Excerpts from “Inside the Invisible Empire: My Travel with Rock ‘N’ Roll Legend Tav Falco and His Unapproachable Panther Burns” by Richard A. Pleuger (Arthur 21, March 2006):

Gustavo ‘Tav’ Falco was born into Italian roots in Gurdon, Arkansas, a sleepy railroad town between Little Rock and Texarkana, east of the Interstate on Highway 67. While driving through rural Arkansas in his 1964 Ford Thunderbird, the sight of the train tracks just outside of Bluff City, Memphis brings him back to his childhood:

“I was living out in the backwoods between Gurdon and Whelan Springs, Arkansas, a whistle stop on the railroad where the cannonball freight ran through it, way in the backwoods and not much bigger than Panther Burns in Mississippi.

“When a steam train came through, it covered the whole town in black smoke, you couldn’t see anything. It was like a fantastic mist that transported you into the netherworld of the imagination and the unconscious.

“Even today, the whole essence of the Panther Burns is to stir up the dark waters of the unconscious mind. That’s why we’re here. You can have a party, you can have sex, you can find your husband or wife—all this happens at Panther Burns shows. You can get spaced out. You can get drunk. You can lie on the floor, get stomped on. You can intermingle with the races, you can dance your ass off. But the essence of it is: stir up the unconscious mind.”

Childhood experience inspired young Tav to become a brakeman on the Missouri-Mississippi railroad, not unlike Jimmie Rodgers, the great country singer of the 1920s. In fact, in the beginning Tav and his band were billed in Memphis as Tav Falco, the Beale Street Blues Bopper and The Unapproachable Panther Burns. Later he changed it into Tav Falco, the Steppin’ Breakman and the U.P.B.

Tav: “The brakeman separates and couples the cars together. He climbs up on the car and sets the big round handbrake. He gives hand signals when to do what. A very romantic job.”

…

Tav Falco: “Around the turn of the last century—1900 or so—they started clearing more land for the cultivation of cotton and other crops around the Mississippi River. These big piles of trees and bush were left there to be burned later. And the animals that were living in these areas—foxes, bears, rabbits—had no place to go.

“There was this wild cat, a panther, who was very cunning and howled all night. Faced with the destruction of his own habitat, the panther started to raid the farmers’ chicken coops. The animal became a general nuisance. They tried to hunt the panther down, but he eluded their traps.

“One night the farmers ran the animal into a canebrake, a stand of wild cane bamboo growing there, and they set the canebrake on fire. The shrieks of the panther were so intense that it was unforgettable. The location became known from then on as The Panther Burn. In essence, it was a symbol for the downfall of the last vestige of frontier America and the onset of European civilization in the South. And this is were we derived the lore of the Panther Burn.”

….

Tav always collaborated musically with his idols. Beside playing with Chilton, Charlie Feathers and James Luther Dickinson, he had blues singer Jesse Mae Hemphill (a.k.a. Shewolf) and the marching drummers of Napoleon Strickland’s Cane Fife Band heavily destabilizing the already raucous rendition of “Bourgeois Blues” on his band’s debut album, 1981’s Behind the Magnolia Curtain. But despite the band’s impressive collective pedigree, Panther Burns was not about musical virtuosity, it’s about an aesthetic.

“To this day I regard myself more as a performer than a musician,” Tav told me in 2002. “It takes a special individual to play in the Panther Burns. You can’t just plug a musician into this music. To play this music is hard work for musicians, but easy for an artist. I would rather work with someone who’s got more of a philosophical orientation than sheer musical virtuosity to display in the band. I’m looking for something ineffable.”

…

On a cool late summer night in 1986, I went to see Tav Falco unleash his unique blend of rockabilly and country blues in a club down on Broadway. Sporting a big black curly pompadour, Tav proved to be an even more powerful performer than I could have imagined. He drove his group the Panther Burns, in his own words, like “the last steam engine train on the tracks that does nothing but run and blow.” The power of the music propelled the crowd into other realms of fierce, ritualistic reality. During the a hypnotic rendition of “Jump Suit,” Tav proclaimed: “Panthermen and Pantherwomen, this is the Invisible Empire!” The audience then stormed the stage to sing along.

Tav Falco and the Unapproachable Panther Burns perform Friday, October 20 at Arthur Nights. Click here for ticket info.