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Rating: If you don't know Tav Falco and while browsing a store you happen to come across his first album "Behind the Magnolia Curtain", I bet you'll burst into laughter at that loser on the cover who looks like a caricature of Charlie Chaplin, mustache and all. You'll shake your head and think it's not worth shelling out even five euros for such a clown, especially since your new flame is arriving soon, and you have to foot the dinner bill.
You've made yet another mistake in your musical life. Yes, this strange character is a genius. It would take you five lifetimes to do what he did in one: gas station attendant, ice cream vendor, railwayman musician, actor, filmmaker, dancer, photographer, performer, etc., but his main occupation is the club rat, understood not as a venue to shake your hips to the rhythm of the latest crap, but as a place where those heavy black records are jealously kept that only work if you place a diamond-tipped needle connected to a phonoreceptor on them. In short, Tav Falco, like the mad scientist, loves to immerse himself among the dismembered and smelly bodies of the old delta blues sound made of dragging rockabilly and frenzied shuffles, emerging with a leg or an eyeball that he can use to complete his own creature. And like all mad scientists, he needs an even crazier sound assistant, and who could it be if not Alex Chilton, a great talent wasted for too much love of the bottle after the glories of Box Tops and Big Star?
Wait a minute!....Memphis... dragging rockabilly... Alex Chilton... but this is a film already seen... the CRAMPS! Yes, it's true, in 1980, two years before Tav, they were the ones who fished with full hands from the skeletons of the swamp, but their approach was more voodoo, more terrifying, more gory, more provocative, more sexual. Tav Falco, on the other hand, was performing at the Memphis Showcase accompanied by his brother Ron on bass when Alex Chilton noticed him and recognized the flame of madness necessary to form a band to repeat the feats of the Cramps in a more philological guise. And what could he call it if not Panther Burns, the name of one of Tennessee's largest plantations? And who could play in it if not that magnificent loser Alex Chilton himself, along with Jim Duckworth of the Gun Club and a sort of belly dancer who uses her body as percussion instead of a drum kit? An album of covers of songs no one remembers, above all the version of "Bourgeois blues," with the suffocating rhythm just like the Cramps and the drifting solo on Tav's feral screams, never heard anything more raw and primitive, wipe off the sweat because here the health shirt is forbidden... "Brazil" sambas on a clattering twang and sung like your uncle would drunk at your niece's first communion.... "Hey - High school baby" a slow and sick rockabilly like a nursery rhyme for lap dance patrons... "Come on little baby" and Elvis's mummy checks if he still has a belly button to twist his innards... "Snatch it back" makes you shake your head to the yè-yè rhythm until you realize it has detached and ended up under the bed... "You're undecided" is an exhausting boogie that drains your soul with that slide at minimum rpm... the frantic start of the electric blues of "Blind Men" makes you believe he's hired John Lee Hooker converted to absolute foolishness...
To elect your own musical heroes neither the Radioheads nor the Joy Divisions nor any other trendy types, but only a handful of debauched like these, means loving rock 'n roll very much.
Evidently, I love it.
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