“The theater goers settle, gowns and tails tucked along red velvet seats, everyone comfy in the plush grand entertainment palace, the one renowned for showing Buñuel and Dalí from celluloid prints so pristine that they’re reputed to swallow audiences whole. The owner knows all the regional vintners and serves only the best-and at fabulous discounts.
The murmur from the seats is about the career retrospective, how Tav Falco selected original songs from across his decades and gathered a diverse and impressive cast to help reanimate them on his new album, Desire On Ice. Ward of the record precedes itself, the experience so transformative that it adjusts space/time reality.
The overhead lights begin to come down, the floor-to-ceiling curtain parts, the room lights dim before we can discern whether what’s revealed is a stage or a screen-or both.
The quiet is broken by a cough.
Somewhere deep and far from the opening silence-in the theater? It no longer feels or smells like we’re in the theater?-the lights go up over all of rural Arkansas, but they’re brightest in a small spot between Gurdon and Whelen Springs, where train tracks define the landscape by promulgating occasional towns. A fire begins to burn and in our seats, we smell the smoke.
With a hard cut we are in the glare of urban Memphis, the flicker of flames becoming headlamps, streetlamps, a giant red power button on a bass amp, but faster than a street gambler can take your twenty dollar bill, the city lights go out, the roar of bus motors, puttering Vespas, leaf blowers and gun shots-all go quiet. All is dark in the big city except for one house in the Binghampton neighborhood that throbs like the body’s blood on a delirium jag. Tav’s house beats like a heart, gushing with music, with art, with the frenzy of answering a calling.
A globe spins, the world turns, we are in Tav’s Vienna. There is merriment on unusual instruments, quiet joy emanating from the cafes onto the streets. A crowd mills outside a small door to a large warehouse. Emerging from the darkness, a single light is growing close. A man in a Greek fisherman’s cap approaches on a Matchless 750cc in a Norton frame.
Inside the European discothèque, the depot thrums, dancers unaware of the maelstrom that is about to push their evening into the vortex. The new arrival enters and after one synth-playing hair farmer notices and faints, but before the dance music can fall apart, the place modulates, the whole place and nothing but the place, the walls and ceiling and building materials, the colors, the sound, the vibe. Night becomes day becomes dawn breaking. There are deep pit dry-rub ribs on every table, there’s chitterlings on the menu. The beer is served in quarts. Magnolia blossoms waft in the night air. We see, smell, taste, touch-swoon.
The stranger continues to the front of the room, his back ever and only to the audience and with one chord on his Mississippi hill country guitar, with one moan from the great state of Arkansas, he ignites the room. The dirt dance- floor heats, it morphs, forth, back-the desolate south and cosmopolitan Europe, the rural cotton farmer and Parisian drag queen, the quaffed, ascot-wearing Marquis and the farmer’s daughter in a loose summer dress, mmmm mmm. The funk churns, snakes slither, the corn liquor tastes like poison.
Revelers revel because that’s what revelers do.
The magicians cast their musical spells, which carry far beyond the grand old theater, far beyond the transmogrifying dance floor, far beyond the rural, the urban and earshot. Tav’s roadhouse is a coffee house, a fun house. It’s the big house and it’s the poor house, the gin mill and the spinning wheel. It’s home to the wanderer, it embraces the devil, it heals the ill and it revs the independent spirit of Sam Phillips and Roland Janes and Jim Dickinson. Tav’s are songs of individuality and freedom, these are songs of longing, songs of injustice and of how democracy dies. And how we let it die. These are daring songs that ask us to recognize that “we show no tolerance/ and that we have sucked the cock of arrogance”-put your ears to the album’s “Doomsday” baby, and get with the now.
The sound of helicopter blades was initially hidden by the delirious din, but now that they’re on top of us, beheading the fans, their volume takes over, the battle between the six-shooters and the six-strings playing out like the Murnau film that Friedrich Wilhelm never got to make. The sleeves and shoulders of my tux are dusty and my ears are ringing, fluids run from the corners of my eyes. I can’t breathe.
The lights come up to reveal the carnage. The reverie was intoxicating, a lotus flower sama state, but laced with fury. The screen is flecked with blood. From not too far, a spigot is opened, the whining brass on brass like a piercing air raid siren. The audience leaps to their feet, slashes through flowing blood as they escape, creating outside the door a thick red trail of fine Italianate leather sole imprints that are quickly washed away by rising
sewage.
Tav Falco, who has been making records against all the odds for nearly half a century, presides, triumphant. A sleight of hand master, he defies the eye, bends the ear, melts your mind. This is your brain on Panther Burn ash. Play this record. Dance to this music. Free these people. Free this nation. Free this world.
–Robert Gordon
A bunker in Memphis, 2025″
![Samantha Fish & Jesse Dayton – Deathwish Blues [Purple Smoke] (LP, US)](../wp-content/uploads/2023/02/SFJD-copy-300x300.jpg)
![The Sadies – Colder Streams [Black] (LP, US)](../wp-content/uploads/2022/06/scsb-300x300.jpg)
![R.L. Burnside – Mr Wizard (25th Anniversary Edition) [Clear Vinyl] (LP, US)](../wp-content/uploads/2022/07/c-copy-300x300.jpg)
![The Bobby Lees – Skin Suit [Blue] (LP, US)](../wp-content/uploads/2022/04/cover-300x300.jpg)
![The Muffs [2015] (CD, US)](../wp-content/uploads/2015/11/muffs-300x300.jpg)
![Perrosky - Tostado [2015] (CD, JAPAN)](../wp-content/uploads/2015/06/perrc-300x261.jpg)
![Diabologum – #3 [2015] (2xLP, FRANCE)](../wp-content/uploads/2015/07/IMG_0119-300x251.jpg)
