Tav Falco: "The Treatments Reflect Where We're at Today, While Re-Imagining the Thematic Contours of the Originals. Then Hurling the Entire Album Into the Future"

For over four decades, Tav Falco has operated at the crossroads of rock 'n' roll, cinema, and ritualized performance, forging a body of work that feels less like a catalog than a lived mythology. With Desire on Ice, Falco revisits songs from across his catalog, reshaping them through new arrangements and a far-reaching cast of collaborators while remaining rooted in the same obsessions that have defined his vision from the beginning. I spoke with Falco, alongside his guitarist and producer Mario Monterosso, about reimagining the past, the collision of his music and film, and pushing his singular world further into the future.

Hot Sounds: Desire on Ice has been described as one of your most ambitious projects yet. What did you and Mario [Monterosso] want to achieve with these re-imagined versions of songs spanning your career and what made you want to revisit them? What exactly was that conversation?

Tav Falco: Well, Joe. Producer and lead guitarist Mario Monterosso hatched the notion of recording a selection of Tav Falco compositions. For quite some time, this idea was kicked around as we rode in the back of our old Chrysler tour van. It would be an album of new and divergent interpretations versus the treatments heard on the original records. Within this incubation, a new song also emerged  – a melodic dirge to love sans neurosis, "Crying For More."

HS: The album features a staggering lineup of collaborators from Kid Congo Powers to Ann Magnuson to Ross Johnson. How did you select the artists who appear, and what do they bring to your vision?

TF: We thought to invite those who'd had involvement with the music either directly on stage, on record, or in some spiritual or political way over the course of my performing career. It is indeed a staggering array of those who responded to the panther howl I am know for, yet who were more than willing to embrace the concept Mario had explained of capturing the original import of the songs and exploring how those songs resonate in today's' turbulent times. Turns out the resonance was deep and wide. The fact that artists from KC Powers to the inimitably exquisite performance artist, Ann Magnuson, brought a willingness combined with insight to interpret my visions of hilarity, absurdity, love of lost causes, fetish, and sexual fantasy all soaked in the rhyme and ritual of the Orphic mysteries. Among these artists, our original Memphis drummer, Ross Johnson, probably knows my moves and motivations better than anyone. As for Ann Magnuson in particular, anyone who has seen her onstage can hardly feel less than overwhelmed and overjoyed by her conceptual brilliance. Her librettos of irreverence, her upside down antics, her surreal contortions that evoke squeals of complicit folly, her erudite perceptions and her articulate characterizations celebrating particles of weirdness that we all carry within us – not to mention her charm and ineffable sexiness – all this I beheld in her one-woman shows in New York and with her band Bongwater, and also with her metal outfit, Vulcan's Death Grip. Later I would join her musical cabal at Life Cafe on Thomkins Sq., but not before inviting her to appear on our own show at Danceteria in her prom dress.

HS: What did you want to do differently on this record compared to your previous releases? 

TF: Our intent was to create new, cross-genre treatments beyond the originally recorded versions. This led us to drown the songs in undercurrents of beat jazz, '60s Italian movie themes, and deviant folk blues. The treatments reflect where we're at today, while re-imagining the thematic contours of the originals. Then hurling the entire album into the future.

HS: Tav, how do you view the differences between your solo songwriting voice and the collaborative process? 

TF: To a collaboration I bring the lyrics, the words, and then surround myself with musicians with whom I can share the vision of the music. Often I have a skeleton for the music. Although I am studying music theory now, for the majority of my efforts, I did not know a note from a molecule. So I try to express in literal terms the audial image I have for the music in my mind. This is how Mario & I composed, "Master Of Chaos" on our previous album, Cabaret Of Daggers, that also appears as a soundtrack theme on my movie, The Urania Trilogy.

HS: Mario, how did you first get in touch with Tav and how has it been working with him over the years? What have you admired most from playing together?  

