Since bursting on to the music scene four decades ago with the classic Behind the Magnolia Curtain, Tav Falco has slowly but consistently evolved from his early avant-hillbilly noise roots to what now encompasses a strange brew of Latin tango rhythms, Depression-era blues, haunting cabaret standards, and party-starting rock ‘n’ roll. He continues to push boundaries with the release of Cabaret of Daggers, quite possibly the most ambitious album of his career.
As prepares for a November 2019 UK tour, Tav speaks to Jason Barnard about this artistic high point, his roots, working with Alex Chilton and the current incarnation of Tav Falco’s Panther Burns.
Cabaret of Daggers seems to draw from a range of arts. ‘Nobody’s Baby’ for instance is a tango. Is this something you’ve aimed for on this album and more generally in your music?
My music has always drawn on a diverse selection of genres and Cabaret of Daggers is a continuation of that approach. The assemblage of songs on this record reflects a state of mind. The lyrical thrust of the originals is reaffirmed by the stylistic impulses of the compositions we cover.
Cabaret of Daggers is a mix of original material and interpretations of previously recorded tracks like the haunting ‘Strange Fruit’ and classic ‘Sugar Mama Blues’. How did you identify what tracks would be the right fit?
One could argue that the diversity of the material on the record is united by an overriding concept, but a concept has inherent limitations. Instead, I would say that the mood, ambience, and the persona of the artist are the forces unifying this album. After all, that is all that people are really interested in – the deconstructing eye of the artist stoked by the strange phenomenal fires within. Each selection on this record plays inextricably into the next. Goethe once said that art exists in selection.
https://soundcloud.com/orgmusic-1/sugar-mama-blues
Why did you choose Cabaret of Daggers as the LP’s title?
A cabaret is an informal and intimate theatre. It has a semi-rounded stage with a curtain and a spotlight casting a white glow on performers emerging from the relief of darkness. Here, songs and dances are performed before a discreet orchestra, and before an audience who comes for the lively arts of the crooner and the showgirl. After a long day of doing what they must do, and being what they must be, they come to the cabaret for amusement — arcane yet familiar, titillating yet cozy, thoughtful yet diverting, dazzling yet charming.
And daggers? Let me put it this way. Juan Carlos Copes and Maria Nieves were a celebrated tango couple in Buenos Aires (where I once lived). Late in her career, Nieves was asked what she thought about the younger tango dancers. She commented that there were many nice couples dancing new intricate figures, but where, she asked, were the daggers in their tango? These are the daggers that I bring to the cabaret. The kind of dagger that hangs in a sheath around the waist of Hamlet.
‘New World Order Blues’ covers current events and skewers Donald Trump. Do you usually comment on politics through your art or is it the extreme nature of the world today that’s led you to making a stand?
I lived through the turbulent 1960s and currently I see an equal degree of unrest and division. When I see bigotry, racism, betrayal, and oppression flaunted by our oligarchic, white nationalist leadership, I feel compelled to speak out. To remain silent is to be complicit. Everywhere I look, there is the murderous glint of man’s inhumanity to man. The New World Order will drag us down into the toilet and into the sewer if we let them get away with it. Like Jim Morrison said, they got the guns, but we got the numbers.
‘Sleep Walk’ works really well to follow ‘New World Order’. Was this a conscious decision to cover this track to mark a shift in tone on the album?
Even in the din of the storm or in the depthless void of narcotic recoil, there is always a space for lyrical tonalities and lush melody. One song seduces the other on this record, often in unexpected and erotic embrace.
Where did do you record the LP – was it a quick or lengthy process?
The germ of the album was conceived during a week of long winter’s nights in Memphis. I wrote lyrics through sunless hours while grass moaned under the weight of icy crystals outside. By springtime, the skeleton of the record was walking like a man. By April, we were recording the album at Terminal 2 Studio in Rome. The duration of the recording process was two and a half weeks, including rehearsals at La Conventicula degli Ultramoderni, where the cabaret photographs for the cover were made.
Can you introduce your current band?
Mario Monterosso is playing guitar, Francesco D’Agnolo is at the keyboards, Riccardo Colasante on drums, and Giuseppe Sangirardi plays bass. This is the formation I have been playing with continuously since 2014. When I step outside the box and deconstruct a song or transform it into something unpredictable, or create a completely new piece, I can totally rely on my band to go along right behind me. This is a new dimension for me and for the group.
Mario Monterosso is also the gifted producer of our last three albums. The contours and beauty of Cabaret Of Daggers are due to his remarkable aesthetic, harmonic understanding, and extraordinary musicianship. I can only compare his productions to those of Jim Dickinson and Alex Chilton. However, where they excelled, Mario is infallible.
Going back, can you tell me about growing up, your background and how/if this influences you?
I grew up in Clark County, Arkansas, between Whelen Springs and Gurdon. I lived with my parents on a farm of 52 acres. As I had no friends other than a pet deer, I created imaginary ones. Most days before sunset, I met them beside a little creek or brook running through a field in front of our house. They were a merry bunch, and we had good times laughing and cavorting in the tall grass by the running water. Later, in Fayetteville, I had my first exposure to art, music, literature, and to the stage at The University Theatre. It was a rewarding, formative period, and I soaked in all I could from every direction. I felt inspired, yet this was the turbulent 1960s, and I eventually became psychedelicized and entered a protracted period of experimentation.
