Falco starts ‘Contamination Tour’ in LR

Tav Falco has responded to a rather innocuous question with what turns out to be a wonderfully apt observation of his decadeslong career in rock ’n’ roll and other forms of the unhallowed arts.

“I’m known for doing things the hard way,” the musician-director-actor writes in an email from his pied-aterre in the theater district of Vienna, Austria.

Falco, who was born Gustavo Antonio Falco in Philadelphia and grew up in Arkansas on land between Gurdon and Whelen Springs, has gleefully avoided any sort of conventional approach to mainstream acceptance and has instead followed his own particular whimsy from gut-bucket blues freakouts, no-wave noise, Southern-Gothic garage punk and Latin-flavored music. He’s directed expressionistic films, including 2014’s feature-length Urania Descending, which was partially set in Little Rock, and he is an accomplished tango dancer.

On Wednesday, the singer-guitarist and his band Panther Burns will begin their latest tour at Little Rock’s White Water Tavern. Bonnie Montgomery will open.

Are there ever any butterflies at the start of a tour?

“There is always a slight case of the pre-victory shakes before going onstage for the first show of a tour,” Falco says. “Generally I take a good, stiff shot of branch water, dance myself up to the microphone, and turn the hounds loose from there.”

Inspired by current events, the trek is being called the “Contamination Tour,” which Falco says is “in response to the socio/political cross-contamination that we face on every level of our culture today. Especially in America. I have not seen our country so divided since the turbulent 1960s.”

Falco, a 1964 graduate of the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, who was working as an assistant to Memphis photographer William Eggleston, made his onstage musical debut on Oct. 1, 1978, with an unhinged marriage of rock ’n’ roll and performance art. The occasion came as part of a bill at the Orpheum Theater on Beale Street that was promoted by musician/ producer Jim Dickinson featuring Dickinson’s band Mud Boy and the Neutrons.

Calling himself Eugene Baffle and, according to writer Holly George-Warren, looking like “a down on his luck Errol Flynn in a vintage tuxedo and fingerless gloves,” Falco strummed an out-of-tune electric guitar he didn’t know how to play and made it through a cover of Leadbelly’s “Bourgeois Blues” before attacking the instrument with a chainsaw.

“ Th e a u d i e n ce we n t completely berserk,” he told George-Warren. “Everyone was up screaming, hysterical. Then I passed out.”

In the audience that night was Alex Chilton, who’d done time as a ’60s teenage pop star in the Box Tops (“The Letter,” “Cry Like A Baby”) and whose early ’70s power-pop group Big Star had failed to gain much commercial traction. Falco found a kindred spirit in the mischievous Chilton.

In 1979, the two formed the first version of Panther Burns and began laying down their own dramatic, avant-garde spin on rockabilly, north Mississippi blues and country music. An EP, Behind the Magnolia Curtain, was released in 1981 and committed the band’s gloriously scuzzy, crashing-to-earth version of “Bourgeois Blues” — injected with a bit of Allen Ginsberg’s poem “Howl” — to wax. An LP, Blow Your Top, followed in 1982.

Chilton eventually left the band, but Falco and a rotating cast continued to record and tour. He has also appeared onscreen in films like Great Balls of Fire, Wayne County, Downtown 81 and Highway 61 and collaborated with writer Erik Morse on Mondo Memphis, a two-volume musical and cultural history of the city.

Last year saw the release of A Tav Falco Christmas. A book by photographer Gina Lee, This Could Go On Forever: On the Road with Tav Falco & Panther Burns, was published earlier this year and Cabaret of Daggers, a new album Falco is finishing up, will be released Nov. 23 on Los Angeles label ORG Music.

“It is a provocative, yet romantic record,” Falco writes from Vienna. “There are moments of introspection, heights of frenzy, some sensual R&B grooves, gender identity crises, strange tangos, and a lynching blues. A taste of something for everybody.”

The group on Cabaret of Daggers — guitarist Mario Monterosso, bassist Giuseppe Sangirardi and drummer Riccardo Colasante — is the same version of Panther Burns accompanying Falco on the road.

“Let’s put it this way: The band that records together allows no disappointments when they perform together,” says the singer. “Depending on ambient acoustics, what you get on record, you get onstage. Further, knowing there is a band behind you that has undergone the fiery ordeal of recording sessions and also the firestorm of the Panther Burns live show, imparts confidence — a feeling larger than fate that benefits in navigating the inevitable chaos of which we are masters on stage.”

Falco has spent the past few decades living in Europe, though returning to Arkansas is always a treat.

“Coming back to Arkansas is always special because each time I see our state, and its diverse landscapes and cultures, in a more clarified perspective. There is no other place quite like Arkansas. In Europe you might find similar topographies, but never the wild openness of the countryside, whether on forested mountain or rolling plain. Never the humid, diaphanous sunsets infused with the heavy fragrance of magnolia or gardenia. Nor the neighborly greeting, nor the genial spirits of lightness and darkness that give rise to song and balladry like we will hear from Bonnie Montgomery, with whom we’ll share the stage at White Water Tavern.”

Tav Falco’s

Panther Burns

Opening act: Bonnie Montgomery 8 p.m. Wednesday, White Water Tavern, 2500 W. Seventh St., Little Rock Admission: $15

(501) 375-8400 whitewatertavern.com