Mario Monterosso: I met Tav in 2014 when I was still living in Rome. It all happened by coincidence because he was searching for a guitarist in Rome and he got my name by a mutual friend. Our collaboration started with the Command Performance album and already there I realized that there was a huge music dynamic range between me and Tav. I believe that over a decade we learned from each other’s how to approach to a different angle of the same picture. Creative process is something extremely intimate and at the same time can be chaotic. From that blend of intimacy and chaos art comes out and takes shape. It can be a song, a poem, a book or a movie. You have to be ready to pass through that dark tunnel of soul in which you don’t have any rational control but it’ll lead you to where you wanted to go, and in the way that what you wanted was supposed to be created. Tav taught me how to go beyond the rigidity of certain rules, he taught me how to go beyond my own limits, he taught me how to open a dialogue with someone who thinks in a complete different way. He taught me how to be respectfully disrespectful. Music is not only made of notes. Everyone can play notes, even those ones who have never study how to play an instrument. However not every note can lead to an artistic composition without a story behind. I think that Desire on Ice is the mirror of what Tav and me have created over a decade.

HS: Diving into some of my favorites from the new album, what's the story behind "Sympathy For Mata Hari" and what was it like reshaping it?

TF: That homage to an intriguing and alluring international spy came about during my four years living in Paris on the Rue des Solitaires (Street of the Lonely). Beyond the photographs of her dancing in Parisian salons dedicated to Orientalism, the image of her in my mind took greater dimension from Dishonored, the third film of Josef von Sternberg directing Marlene Dietrich where she faced the firing squad with unspeakable nonchalance puffing on her last cigarette. When the moment came, the young commander in charge of the squad broke down in hysteria. He was immediately replaced with a more purposeful officer who gave the execution order and lowered his sword. She was then dispatched to the mystic in her black ermines. I sang it; Mario orchestrated it.

HS: "Cuban Rebel Girl" goes back nearly four decades in your catalog. What does it mean to revisit and reinterpret a song with such history attached to it?

TF: We brought that tune back into our live stage show on the last tour as a kind of rafraîchissement for the audience. In doing so, Mario experimented with blues arrangements, rather than the fuzz tone/buzz saw treatment of the original '80s version. I had my doubts, but it worked and is a groove for us to play again. The ethos of the song speaks for itself and is still a romp for today.

HS: Chris Spedding also plays guitar on this new version. What do you remember about first meeting Chris and hearing his records?

TF: The very first time I encountered Chris was at an art-action happening in New York organized by the Details magazine crowd, or the like. When I entered the space, there he was just standing on top of a pedestal posing in a pink suit. I thought it was so cool. I walked up to the installation and spoke out to him, but was shooed away by other spectators. Prior to that I had seen Chris playing with Robert Gordon on stage in Memphis. I was playing a gig that night down the street at Antenna Club, but I took a few minutes to go watch him. Impressive show and big sound. Everyone was impressed with Chris on his records, on stage, and with his vintage Motorbikin' style. Sometime later he actually showed up at a lead guitar audition for my band at a rehearsal room in the East Village. Turned out he was more interested in producing us than putting together a live show. So of the guitarists who auditioned, Jimmy Ripp got the job.

HS: "Vampire From Havana" has always been one of my favorites of yours. What did you envision for this re-recording? 

TF: This came out of one of those aimless daydreams that assailed me lying on the sofa on long, hot Memphis afternoons. I had the music going in open-D tuning that opened up a deep power bottom to the sound, and the melody just fell in there like a bucket of well water. This is the one tune on the album that adheres more closely to the original version, while the 12-string slide guitar draws one down into the bottomless pit of hysterical bliss paired with the sexual innuendo of Ann Magnuson's vocal improvisations.

HS: What do you remember about re-approaching "The Ballad of Rue De La Lune"?

TF: The approach to re-imaging this song was a matter of sonic refinement and heightening the musical gradients of the most surreal, yet personal ballad in my oeuvre. Lyrics, music, and arrangement are totally of my creation. It is accessible, it is ultra melodic and revealing of dialogue between night two crawlers who meet on backstreets, on back stairs, and in back rooms on the Street Of The Moon in Paris. Like much on this album, it is a night song woven from the spectral pageantry of my existence. Pete Molinari sings beautifully with me in this duet - better and more tuneful than I. Listening to him, I learned more about the song than I knew before, which, I think, speaks to his ability and sensitivity as well as to the depth of the song itself.