What artists, past and present do you admire and why?
Artists I might cite and their oeuvre whether as individuals or collectively: Antonin Artaud and his Theater Of Cruelty; The Futurists; The Expressionists in art & cinema; Beat Poets; the Group Theater in New York; dancer Vaslav Nijinsky; actress Alla Nazimova; actor John Barrymore in all his roles both tragic and comic; film directors F.W. Murnau and Pier Paolo Pasolini; photographers Baron de Meyer and Berenice Abbott; musicians Eric Dolphy, Sun Ra, and David Amram; singers Billie Holiday, Anita Ellis, and PJ Proby; the tango orchestras of Carlos DiSarli and Francesco Cannaro.
How did you get to meet Alex Chilton and what led to forming Tav Falco’s Panther Burns? What was Alex like a person and musician?
I first encountered Alex behind the lens of a video camera at Sam Phillips Recording studio. I plainly saw that he was a singer, but I did not know who he was. Memphis is full of singers and guitar players. During the 1970s, and the eclipse of psychedelia, I retreated back to the realms of country blues and avant garde free jazz. In comparison with the ’60s, for me what followed was a lost and vacuous decade, though a time for research and experimentation.
It was not until after I had picked up a second-hand Sears electric guitar, and had destroyed the instrument on stage at the grand Orpheum Theater at Main and Beale Streets, did Alex and I become acquainted, and soon after, collaborators. Alex urged me to form a band, and my one and only band resulted, the Panther Burns – named after a legendary plantation in Mississippi. The same plantation that Arkansas poet Frank Stanford alludes to in his epics. At the time I was playing a rudimentary form of country blues in the vein of RL Burnside, for whom I had recorded videos. I turned Alex on to my interest in blues – a genre in which he previously had little interest. He was enthralled with my cryptic, oblique, and roughly-hewn guitar playing. Alex showed me how to play some rock ‘n’ roll stuff – something I had never even considered, as it seemed to be real music of songbooks and playing within the complexity of a group.
Alex’s own playing was among the most inventive of the handful of exceptional guitarists I have ever seen. The attack of his fingers on the fretboard expressed the convoluted, manic, exhilarating, sensitive, humorous, and often feral nature of his personality. He did not think of himself as such a guitarist, but I assured him that he was among the very best, and my personal favorite. As a singer, there was none better than Alex Chilton. He was the man of 1000 voices. When the Box Tops’ “The Letter” was outselling the Doors’ “Light My Fire,” the Beach Boys tried to recruit him. During a trip to the west coast around this time, Alex met Charles Manson at the house of producer Terry Melcher (son of Doris Day).
For more on my time in Memphis, I would refer your readers to my book Ghosts Behind The Sun: Splendour, Enigma, and Death — Mondo Memphis Vol. I (Creation Books, 2011). It is a 450-page encyclopedic history and psychogeography of Memphis’ cultural underground and its demimonde. I also have a second book, An Iconography Of Chance: 99 Photographs Of The Evanescent South, published by Elsinore Press.
What’s your favourite material that you made together?
What I still play to this day every time I go on stage is the guitar solo Alex showed me for the rock ‘n’ roll tango “Drop Your Mask.” We played it together on our very first show in a cotton loft in Memphis and recorded it on The World We Knew album (1987) at Phillips studio.
1981’s Behind The Magnolia Curtain is an album that’s particularly revered, including by Jon Spencer. Out of all of your albums, which LPs and songs are you most proud of?
Our new album, Cabaret Of Daggers, is the one I am most stoked about. This record contains all of the dramatic unities and the genres we are know for: rock ‘n’ roll, jazz, ballad, dirge, tango, deranged pop, and protest. Recurring themes are unrequited love, mistreatment, betrayal, brother-against-brother, hoodlums in government, the smoke of burning mansions, and liberation. What distinguishes the new album is the challenging nature of the material and the refinement of execution. I can play a blues like falling off a log, but to do justice to a Chet Baker ballad is another matter. There are songs on this album I had always admired, but never felt competent to undertake until we recorded them. I might add that the content on this record is something of a departure from what might be expected of my incendiary band, The Panther Burns. So much so, that we are presenting this as a solo album.
You’re about to embark on a Cabaret Of Daggers album tour & Panther Burns 40th Anniversary Howl. Which material is received best live today?
It is always hard to gauge what goes down best from the stage. How do you gauge? Is it how many dancer are moving on the floor, or how many people walk out, how much applause, how many jump up on the stage and tear off your clothes? We have evoked all of these responses. One can never be sure what someone in the audience will carry home with them. The residual effect is also critical. You can, however, sense when an audience is with you – breathing, sweating, hunching, howling, weeping, thinking with you. The encore of our current show, “New World Order Blues,” has been eliciting a terrific response in all of these ways and generally leaves the crowd crying for more.
Cabaret of Daggers is available from orgmusic.com
Tickets for Tav Flaco’s Cabaret Of Daggers album tour & Panther Burns 40th Anniversary Howl are available here.
See also Tav’s website for further information tavfalco.com
