Tav Falco's Wild & Exotic World of Musical Obscurities
1. The Johnny Burnette Trio - Train Kept-A-Rollin'
(Bradshaw-Mann-Kay /
A Memphis Golden Gloves boxing champion, as was guitarist Paul Burlison, and bassist Dorsey Burnett in the RnR Trio, they were know to pull their touring car over to the side of the highway when tempers flared and fight it out until exhaustion stilled their angry fists. RnR tours were no picnic in those happy days of the 1950s and still aren’t. Paul told me that their booking agent sent them out on the road with a Ball Mason jar full of amphetamine capsules. Paul didn’t know what the pills were all about. Just something the agent gave them to stay awake. He ate the capsules like popcorn and lost 20 pounds on the road. He said that more than once before the night was over; the RnR Trio had to fight their way out of the joints they played in. At a honky tonk in Tipton county, Tennessee, he had to break a beer bottle to hold back a fierce assault of unruly celebrants, while Johnny managed to slip out of the club and get behind the wheel of their Cadillac. It is theorized, and certainly the better part of truth, that Paul Burlison was not the guitarist who recorded the schizoid guitar fugue on “Train kept a Rollin” at Owen Bradley’s Quonset hut. Rather, it was professional studio musician, Grady Martin, one of the Nashville Cats.
2 Don Willis - Warrior Sam
(Willis / East Pub. BMI)
‘Indian Rock’ - for lack of a better term – was shrouded in thundering reverberation and infused with a kind of jerking, reverse-waltz/tom-tom beat. This larger-than-life rockabilly tangent reared it swollen head during a three-year period in the late 1950s. Its noteworthy examples were recorded overlapping 1957/1958: “Hey High School Baby” by Benny Joy released in 1957 and “Warrior Sam” by Don Willis recorded in 1958. Still, the hit came in 1959/1960 with a song written by the Big Bopper and recorded by Johnny Preston called “Running Bear”. Of course, the Indian Rock number of particular interest for me is the Don Willis song “Warrior Sam” as deranged and seething as the snake pit in which it was recorded - a place known as Memphis where I spent 17 hot and bothered years of my life. Warrior Sam shows no mercy, and he takes no prisoners. The song defies any sort of rational meaning other than blazing the dark and hollow warpath of the unbridled savage.
After a misfire at SUN Studio with Sam Phillips, Don Willis turned his back on a deal with Mercury in Nashville, and took his song to the fledgling garage (literally) studio of Jim Stuart. “Warrior Sam” was the second release on the Satellite label of partners Jim Stuart and Estelle Axton. At the time it seemed unlikely that this backyard recording operation founded by two Bible belt lily-white folks would morph in the premier soul label of the era - STAX records. Some years after STAX had been swallowed up in financial collapse and miss-managed bank default, I visited Jim Stuart in another makeshift recording studio he had patched together in a former auto-body repair shop around the corner from where I lived in an outlying working class district of Memphis called Binghampton. I tried my best to interest Mr. Stuart in my group, Panther Burns, but he was too immersed in trying to forge 80s disco gold out of nameless east-Memphis talents. I left the alchemist to his madness.
3. Bobby Lee Trammell - It’s All Your Fault
The late Roland Janes – chief engineer at Sam Phillips Recording Service - said that when Bobby Lee Trammell came to Memphis to record, he quickly earned a reputation as the wildest of all the rockabilly cats around. He was known to decimate a recording studio like no other. When Bobby Lee appeared on local TV, he actually leaped onto the big TV cameras and rode them around the studio glaring into the lens. If Bobby’s other regional hit, “The Arkansas Stomp”, is any indication of his appeal, his lyric, “Lift your leg high and do the Arkansas Stomp tonight!” cemented my devotion. Having immigrated myself from across the river to Memphis, I knew what the ‘stomp’ was all about.
It took me a couple years to get on top of “It’s All Your Fault” – this sulphurous lament of accusation and innuendo. My recorded version is not so bad, but the mush-mouth vocal of Trammell is definitive. No body can touch it. Along with Bobby’s voice, the other lead instrument is the reverb soaked broke-leg snare drum. How outright elegant can you get? I once told a top guitarist who came to a Panther Burns audition in New York as did Chris Spedding, that if he could get the lead part of this ditty by Trammell, we would rule the Mudd Club, CBGBs and the rest of them. He just gave me a dumb look. How little faith, ye infidels. Now I play the guitar solo myself.
