In the late 1970s, so many awesome punk bands looked to rockabilly for inspiration—think of the Cramps, X, the Gun Club. Not as renowned as those bands but possibly more authentically rockabilly than any of them were Tav Falco’s Panther Burns.

Early on, Gustavo Antonio Falco caught the attention of fellow Memphisian Alex Chilton, who saw him end a perfomance at the Orpheus in Memphis by cutting a guitar in half with a chainsaw. Chilton worked with the Cramps around the same time, and saw in Tav Falco someone who he could help take blues and rockabilly to new places. Falco did the titleing for Chilton’s notorious first solo album, Like Flies on Sherbert.

Around the time all of this was happening, Falco booked a gig on a Memphis-area talk show hosted by the matronly and marvelously named Marge Thrasher. In Amy Wallace and Handsome Dick Manitoba’s Official Punk Rock Book of Lists, Eric Friedl ranks this TV appearance #2 in his list of “Things That Made Memphis Punk.” With Chilton shyly sporting a pair of Cons and slotted in as guitarist (Falco cheekily introduces him as “Axel Chitlin”), the Panther Burns did a rendition of the Burnette Brothers’ “Train Kept a Rollin’” before segueing into … well, it took quite while before they could get to that second song—over the apparent objections of La Thrasher.

Fascinating here is the yawning chasm between the song they actually play, which seems understated, spare, groovy, and otherwise unexceptional, and the well-nigh horrified reaction it gets from Thrasher. While it was not a performance designed to blow the roof off the joint, Falco must have been positively bumfuzzled to hear the middle-aged Thrasher deem the song possibly “the worst sound I’ve ever heard come out on television” and block Falco’s efforts to play a second song by engaging in a lengthy and hostile interrogation as to the inherently “anti-music” nature of Falco’s style, which frankly seems hardly to exist—there’s nothing particularly alienating about the music! Not unduly discomfited, Falco gamely offers up a bunch of philosophical mumbo-jumbo in defense.

Thrasher doesn’t even seem all that angry, she’s genuinely curious why anybody would choose to play music like that on live TV at 9 o’clock in the morning: “This is anti-music, is that right? ... Are you all all part of the federal grant, of money?” (You can almost hear the Tea Party in that question….) We encountered a similar theme in a recent post about the Jackson 5—our increasing inability to hear just how profound punk’s attack on the status quo was. I don’t know if Thrasher was expecting the Electric Light Orchestra or the Carpenters or Lawrence Welk, but she sure as hell wasn’t expecting the thrum and purr of a low-budget rockabilly machine such as Tav Falco’s Panther Burns. I don’t know; it’s a wonderfully resonant bit of television. (In the video, the interesting freeze effects and inserts are the work of Randall Lyon, who partnered with Falco to run a video company named TeleVista Projects, Inc.)
 

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Alex Chilton Honored In Congress By Representative Steve Cohen
Alex Chilton and The Box Tops live at The Bitter End in 1967