HS: Much of Desire on Ice was recorded at Sam Phillips Recording Services in Memphis. What was it like to return to that space, given your long connection to the city's history? Also when did you return to Memphis to record? 

TF: Phillips studio has become our recording home. My first sessions were held there with Stan Kessler producing. After tracking a few numbers, Mr. Kessler proclaimed, "these boys don't play in meter." As right as he was, Alex Chilton packed up and moved the sessions for Behind The Magnolia Curtain up the street to another studio where we took over the proceedings and held the recording engineer captive. Yet, again and again I went back to record at Phillips. Now I cannot imagine recording anywhere else. At Phillips there's always room to experiment, to innovate, and to incubate your ideas. Most of what's good that comes out that room for us, comes from working it out on the studio floor, rather than in rehearsal. In spite of the mixing board at Phillips' studio, well known as infested with restless errant ghosts, the engineering prowess of Scott Bomar, studio manager & SMPTE Academy Award winner, prevailed in overcoming the challenges of resolving the wildly disparate recordings he'd received from participants around the world. Also as one of the Panther Burns bass players, he understands how to handle our music. It's a dirty job, but somebody's got to do it. After 18 months flogging the project, Scott finished his tone painting and dispatched the masters to Org Music, our label home in LA. As for returning to Memphis itself, going back felt like I'd never left. There is something immutable about the Bluff City overhanging the Mississippi River. There's a feeling that things never change, and much does not change, but incrementally there is decay as the leaves are swept away, there is freshness in the forests that comes and goes, and the majesty of the river knows no bounds as it twists and heaves and contorts under the city as it's rolling by on its path down to the gulf. One thing is for sure, there will always be someone drunk on Saturday night crying the blues in an alley behind Beale St., and there will always be somebody new coming along in Memphis singing & playing & dancing & acting like have never been done before. Memphis is a drum beat that shakes the ground. Nashville is a tune that's picked on a wire.

HS: Your work has always crossed between music, film, and performance art. What role does filmmaking still play in your creative life today, and how do you see it in dialogue with Desire on Ice?

TF: Whether in writing, music, or film, I sing only one song... for I have but one persona. It is the secret eye of the persona that matters, and that's all that really interests people in an artist. The themes, the narratives, the abstractions, the psychic thrusts are all a product of that secret eye. There is little separation between the making of film and making an album like this one. Thematically, no differences. Materially, somewhat different. Both, in my hands, are cinematic. Silent film for me, is visual music, while music itself – when you close your eyes – is filmic. Silent films are what I make, but with disembodied sound.

HS: You've described The Urania Trilogy as exploring myth, memory, and identity through dreamlike structures. How do those themes connect to your larger body of work both in film and in music?

TF: In music, my thought and creative impulse are cinematic – all about the image conjured from dark waters. In film, my motive is musical in rhythm/cadence; melody/narrative; lyric/meter; time/space. No separation, unless one follows a psychological/literary approach, and I have little inclination for that, which is more suited to books of fiction. In my music/film work, myth is the core dynamic. Mythic archetypal specters that rampage across collective generational memory from antiquity onward. It is a Tarot deck of symbolic glyphs that inform our identities and motives, and that sculpt our masks, and fire our poetic furor.

HS: The Urania Trilogy has been revised with new edits, a remixed soundtrack, and monochrome tints drawn from early cinema. What led you to return and rework the film, and what do you feel these changes reveal that wasn’t present before?

