foot firmly in the future. Celebrating history while also deconstructing it a little bit.

Tav Falco: You can say that. Yeah.

AV: I was wondering, in talking about the Televista group, and documenting people like RL Burnside and Jessie Mae Hemphill, and then also having these art-action events and combining the avant-garde with the traditional, just how important was it for you to bring these things together, to meld these things?

Tav Falco: Well, that was our mission. That was what we did. That was the important work. We didn't want to be an art student, particularly. I'd already been to school and studied what I wanted to study and it was time to put all of this into action. So Televista recorded the musicians— blues artists, fringe artists. Burnside, for example, at his honky tonk out in the boondocks there from Como, Mississippi. I was particularly into Burnside's music and his animal magnetism, the way he played guitar, because it was trance music. It was outside of most blues formula you had ever experienced. And most of it was not any kind of 12-bar blues. Far from it. Maybe he did that later after he got with Fat Possum, I don't know. They screwed around with him in such a way that I don't know what they did to him. And Kenny Brown— you know, Kenny Brown loved Burnside— this blues artist from around Burnside's neck of the woods, this White kid. So these White boys got a hold of him and they turned him into a show that played halls and in festivals and that kind of deal. And you listen to that and all of a sudden he sounded like somebody that's playing 12-bar blues. Not totally, he still played his repertoire, but it changed a little. So the real weird thing was when— now, I'm all for experimentation, and I must say that this was quite an experiment when Fat Possum put out a record with these deep house beats and hip hop beats behind Burnside— you know, why not, okay? But that's not the soul of Burnside. That's not what I captured, and what Televista captured. We captured something feral and covert…magnetic.

AV: Very intimate and real…

Tav Falco: Something from the swamp. Something from the swamp root, that's what interests me. Something incendiary. And honestly, there's some commercial music that is exciting in spite of itself. And I'm into that, but for the most part, I don't care if it's commercial or if it's a shellac from 1929, or if it's something that's been recorded yesterday. I'm looking for a feral kernel coiled deep withinside a woman or a man that is infused with sexuality, and turgid with jism, and that's going to explode any moment. And then you roll over and die and then you're born again.

AV: La petite mort?

Tav Falco: Yeah, and then there's the rebirth. I don't wanna say born again, because it sounds too Southern Baptist, but I'll say rebirth— a resurrection, let's say resurrection. And I'm speaking in broad terms here, but I'm into a certain music that has a certain mystery that can only be partially revealed. And that's all that has to be revealed because if you reveal too much, it's no longer a mystery and it's bland and you see it. And somehow it becomes un-human for that…inhuman.

AV: Totally. Well, your music does have a little bit of this revivalist aesthetic to it, but also again, bringing a very modern— really post-modern— sensibility in, sort of deconstructing some of these forms in a lot of ways. And I was wondering, speaking of having a foot in the future, the very first time Panther Burns really introduced themselves to any sort of widescale audience was during the infamous appearance on local TV show Straight Talk with Margaret Thrasher. Which was broadcast across North America via an early use of satellite technology and is still one of the greatest performance art pranks of all time. The stunt didn't sit too well with your host, who accosted you for the “anti-music” you were performing, and presumably, many more tuning in. You said at the time that you were trying to create an open “anti-environment” with which to express yourself. How did that all come together and how was it received around greater Memphis at the time? I mean, this is this combination of technology, and then again this sort of roots form, but you're also using synthesizers. It was a very heavy mix of things and to present it in such a big and dramatic fashion was amazing and hilarious at the same time.

Tav Falco: Yeah, that's it: amazing and hilarious. That's a large part of the thrust of Tav Falco and Panther Burns. And like you say, retro-futurism. As for Straight Talk, these tendencies came to focus in a media event, and Panther Burns’ participation you only see one little segment of that show on YouTube or in cyberspace. But Panther Burns were only the orchestra for a Televista appearance on Straight Talk. It was a Televista show and interview. We just played some music there.

AV: It was an art-action.