4 Allen Page - She's The One That's Got It
Allen Page and The Big Four were the discovery of Cordell Jackson, the self-proclaimed first lady recording engineer. She signed the group to her label, Moon Records (there was SUN, but there was also MOON Records in Memphis). Because a bass was difficult to record in the 50s, the 45s she cut with The Big Four had guitars playing the bass lines. Alan Page had the charm and a country lilt in his voice that made his Moon sides swing in a felicitous and sexy fashion. The band had a two guitar sound, just like Panther Burns when Cordell saw us for the first time at Western Sizzlin on Madison Avenue playing on a benefit for Don Ezell, the taxi driver for Sun Records. In those days, we also played without bass, concentrating on duelling twin electric guitars. Next day, Cordell came over to my house and played the Moon singles of Allen Page. Alex and I were impressed with the lyrical onrush of “Dateless Night” and the Velvet Underground mono-rhythmic, sock-hop dervish of “She’s The One That’s Got It”. Both songs remain in our repertoire.
5 Arthur "Big Boy" Crudup - I'm Gonna Dig Myself A Hole
This is one of numerous examples of Atomic Blues recorded during the Cold War era. The song is a frank statement of escape strategy from nuclear holocaust that I too used to hear expressed in the backwoods of Arkansas.
“I gonna dig myself a hole
Move my baby down in the ground
You know when I come out
There won't be no wars around..."
Actually, I learned this song from Charlie Feathers who had been studying it for years. He used to play it for me on an 8-track machine he had mounted under the dash of his old Chevrolet. He said, it ain’t easy getting on top of this one. He was right. When I finally got to record the tune, it was the most challenging I had attempted. Jim Dickinson played acoustic guitar in open-G on the cut, but I couldn’t get my tone up – too breathy. Arthur Big Boy Crudup never had that problem.
6 Jimmy Lloyd - Where The Rio de Rosa Flows
Perhaps the stretching conceit of the Yellow Rose , countrof Texas, this number about the Rio de Rosa is more associated in my mind with a mutation of the lyric to Rio Dolorosa – River of Sorrow. Any way you slice it, the song is a masterstroke of syncopation where snare drum and the vocal of Jimmy Lloyd are intertwined to perfection – not unlike the entanglement of snare and vocal in “It’s All Your Fault”. Born Jimmy Logsdon in Panther, Kentucky, he learned rhythms and tonalities that reek of the honky tonk, bourbon whiskey, and country swagger that make this song intoxicatingly irresistible. His mentor, Hank Williams, never cut one better.
7 Benny Joy - I'm Doubtful of Your Love
This tune is an Indian Rock spin off into Spanish tones of haunting melancholy. This ghostly ballad is a far cry from Benny Joy’s other offerings such as “Spin The Bottle” and “Crash A Party” exuding a maturity of tortured angst that builds to an unholy crescendo. The track is so heavily loaded with echo and reverb, that one picked guitar note sets up secondary, then tertiary rhythms. The result is a shimmering, quaking, forlorn howl at the moon that seems to wail from the depths of Benny Joy like the primal outcry of possession by a VooDoo demon… in this case, the high school baby VooDoo doll. This is a dirge skulk fugue of operatic proportions unmatched anywhere else in the canon of RnR. My own recorded version rises to the occasion, and my berserk guitar solo can attest to that.
Side 2 vinyl / CD Track 8-14
8 Carlos DiSarli - A La Gran Muneca
1. “La Gran Muneca” (The Grand Doll) ”“ Carlos DiSarli, El Señor del Tango (The gentleman of tango).
The orchestra of Carlos Di Sarli had a lush, dramatically grandiose sound, and emphasized strings and piano over the bandoneon. During the 1940s he consecrated the El Maricaibo Club in Buenos Aires where he appeared behind the piano wearing either an eye patch or dark circular sunglasses. Such eye masking was worn, I was told when living in BsAs, due to an eye DiSarli had put out – self-inflicted over a tragic affair d'amore. With its grand circular stage and ample parquet dance floor, The El Maricaibo, was a favorite haunt of mine. I seemed to perceive the aura of DiSarli drifting among the folds of the scarlet stage curtain.
9 Orchestra Juan D'Arienzo - Milonga Vieja
In the mid-1930s D’Arienzo brought tango back from 4/8 time to 2/4 time of early tango canjenge and back to the feet of the dancers. In 1949 D'Arienzo said: “In my point of view, tango is, above all, rhythm, nerve, strength and character.” Milonga on the other hand is actually not tango, which is music of the city. Milonga is derived in large part from the folk music of the gauchos of the pampas. The term can be translated as ‘party’, and although highly syncopated, it is danced on every beat in 4/4 time often in a quadrado figure. This song, the old milonga, is like most milongas, a noble, pure form of music – honest and cordial as the temperament of a gaucho and laced with the frivolity of a rustic gambol.
