Rock ’n’ roll is a sound and it is a style and Tav Falco’s been straddling both since the late 1970s.
The latest version of Tav Falco’s Panther Burns, on a cross country tour, stopped at The Runaway in D.C. for a midweek show that was strangely mesmerizing and altogether rocking thanks largely to his straight-outta-Rome backing trio led by Mario Monterosso.
At 77, Falco doesn’t look all that different than he did when Alex Chilton joined forces with him to form Panther Burns back in Memphis. Minus his pencil mustache, he’s maintained his black pompadour, and certainly his style.
With only a mediocre croon, he does a lot with his moves, taking the stage with maracas — that forgotten engine of old Bo Diddley songs — before slowly putting on his Hofner guitar to add rhythm to the stinging lead that Monterosso had already nailed down (the length of time it took him to get the guitar over his head and adjusted was the only giveaway to his advancing age). There’s a lot to be said about the guy’s taste
Panther Burns got its name after a legendary cat set afire on a Southern plantation and the band has similarly mined the swampy and mysterious sounds of the American South for its inspiration.
There was so much ground to cover, Falco played exactly nothing from his latest release, the 2021 EP “Club Car Zodiac” on ORG Music. Instead he dived into his story about a New Orleans voodoo queen and his version of the classic bolero “Sway” before the somewhat surprising, straight ahead version of the Honeycombs’ 1964 chart topper “Have I the Right?” with a 1-2-3-4 countdown right from the Ramones.