Tav Falco: Yeah, it was an art-action. And there was a long interview with Randall Lyon before we played, and there was the hookup with a Slow-scan image converter with four art-action groups in North America. That was the central focus of the appearance on Straight Talk. It wasn't Panther Burns. And so we had a hookup through this very rudimentary converter that we got our hands on, and each of the other four groups had a similar converter. We converted Slow-scan video images into audio signals that could be decoded at each of the four hookups. At that point, telecommunication art was something that grew out of mail art, which got off in the late-60s and was important all through the 70s. Artists using the mail to communicate and to create artworks. Many of them were conceptual artists, and it became quite a network throughout the world. Telecommunication art was, in my mind, in my opinion, mail art. And there was the Center for New Art Activities in New York— Willoughby Sharp and Liza Béar. Liza is still writing and an essayist and journalist. She's in BOMB magazine quite a bit. So we were connected that day with that converter via the paid telephone in the hallway of WHBQ television. We were connected to the audio hookup with a conference call on the payphone with Center for New Art Activities in New York, with Open Space in Canada, Relay in San Francisco, and one other group I can't remember where right now. So yeah, Center for New Art Activities, we were all doing a performance of a sort, and Panther Burns was the feed that day on Straight Talk to send to the other four arts groups. So they were getting a Slow-scan image of Panther Burns in black and white. And then we'd switch. We switched it and we received. It was send/receive. So Marge Thrasher was interested in this experiment and she was in a constructive conversation with Randall on camera, but then the images started coming in from New York. And once again, nudity got in the way and all of a sudden there was this nude woman on the screen being broadcast. ‘Cause we had our own monitor there. We had our own monitor, our own black and white camera, and we were sending and receiving with that on the set at WHBQ regional ABC television going out to 300,000 people in three states that morning at nine o'clock, you know? And so the camera was looking at our monitor and this nude woman comes down and Marsha just turns white as a sheet. And you know, you got all these Southern Baptists tuning into this, and they run Memphis. They run Mississippi. Southern Baptists run the show down South, and they run everything then. So it pretty much unhinged her, so you cut away from that. And then Panther Burns were on. And to compound her anxiety, the King and Queen of Cotton Carnival were on the show.

AV: Awkwardly looking on.

Tav Falco: Yeah. It's like the King and Queen of Mardi Gras in New Orleans, you know? Memphis royalty's out there in their drag. She's out there in a gown, in a crown, and the king has on a crown and has got a scepter. Well, they're on one segment, so when Panther Burns get out there I met the king and queen. And there are two segments. You only see the first one [of “Train Kept a Rolling” on YouTube]. The second one is a tango with Panther Burns, “Drop Your Mask.” You only see the first of the two songs on the internet. I got the whole thing on video tape, on three quarter-inch video from the TV station. So the second song we did a tango, you know, our take on a tango. And I had the King and the Queen of Cotton Carnival out there with me and Panther Burns on camera, and I had given her the Panther Burns tambourine. And there she was playing the tambourine, the Queen of Cotton Carnival, this beautiful girl, playing tambourine with Panther Burns on the second song we did. And so, you know, Marge was going completely berserk.

AV: Not happy about it.

Tav Falco: Well, just totally stranged out. She didn't know what was happening.

AV: I'm sure most people didn’t.

Tav Falco: And she said, “What are you on Tav?” [laughs] “What are you on?” I said, “Well, Marge, I'm just on WHBQ at nine o'clock in the morning.”

AV: Nice. [hysterical laughter]

Tav Falco: She said, “This has to be the worst sounding thing I've ever heard on television.” She says, “What do you mean by that?” I said, “This is anti-music.” I said, “Well Margaret, I find this music exhilarating. I find what we play exhilarating.” She said, “How do you market this? Do you expect to make any money?” And I said, “We’re not in it for the money…[laughs hysterically]. ‘Cause we find it exhilarating.” So anyway, it was a hoot.

AV: It's an amazing scene…

(Trailer for documentary on Glenn O’Brien’s TV Party.)

Tav Falco: But you’re right, it was a media art-action. It was a media event. And I guess one of the earliest. And then when I went to New York where things really started opening up for Panther Burns, I was invited to TV Party. Chris Stein's [of Blondie] underground, black and white cable show.

AV: With Glenn O'Brien.

Tav Falco: Glenn O’Brien was the host, who at the time was the music editor of Andy Warhol's Interview. And of course he wrote about us a number of times, and some feature articles too. And anyway, that's how we broke through in New York in a sense with the underground— another media event. And I was on there a few times, and that was always exciting. And that show was also syndicated in Los Angeles. So we reached an underground crowd with that appearing on TV Party.

AV: It seemed like New York really took to you guys once you made the transition up there.

