Rock is now 25 years old ... and still rolling By Walter Dawson — Fanfare - The Commercial Appeal, Sunday, July 1, 1979

   The Panther Burns

   The name itself is threatening, carrying an idea of an animal that burns with the basic hunger of being on the prowl, but the band that has that name took it from another kind of burning - the literal kind.
"It comes from a town in Mississippi named Panther Burn," says Rick Ivy, the band's trumpet aficionado. It seems that earlier on, a panther prowled the provinces down there and the local people trapped it in a canebreak, set the canebreak on fire and suffered through a night of howls and screams as the cat refused to go gently.
   Thus, it is an apt name for this band, for they, too, refuse to go gently. Just ask Marge Thrasher, the band members say. She had them on her Channel 13 morning show, Straight Talk, and when it was over she made some comment about it being a new low for her show, the worst sound she ever heard, and how could they do this to the king and queen of the Cotton Carnival (who were also on the show and, according to the band, seemed rather to like the music) ?

   IT ALWAYS HAS been that way for rock and rollers who forge ahead, instead of following. Memphis, of course, has had more than its share of such people, and the Panther Burns are the latest offspring in that lineage.
What seems to upset people about the band is the way Tav Falco sings old blues and rockabilly songs with a personal vengeance and it has probably something to do with the way Alex Chilton plays his guitar supporting Falco's vocals with the subtlety of a rapist. Or perhaps it is Ross Johnson, the drummer of sorts. Maybe Ivy, who sounds just as well without a microphone as he does with one, has enflamed a few people, especially with his bepop-to-Madison-Avenue approach to clothes. Then there is Eric Hill, whose synthesizer is designed to fill the space of a chainsaw.
   "We are on the outside," says Falco. "And we're not expected. There is no format for us - we'll have to create our own format."
The group has played at the little Madison bar called the Well, which apparently is run with a kind of esthetic anarchy in which anyone can play. Even there, Falco says, "they threw us off the stage twice." But, he adds, "we've gone full circle there."
Indeed. On a recent Tuesday night, during a period when many live-music clubs around town are bemoaning the recession, the Panther Burns packed 'em in at the Well, drawing a strange mixture of the Trader Dick's crowd and the new-wave boys and girls. It was, pretty much, a successful performance - at least, as successful as the Panther Burns get. It is a very experimental band, in a lot of ways, and sometimes things work. Sometimes…
What the band is doing, basically, is rearranging some old ideas. "I kinda had this idea," says Chilton, "for somebody to do blues and punk it up. I thought it would fit."

   CHILTON, formely the front man for the Box Tops and then Big Star, lately has become recognized as the embodiment of the new-wave / punk syndrome. It's not a new thing for him - he always has been what he is today - it's just that people had no idea what to call him before.
For those knowledgeable about Chilton's past, one of the first questions about the new band is why he doesn't do the lead vocals, and the answer is simple: "I found someone who can song better than me." That someone, he says, is Falco.
"I met Tav last fall and he was playing all these blues songs. I was really impressed… so we got together," says Chilton. The initial meeting of the two was at "The Tennessee Waltz," the 7^th or 12^th farewell performance of Mud Boy and the Neutrons, a local group of musical guerillas who refuse to take their farewells seriously. Falco did a solo set and ended it by taking a chainsaw to a guitar.

'Damaging' the art in order to see it better

   Falco is involved in several media besides live music, the most important being video, and he is working on assembling hour-long video and audio cassettes of the band for sale. He is a partner in Televista, a Memphis-based video company, and that was how the Panther Burns got on the Thrasher show: Televista was demonstrating a three-city video hookup, and the group was brought along to provide the images for the screen.

   Chilton and Falco spent a lot of time jamming last winter, and then Chilton brought in Johnson. "Eric was hanging aroung too," says Chilton, "and we decided to put a synthesizer in to take the place of the chainsaw Tav had used at 'the Tennessee Waltz'."
As Hill tells it: "All the instruments were taken when I came in, and I decided that (the synthesizer) was the spot for me."
Ivy joined sometime later, after having seen the band at the Well. "I had been blowing this horn over at a friend's house drunk, and so I asked 'em about sittin' in and they said 'Oh, we'll try to think of a song for you.' The next night, I got up and just sort of hung around onstage; Nobody said no - so I stayed."

FALCO, who has an affinity for Aragon's statement of the surrealists' purpose, is the group's main philosopher, and he probably explains the band as well as it can be explained, without seeing one of its performances.
"With our musical performances and different rhythms coming out of different performers, we can think of, like, different tape recorders running and a couple of radios going, in a way that maybe John Cage or Stockhausen would think about their music.
"As we tried to explain to Marge Thrasher, it's art damage. It's the function of the artist to make something visible to us that maybe is there all the time as part of our environment, but we don't see it. When you throw up an anti-environment, your own environment becomes visible. So you have to damage some art sometimes, alter it, in order to really see it."
   Chilton adds that "the blues, to me, is relevant anytime… We're not hung up on trying to write at this point - we're interpreting."
   And, as Falco points out, there is no format for that.

- Walter Dawson

Fanfare - The Commercial Appeal, Sunday, July 1, 1979
[taken from fanzine FAST FUSE] 

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