I have played with Tav Falco’s Panther Burns off and on for well over thirty years since their first live date, which was February 10th, 1979. Some version of the band has existed for over three decades on two continents, and recently Tav played a date at the Hi Tone with the latest version of what I call his Euro Burns, since he has lived mostly in Vienna, Austria for the last twenty years (with a brief return to the USA when he lived in New Orleans in the late 90s).
I once attempted to count the number of people who have played with the band since its inception but gave up when I hit about twenty-five or so; have a look at Tav’s Wikipedia entry for a long and rather accurate listing of personnel. It’s not triple digit yet, but it’s getting close. The one constant member has always been Tav himself. There is no Panther Burns without him. The rest of us are mostly placeholders. He asked me to join him as a second drummer for the Hi Tone gig, so I shared percussion duties with his longtime drummer, Giovanna Pizzorno. Also along on guitar were Peter Dark and Ken Stringfellow of the Posies and Big Star on bass.
I was going to set up two drum kits, a full one for Giovanna and a stripped down one for myself, but the stage was too small to accommodate two drum sets. So I set up a second snare drum and Giovanna and I traded off between drum set and snare from number to number. We did the same on a European tour in 1987, and it worked pretty well then. I can’t say that it did that evening at the Hi Tone. I ended up playing most of the tunes that night on the larger kit and almost immediately I realized that I still have trouble finding the 1, much less 2, 3 and 4 when it comes to playing drums.
I got a laugh out of Tav that night when I reminded him that in early Panther Burns days founding member, Alex Chilton, frustrated with our musical deficits, would often say to us singly and/or together, “It’s not that you can’t play this song right; it’s that you won’t.” It was a case of “can’t” on my part during that performance, I would venture. I am still a non-musician after thirty plus years of playing live and on recordings, and not in a pretentious Brian Eno non-musician kind of way. Rather, I just start banging away at the drums, and sometimes I get away with it and sometimes I don’t. That night I didn’t.
The ghost of Alex Chilton loomed on stage when Ken Stringfellow began counting off “1-2-3-4” for me as Alex would in the late ’70s and early ’80s. I was too ashamed to meet his gaze and too incompetent to play the simple beat he was counting for me. Somehow, it just didn’t seem to matter, since the Panther Burns began as performance art and slowly mutated into a rock band of sorts that has somehow been around for more than a quarter century. We didn’t think we would continue playing live after the first few shows done at a cotton loft on Front Street in the winter of 1979, but the story of how the Panther Burns became a band is one that I’ve told too often. Let’s just say that we often received a rather immediate and negative response during our early performances. That night at the Hi Tone, though, the place was packed, and the audience didn’t seem to care if I couldn’t find the right beat. They smiled and clapped loudly regardless of how ragged the band sounded.
The irony of the moment was not lost on me or an old friend who saw most of our early shows. He commented afterward to me, “Well, y’all still can’t really play, and I liked it better when people wanted to kill you when you played live. You were a lot more exciting then too.” I nodded in agreement at the time, but I will take a packed house of smiling, appreciative faces over an angry mob wanting to lynch us anytime. I really don’t know how the band sounded that night at the Hi Tone, but I had a blast playing with Tav and trying to keep up with Ken Stringfellow’s professionalism. Almost thirty-three years later, the Panther Burns still sound much the same to my untutored ears. I always like to say that we helped lower musical standards for everyone else. And Tav has turned a noisy art experiment into a musical career that has spanned centuries and continents. I guess we did get away with it, after all. Irony tasted rather sweet that November night.
Editor’s Note: Tav Flaco released the critically acclaimed book Ghosts Behind the Sun: Splender, Enigma & Death in November. Get more info at Creation Books.
Photo by MemphisOrDie