Tav Falco: Well, there again, we were an anti-environment among the No Wave artists— the cool No Wave ‘everybody's down, everybody's beat.’ It’s expressionless in a sense. Expressive, but yet blank. The sort of blank stare. All black. Well, we were the antithesis of that from Memphis. We were hot. We were maximal. We were colorful. We were over the top. So the underground embraced us for that. There was no one quite like us. There were rockabilly bands, but they weren't like Panther Burns. People thought we were a rockabilly band. We did some rockabilly tunes, and other kinds of tunes: you know, a samba, a tango, rockabilly, rock and roll, the blues— more than one blues— R&B. So we were not just one thing. Then later they tried to brand us a “psychobilly” band. That was a— what psychobilly is thought of and defined as today is kind of a music journalist term, a categorical term. There's no application to us. No application at all. We're far more grotesque than any psychobilly band could ever imagine with all of their noise and posturing and antics they pull on stage. I'm not interested in that. It’s tunnel vision. And I don't want that term applied to me. We got nothing to do with that. We're much farther out. Way farther out than any rockabilly raccoon could ever imagine.

AV: This is true. I was gonna say, you've always been considered sort of an “outsider artist” here in the South. And we actually have a wonderful history of really eccentric creatives that stretches from everyone from like Sun Ra and even people like Dr. John…

Tav Falco: Yeah, I photographed Sun Ra in New York at the Squat Theatre. I love him.

AV: I'm actually from Birmingham, so he's one of our hometown heroes.

Tav Falco: He’s your boy down there. I mean, boy is a negative term I guess, but he's your man. He's your native son.

AV: Absolutely. But then you have people like Howard Finster, Col. Bruce Hampton, Rev. Fred Lane, and beyond, all of whom have incredibly unique regional vocabularies and sort of forms of self-expression tied to the areas they came from. Is there something in the water down here, or just the environment in general, that produces such singular characters and artists from the South? Is that a question you can answer?

Tav Falco: Well, in those towns, you’ve got a lot of the country in the city. Like Memphis, for example, is more Mississippi and Arkansas. And you’ve got so many country people in Memphis that it's unlike a real urban environment, and suspect the same in Birmingham. I suspect there's as much swamp as there is asphalt around there. Same in West Memphis, you know? It’s swampy, man. It’s the Mississippi, and yeah, there is something in the water. There's something in the water in the Mississippi that's not in the Hudson.

AV: Yeah. And a lot of people having to play in brooks and use their imagination, being sort of removed from the bigger cultural centers, and having to invent themselves like you did.

Tav Falco: That's it. That's it, too. That's a good point. And also consider, American music— that is, particularly American music— came up river. It came up river from New Orleans. And it came up river all the way to Harlem. It didn't come down river. It didn't come down river from Harlem. It went up river from New Orleans from the South, and it came up through all those towns in between, all those rivers that go into the Mississippi in a sense, you know? Metaphorically speaking. But then again, historically speaking too, that music came out of Congo Square in New Orleans, you know? And that's what we've got. We've got a legacy of African music that became quintessentially American, right? Picking up the instruments of Europeans and creating something that had never been heard before, and they invented something and it was invented down South. And that's the reality.

AV: And changed world culture along the way.

Tav Falco: Well, yes, it did that. We know culture is always changing, but yeah. American music had a huge impact, and on other forms of music, too. Even Viennese operetta was hugely impacted during the hot jazz period of the 20’s and 30’s.

(Tav Falco and Panther Burns perform “Memphis Ramble” live on July 31, 2020.)

AV: Yeah. Well, you know, I was gonna ask you— speaking of that— since your time in Memphis and New York, you've kind of become this international man of mystery and a global citizen and someone who's lived all over the world and been an expat for decades now, from France and Vienna to Bangkok. How does Southern life, art and culture stack up in your mind compared to that of the rest of the world's great societies? Do you still find it as unique and alluring as you did? Do you still draw inspiration from it having lived abroad and do you have a greater appreciation for the South now?