10 Bachicha Bianco - La Cumparsita
Certainly the one song most famously associated with Tango Argentino. “La Cumparsita” had humble beginnings: initially a little march, composed by a young student of architecture, Gerardo Rodríguez around 1915, and from there it evolved with embellishments drawn from Giuseppe Verdi and notably elaborated by the orchestra of Roberto Firpo. For the researcher Juan Carlos Legido, it is “... a real phenomenon touching crowd’s hearts with the simple and clear texture of its melody.” Bachicha was the bandoneonista with the Firpo orchestra, and when Eduardo Bianco summoned him to Paris in the early 1920s, the “Bianco-Bachicha” Orchestra was born. Anyone playing tango has their own arrangement within their repertoire, including my own group, Panther Burns, under the title, “Drop Your Mask”.
11 Los Indios Tacunau - Romance Del Barrio
Guitar tangos are particular favorites of mine. From the province of Buenos Aires, brothers “Cacho” Tacunau and Nelson Tacunau, calling themselves the Indians Tacunau, perform this rendition of the tango classic. Their execution is impeccable and the sentiment evoked is joyous and sensual. The music for the canción as created by the bandoneonista extradinario, Anabal Trollio, is composed in waltz time. Of the tango, the avant-garde dancer Isadora Duncan wrote, “On my first timid steps I felt pulsations responding to the provocative, languid rhythm of that voluptuous dance; suave as a long caress, intoxicating as love under the mid-day sun, cruel and dangerous as seduction in a tropical forest.”
12 Osvaldo Pugliese - Desde El Alma
Probably the most lyrical and sensitive tango waltz of all time, Desde De Alma “From The Soul”, is the song that draws the most dancers to the dance floor. Authored by the tango poet Homero “Barbeta” Manzione, it was written in proper Spanish rather than in Lunfardo, the argot of the port of Buenos Aires in which many tangos were composed. This version features the dramatic styling of piano virtuoso, Osvaldo Pugliese, who became so popular that the fascists banned him from radio broadcasting - an interdict, which did little to diminish the fame of his orchestra. You can see from the names of the musicians and poets of tango that the Italian influence was predominant in ports of the Rio del Plata – the cradle of tango itself, whilst the patois of Lunfardo is composed of 60% Italian vocabulary. It is said that an Argentine is an Italian who speaks Spanish, acts French, and thinks he’s English.
13 Anton Karas - Harry Lime Theme
How can I leave my old Vienna room in Hotel Orient without tuning the radio dial to the jocose sounds of the only Slavic virtuoso ever to release a 45 rpm zither hit single. It was a fortuitous happenstance when the production company of Alexandar Korda that sent Carol Reed from England to film The Third Man, stumbled upon Anton Karas plucking his zither in a bombed out bistro. Karas crafted this blithe gavotte especially for the nefarious central character of the movie portrayed by Orson Welles. The music twinkles on in the hearts and minds of all who have ever heard its wistful strains. Its melodies and countermelodies go far to elevate an otherwise grim and morose movie of post-war intrigue.
14 Alexander Princes - Donauwellen
Iosif Ivanovici was a Romanian military band leader and composer born in Timişoara, Hapsburg Monarchy, of Transylvanian Serbian origin. His waltz “Waves Of The Danube” is played here on the Maccann Duet system Concertina by Glasgow born Alexander Prince. It is a CRG shellac record from the time around 1910. A modulating souvenir of the merry sinister music halls and playhouses that once dotted the winding Danube river from its origins in the Black Forest of the Rhineland to its destination at the mouth of the Black Sea in the Ukraine.
Side 3 vinyl / CD tracks 15-19
15 Elmore James - The Sky Is Crying
One can hardly forget this anthem to the darkness of the night sky over the Mississippi and the even more ominous sunlight that falls in scorching hopelessness over West Memphis, Arkansas, where Elmo hung out and recorded. The bars were jumping after war, and the juke joints there resounded with the eerie, reverb drenched slide guitar drone of James' playing, but underneath the booze soaked veneer, it was a sad life. America is a sad country… and that's what Elmo's guitar was saying.
