“Otherworldly” may be the word for Tav Falco. Standing onstage with his band, the “unapproachable” Panther Burns, he seems less of a hellcat rock ’n’ roll frontman than a visitor from another planet who seems to have found himself onstage with a rock band. Listen to his new live album, Nashville Sessions: Live at Bridgestone Arena Studios, and this dynamic comes swimming into view only seconds into the first song as the pompadoured troubadour hesitantly introduces himself, one quizzical syllable at a time: “This is Tav… Tav Fal-co…”
Nashville Sessions is a pretty good representation of Panther Burns’ recent live set, which they’ll perform at Kilowatt, SF, Thu/19 at 8pm. It’s not the first time Falco has played Kilowatt, but it’ll be his first time since the Mission District dive bar started hosting shows again earlier this year, following a 25-year hiatus. “It was very funky when I played there,” he says. “Very underground, very bohemian.”
Falco is shocked when he learns how much time has passed since the last time Kilowatt hosted shows—their last show before the hiatus was in 1997, featuring fellow Memphis shit-kickers the Oblivians—but when you’re 78 years old and have been playing rock ’n’ roll for 50 of them, maybe time starts to flatten a bit.
Falco grew up in rural Southwest Arkansas and spent a brief stint in San Francisco during the height of the hippie era in the ‘60s, living at one point with a group of Hells Angels and at another with a Black Panthers-connected woman whose comrades would frequently come to the apartment to discuss strategies.
“I saw Big Brother and the Holding Company,” he recalls. “Janis Joplin was OK, but the band was really innovative and exciting. They were playing highly psychedelic music and often atonal. You don’t hear it so much on the record.”
After returning to Arkansas to get his B.A. in English from the University of Arkansas (he graduated in 1972), Falco moved to Memphis, where he studied photography with the legendary William Eggleston and began staging avant-garde musical performances—one of which, climaxing with Falco sawing a guitar in half with a chainsaw, attracted the attention of cult rock ’n’ roll figure Alex Chilton of Big Star.
The two co-founded Panther Burns in 1979, and though Chilton only played with the band until 1984—and even then only on and off—his song “Bangkok” has re-entered their regular setlist. It’s a jarring song to listen to in 2023, its political incorrectness only slightly mitigated by the hilarious fact that the song fails to touch on anything actually Thai. But to Falco, who moved to Bangkok in 2022, it has a personal resonance beyond the Chilton connection.
“I had no real intent to move to Bangkok,” says Falco. “I went down from Vienna, where I had been living for quite a while, and I was open to moving somewhere. And I got there, and it was as exotic as I could possibly imagine.”
Falco initially went to Thailand to visit James Williamson of Creation Books, the publishing arm of the great UK indie-rock label Creation Records (perhaps best-known for releasing My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless and nearly going bankrupt in the process). Creation Books put out Falco’s 2011 two-book “psycho-geography” of Memphis, Mondo Memphis, and after Williamson came to Vienna to visit Falco, Falco repaid the favor by going down to Bangkok. Upon arrival, he decided to sell his vintage 1960 Norton Dominator motorbike to afford the move.
“The social fabric is quite different from Europe, and especially from the United States,” says Falco. “The social fabric is cordial and respectful, and not in an artificial way but in a cultivated way that seems quite natural. And there’s a certain joy in living there that I sensed right away, a joy in knowing one another.”
Falco doesn’t yet have a permit to work in Thailand and thus cannot play any shows in Bangkok, though he’s been spending his time editing the Urania Trilogy, a series of expressionist films he’s been working on for nearly a decade. His band is based in Rome, and at the time of our conversation, they had just arrived in New York City to rehearse for a show in New Haven the next night.
“If you come to our show, you’re not gonna forget it,” Falco says, one carefully annunciated syllable at a time. “So come down and see the Panther Burns. It’ll be a night to forward the tragic alliance with the underground. It’ll be a night to crack the imperialist black egg. It’ll be a night to get your ashes hauled.”
TAV FALCO PANTHER BURNS w/ Isaac Rother & the Phantoms and DJ Omar, Thu/18, 8pm, Kilowatt, SF. Tickets and more info here.