Tav Falco: I have a better you perception of where I grew up and where I come from. And back in America now I have certain impressions, maybe superficial, but I expected the country to be more deteriorated somewhat since I toured here in 2019. And to be more politically divided, as it was when I toured here before in 2019. But on the contrary, I come back here and the economy— even though the stock market is supposedly down somewhat— the economy seems to be booming, and I don't see any deterioration in the infrastructure. On the contrary, I see buildings going up everywhere. A lot of housing being constructed. Everybody seems to have money in their pocket, even though there are homeless tent cities in San Francisco and Los Angeles that were still there as they were in 2019. But aside from that, I see an affluent country and I see a lot of apathy, more apathy than I expected. I see the political climate has calmed down— the divisiveness has calmed down quite a bit. And I sense people are just bored with all of this conflict that we had. Not that it's gone away totally at all, but still I feel like people are fed up with it. You know? They just shot through it and they don't wanna deal with all this political crap. They wanna live their lives with as little complication as possible. And even maybe try to get along with one another. I think people are trying to make an effort— or at least somewhat of an effort.

AV: Do you think that's true in the South?

Tav Falco: Yeah. Everywhere I've been going on tour I'm getting the same vibe. Well, not the same vibe, but I'm getting this sense that people are— they don't wanna waste their time and energy anymore on being contrarian. They're interested in affluency. They're interested in having comforts— the American way of life, the American dream. You know, in a sense to have all the material wealth, and to have a good paying job, and to earn decent money and produce and live their lives, you know? Have their families and do their thing. And I also noticed that the country's cleaned up a little bit since 2019— the highways, the interstate. So a lot cleaner than I remember. Even Texas— Dallas looked all cleaned up. Couldn't believe it. Looked like Beverly Hills. Houston was all clean and spic and span. Couldn't believe it. Even Memphis was partially cleaned up. It was strange, you know? But that's my impression now. But those are superficial impressions as far as the real soul of America. I can't comment on that. But I still feel I shouldn’t be here— live here at least.

AV: Do you still have a deep love of the South?

Tav Falco: I’ll always be a Southerner no matter where I go, not trying to change it. But I am a Southerner. I grew up here, so I understand it and I'm part of it. Doesn't matter where I live. You just carry it with you. You know, I decamped from Europe in November to Bangkok. I’d never been to the Orient before and I'm enchanted. I really am. And, if I know what's good for me, I'll stay where I am over there. Because it's a very healthy, positive environment that I've been able to find a place in and live a pretty good life that I can afford. I couldn't afford that kinda life in America. And the beautiful, beautiful people around you all the time— intelligent, respectful, physically and mentally beautiful. And the cuisine is marvelous. I have no complaints. So I'm gonna try to ride it out and hang my hat there for a while. I doubt that I can do Panther Burns over there in any kind of extensive way, but that's not the only thing I'm doing. I'm working on my movie. I'm editing the complete Urania Trilogy now. I brought out part one in 2017 and the complete trilogy and feature film form will be ready early 2023. And I will be bringing that around to key cinematheques and movie houses since I did part one. I'm doing some cabaret work. I'm forging a cabaret identity, and I'll be going after this tour to Rome and appear in a cabaret there where I started working last summer. I’ve adopted the identity of L’Ultimo Gigolo— the last gigolo. When I'm doing song and dance— dancing, cane, Matelot straw hat, you know, the flat one— it's interesting. Something's gonna come out of that. I don't know exactly what yet, but there's gonna be a new synthesis of something I haven't done before and hopefully something people haven't quite heard before.

AV: Well, you've always done that, and it's been just a remarkable career as an artist, as a musician, as a filmmaker, and something I find fascinating. Especially having come from the South, and helped create these environments— or “anti-environments,” as you wanna call them. I was gonna ask you one last question: are there any cool archival releases coming up? Will we ever see the second half of the Straight Talk show and feed?

Tav Falco: Well, maybe. There's a film company in Rome that's working on a documentary piece. I sent that videotape to them along with a selection of others from my archive of video, and they had that digitized in New York and they're working with it now. I'm not sure if they're going to include the second song that Panther Burns played that day on Straight Talk in their treatment. But I certainly have the material. And a lot of Televista— most Televista work that survived— is in the WPA Film Library in Chicago, and also the Memphis/Shelby County Library history department has a professional archive on Tav Falco. And I may be delivering all of my video to them pending a meeting on the 4th of October in Memphis. That's already set up, after the tour finishes. So they may have it and archive it. I think I want them— because they have a lot of posters I screen-printed and letters and all kinds of artifacts— so I'm gonna make one more deposit of my artifacts before I ship all of my stuff in storage from Hot Springs, Arkansas over to south of Bangkok.

AV: Amazing. Well, hopefully it will continue to blow minds well into the future.

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(Tav Falco’s “Strange (Libertango)” from his 2019 album Cabaret of Daggers.)

Lee ShookSeptember 27, 2022