16 Bobby Blue Bland – Who Will The Next Fool Be
THEN! The auditorium curtain rose on Little Boy Blue – Bobby Bland, except Bobby was not so little. The MC in his introductory rave-up proclaimed, “Ladies and gentlemen - here’s the MAN – I mean the MAN – the sensational – the incomparable – the dynamic BOBBY - huh, Bobby BLUE Bland!” and Bobby was no boy either. He was pretty big in fact, high yellow in color, and astonishingly silver-throated. Connoisseurs, with whom the auditorium was packed, extol nothing more than the sublime tones of a sissy blues singer.
Bobby was raised in the church in Memphis, and he sang divinely with pipes of pure sterling. His voice poured forth full, rich chords like a gospel piano, but in his signature high-register octaves reeking of misery and mistreatment, were the sublime tonalities that brought the audience to their knees. No one in the blues can testify trouble and heartache like Bobby Bland. Rather than a band, Bobby Bland had a complete orchestra seated onstage in three tiers behind him. His musicians were all deep black as the color of their matt tuxedos. These were mature artists raising the song of Bobby Bland to swirling heights of ecstatic, harmoniously melancholic wail. If I dropped dead that moment, I knew that I had just witnessed the consummate performance of a lifetime, and would be eternally gratified.
17 Chet Baker – I’m A Fool To Want You
In 1988 we played a little club in Amsterdam, and there were still posters on the wall for Chet Baker’s gig there a couple weeks earlier. It was his last gig. The no longer young horn player from Oklahoma had allegedly fallen out of the window of room 210 of Hotel Prins Hendrik in the nearby De Wallen red-light district. He lay lifeless on the wet cobblestones below. A mercifully painless descent, soaked as he was with cocaine and heroin. Chet once remarked that the happiest day of his life was in Italy when he took possession of a new Alfa Romeo SS. He also said in Paris a few weeks before his death, “I’m a romantic. I don’t think life is really worth all the pain and effort and struggling… if you don’t have somebody that you love very much.” His golden tones are the embodiment of that sentiment, and he remains the singer’s singer by which all others are measured.
18 Fred Buscaglione - Guarda De Luna
When I feel like a slow dance, I play this waltz tempo ball-busting ballad, gangster-buddy howl at the moon. From the man who wrote “Love in Portofino”, Sig. Buscaglione reaches for the stars in this high drama of futility in love turned suicidal. The saxophone solo is definitive for the instrument. In 1957 the deep-throated crooner crashed his new pink Thunderbird along the coast of Rimini. A blazing farewell to a star-crossed career.
19 Martin Denny - Quiet Village
This ambient pastiche is still a favorite to chill to after a long night at the club, with a Tiki cocktail in one hand and the other around the waist of my main squeeze. Nothing particularly cerebral here ”only exotic arias and weird bird calls of the lost and forgotten island paradise to which I'm irresistibly transported in the wee hours. All of the birdcalls and animal screeches on the track were vocalized from the throats of Denny’s indigenous orchestra members.
Side 4 vinyl / CD Track 20-25
20 Dion & The Belmonts - (I Was) Born To Cry
This post-modern ballad is dripping with existential angst, and Dion DiMucci delivers it like a ton of bricks thrown in your face. As a child, he accompanied his father who was an entertainer touring on the vaudeville circuit. That training and the influence of local musicians that he heard performing in local bars and on the radio made a profound impression on the young DiMucci. His singing was honed on the street corners and local clubs of the Bronx, where he and other neighborhood singers began to create original vocal stylings a capella.
Yeah I'd like to tell you something all about the good and the bad
I wish today the world, my friends, would stop being sad
There's so much evil around us, I feel that I could die
and I know... yeah that I was born to cry
Well if I ever told you all about the things I have done
I can't remember having even one day of fun
I don't know what I'm doing, if I do it's a lie
but I know that i was born to cry
21 Shorty Rogers - Hot Blood
Although composer and musical director of the folkloric seminal motorcycle movie, The Wild One, the soundtrack was credited to nitwit associate producer, Leith Stevens. Shorty Rogers and his orchestra The Giants spew a hop-head rampage wail over the hot exhaust pipes of rival motorcycle gangs: The Black Rebels versus The Beatles. A film directed by László Benedek, the story is based upon an actual motorcycle raid on the town of Hollister, California on a Fourth of July weekend in 1947. The bluesy beatnik jazzy squalks of Shorty Rogers’ creation can also be heard in his playing for the soundtrack of the Otto Preminger 1955-drug addict film, The Man With The Golden Arm. Soon Rogers became a force in the LA avant-garde jazz scene, only to drop out of music and then return years later as a pop arranger for TV groups you don’t want to know about.
