Gustavo Antonio “Tav” Falco is a persevering giant of American Music. More specifically, along with his band Panther Burns, he’s been mastering and merging numerous root forms from the USA (and beyond) for decades. In digging so deeply into the past, Falco is one of the underground’s true originals; once acquainted with his work, it’s impossible to mistake him for anyone else. He’s cut many live records over the years, but his latest, released digitally in March, arrives on LP June 23 via ORG Music. Nashville Sessions: Live At Bridgestone Arena Studios is another gem in the crown of a king.
Tav Falco’s emergence on the scene at the dawn of the 1980s roughly coincided with a neo-rockabilly impulse that was adjacent to the new wave, but it didn’t take long to comprehend that the man stood far apart from any standard nostalgia trip. Formed with fellow Memphis legend Alex Chilton immediately following the dissolution of Big Star, Panther Burns was an excursion into wild rule breaking, blending original compositions and choice covers not just sourced from rockabilly but soul, R&B, blues, C&W, teen R&R, and even pop of a classique, sophisticated stripe.
Falco could even knock out a James Bond theme with panache, doing just that with “Goldfinger” on an earlier live disc, the New Rose Records 2LP Midnight In Memphis. That album came out in celebration of Panther Burns’ 10th anniversary in 1989 and was a stone gas, as is Nashville Sessions, in large part because his latest, while still brimming with Falco’s distinctive personality, documents the guy’s personal and artistic growth over the course of nearly 35 years.
Midnight In Memphis captures Falco as a gloriously eccentric but tack sharp champion of music from the record’s titular locale, but Nashville Sessions, while retaining core aspects of the man’s origins, primary amongst them a sweet version of Memphis Minnie’s “Me and My Chauffeur Blues,” additionally presents Falco as an eternally suave citizen of the world.
As Falco explains between songs late on Nashville Sessions, he left Memphis in the ’90s to reside first in Paris and then in Austria for a lengthy stretch before moving to Bangkok, where he currently lives. A version on this new set of Chilton’s demonically bent “Bangkok” deftly intertwines Falco’s early years and his present reality.
Nashville Sessions features a blade sharp band of Falco, guitarist Mario Monterosso, bassist Giuseppe Sangirardi, and drummer Walter Brunetti in the midst of their US tour last year, but the 14-songs were notably cut in the studio used for Sirius XM’s Outlaw Country station (I assume for live broadcast). While the audio is vibrant (engineered by Jeremy Tepper for Sirius XM), the lack of claps, hoops and hollers between songs is felt.
But that’s only a tiny quibble, for as said Tav and the band are in killer form. Other tracks that harken back to Falco’s Memphis era are Sanford Clark’s “do not fuck with me I’ve done time” classic “Go on Home,” Falco’s nifty original “Cuban Rebel Girl” (heard on the ’86 “Shake Rag” EP and possibly inspired by the ’59 film Cuban Rebel Girls, notably Errol Flynn’s final movie), and a closing take of Troy Shondell’s dead girlfriend teen pop nugget “Girl After Girl” (the only song to overlap with Midnight In Memphis).
Falco’s interest in assorted Latin styles and pop angles are also represented on Nashville Sessions, as songs from the tango-inclined 1995 album Shadow Dancer are reprised here, including Nelson Pinedo’s “Sway,” the Falco original “Born Too Late,” and a version of The Honeycombs’ “Have I the Right.” There’s the Paris-inspired Falco original “Ballad of the Rue de la Lune,” and from the cabaret-infused 2018 solo LP Cabaret of Daggers comes Astor Piazzolla’s “Strange” (I suspect the Grace Jones version inspired Tav, as well).
Opener “About Marie Laveau” gets the record off to a wicked swampabilly start, a few tracks later there’s a swank rock rearrangement of Jim Reeves’ “He’ll Have to Go,” mid-way through comes a reading of “Treat Me Nice” (announced as a song by Lieber and Stoller) that stays close to the original while avoiding the reverent, and from late in Nashville Sessions a tribute to the character Fantomas “Master of Chaos” is a standout. The whole album reinforces that, as ever, Tav contains multitudes. How sweet it is that he’s still out there doing it.
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