22 Tav Falco Panther Burns – Sweet Lotus Blossom
During my early years of musical development In Arkansas, I came across a record on a vocalist from my own hometown of Gurdon. The album featured Jimmy Witherspoon with Illinois Jacket on tenor saxophone and Wilbur de Paris playing coronet. Sure enough the liner notes stated plainly that “Spoon” was born August 20, 1920 in Gurdon and raised there. That album was and still is in my estimation the most magical collection of ethereally tenebrous blues tunes I’ve ever heard, and its sublimely enthralling composition, “Sweet Lotus Blossom” sunk into my sensibility like an elixir of devils.
Later I was drawn to the explosive new music, art-action scene in San Francisco. Not long after I noticed an announcement in the Berkeley Barb that my idolized vocalist from Gurdon was performing at a swanky nightspot across the bay in Sausalito. I took the bus over and walked to the club. There I saw Spoon resplendently attired and robust in a dark midnight blue Tuxedo crooning to a small but erudite crowd of music lovers. Between sets, I gained entrance to the dressing of the artist and introduced myself. Mr. Witherspoon admitted that I was the first person he had ever met from Gurdon since he left there for Kansas City with the intention to sing like his mentor Big Joe Turner. Spoon had in fact done that, and his golden baritone became known as a prime example of the Kansas City sound
My request that evening was of course “Sweet Lotus Blossom”. With a regal flourish Jimmy Witherspoon dedicated the tune to me in the audience. I was transported. A song with a parallel meaning that evokes the sweet white narcotic poppy flower or the blooms of the flowering cannabis, its theme symbolizes the regret and remorse of addictive euphoria. Spoon no doubt heard the song performed by KC pianist and singer Julia Lee who specialized in numbers about sinful substances, and even recorded a version for Columbia.
Some years later after I had started my own musical group in Memphis, I was touring in Europe and found myself with a day off in Milan, Italy. In the local press I saw that Spoon was headlining an open-air music festival. That night I was there once again in the audience of Jimmy Witherspoon. Between sets I made my way into the back stage tent and again introduced myself. He recognized me from our meeting years before. Because it seems impossible to find that 1953 album of my original inspiration, we must content ourselves with my own group’s recorded rendition of “Sweet Lotus Blossom”.
23 Charlie Feathers - Jungle Fever
Rather than his first release of “Jungle Fever” as a single in 1960 on KAY 1001, we are listening to a far more snake-in-the-weeds type treatment that Charlie recorded for his own FEATHERS label. The master of the hiccup vocal coupled with his signature operatic whine and gasp, he reached delirious heights unknown in the annals of American recorded music. Here Charlie joined forces with his guitar picking son, Bubba, to produce a manically compulsive track propelled by a relentless 80s disco beat. In 1987, I had the privilege and the pleasure to collected a number of the FEATHERS label recordings into two albums released on New Rose Records in Paris: New Jungle Fever, followed by Honky Tonk Man in 1988. Like Charlie always said, the idea is to find a good song, and a good song has to have some truth in it or nobody is interested. He also advised me, if you’re not doing something different, you’re doing nothing at all.
24 Alex Chilton – Bangkok
Socially, politically, and geographically incorrect, Alex did not let such digressions stand in the way of his composing this full-frontal RnR blast. To exercise total autocratic control over this studio masterpiece, Alex played all of the instruments himself. Emerging from the little recording studio in downtown New York with the master tape under his arm, he must have felt like a new man. A man who had not only paid his dues, but a man who had earned the luxury to create and experiment in his own way and had above all earned the freedom to follow his instinct. It was the kind of latitude rarely afforded him in the studios of Memphis, other than by producer Jim Dickinson who understood how to give Alex all the elbow room he needed… because he realized that neither he nor Alex nor anyone else had any idea of all that Alex was really capable of. With the triumph of “Bangkok”, the ‘man of a 1000 voices’ at last tasted the unequivocal victory that he so richly deserved.
25 Tav Falco Panther Burns - Real Cool Trash
This number was given to us by our comrades in Nice who play in a group known as the Dum Dum Boys. Their lead guitarist, Balducci Didier showed up in our dressing room of the Theatre Elysée Monmartre on the occassion of our first show in Paris in 1987. Since then we have consulted on a number of art-actions. The tune itself is a garage thrash of questionable redeeming value that was played early in the career of Baldicci’s band, and now hardly at all. Still, I find that the song epitomizes the decorticated nature of RnR: replete with impulsive repetition, droning guitars and psychedelic riffs, hysterical breaks, and a finale of demented invocation of all the demons of the night that suspends the lead vocal for an eternity on the threshold of the void.