TF: As if the lost decade devoted to the making of this troika of intrigue films weren't enough, there came a point when it was not enough. Preview screenings last year in capitols of America and Europe proved that. Although I was not expecting it, watching the movie projected on theater screens with pro sound reinforcement revealed how I might improve the flow and especially the erratic audio levels and tonal quality. I had to admit that the movie was still inchoate and that I must address these issues. Realize that after the filming was done, and the line drawn that it was in fact done, I was challenged beyond my abilities in patching together the hand-processed fragments of 16mm film that survived the production phase. Not all scenes were intact! The audio was a nightmare – much of it recorded with bizarre distortion, and many of the tracks contained only the sound of the clapper, nothing more.  What should have been an editorial job turned into a massive restoration task. Dialogue had to be dubbed, background sound and ambiance had to constructed, I had to undergo weeks of self-tutorials online to learn how to achieve filmily what I did not how to do. I learned how to EQ and to normalize the soundtrack according to three accepted standards for cinema, TV, and for online. Along the way, I discovered how most early silent films were not released in black & white at all. Instead those film were tinted according to special processes. Over time either those tints faded away, or when the film negatives were reprinted later, the projection copy was printed black & white. In German, the tint process is called Viragierung. The new and definitive version of The Urania Trilogy is truncated  to 129 minutes, and each of the three parts are now tinted: Yellow - deceit / Rose - passion / Blue – intuition.

HS: Some of my favorite film work of yours online is that footage of RL Burnside and the "Memphis Antics" featuring Alex [Chilton]. What do you remember about filming those two? 

TF: "Honky Tonk." All night at The Brotherhood Sportman's Club of RL Burnside situated in the brushy environs of Como, Mississippi. This was a TeleVista art-action video group hand-held capture of trance blues artist Burnside playing before his secular 'church' of cotton patch socialite dancers, bootleggers, and crap shooters. No separation between the subjects and their community. One without the other is as hollow as popping a camera on a tripod before placing a dude picking guitar on a front porch backdrop. TeleVista was full-on cinema verité = no narration, no editing (other than technical), everything done in camera.

More from my first book, Ghosts Behind the Sun: Splendor, Enigma & Death: Mondo Memphis Volume 1:

Once I was introduced to the charismatic, magical individual known as Rural Burnside in the

backwoods of Panola county in north Mississippi, and I heard his haunting, trance-dirge guitar and filmed him through an interminable night in his honky tonk, I fell then completely under the spell of his snaking, swamp infested rhythms. I had never heard anything quite like these darkly melodious strains of erotic yearning and torment that seemed to flow effortlessly from his body and from his battered, de-tuned electric guitar. His honky tonk was a secular church. Sharecroppers and their women came there for serious merrymaking, for the voluptuous guitar sounds, and howling vociferation as heard from the seemingly farthest reaches and corners of hell itself. Tenant farmers and tractor drivers came for the camaraderie, for the chicken frying all night in an iron skillet, for the endless cases of cold Schlitz, and they came for miles around to wager on the vagaries of tumbling dice shaking in a leather dice horn, and for the girls working the back room. At some point during this period I began to see no separation between what was in front of the camera and what was behind it... between being behind the camera and being in front of it, no separation between the observer and the observed.

"Memphis Antics" is a piece shot on the Porta-Pak open-reel, black & white video camera of TeleVista (not long before Bluff City Electronics re-possessed for non-payment). It's a party (also in my psychogeography book on Memphis) happening in my hovel on Cox St. where the bass player of an all girl-group called The KLITZ, happened to be hanging out. She called Alex on my telephone, and during their conversation he heard in the background my playing a raw electric blues fugue on $5 Silvertone guitar I'd bought off a neighbor. It had a little loud speaker built into the body. Within the hour, Alex had found his way over to our party. Alex was amusing because he played guitar effortlessly and had fun singing songs like put-on charades. In his hands, golden tones poured out from my Silvertone, He had long sturdy fingers like Chuck Berry’s and he could nail down power chords the same as Chuck when I saw him play up close once in Arkansas. Right in the face Alex looked like a cross between the actors Robert Morse and Marlon Brando. With the Silvertone hung around his neck and my motorcycle goggles over his eyes, he sang a ludicrously interminable version of "96 Tears" by Question Mark and the Mysterians We made impromptu videos with the TeleVista camera that first night as the party and the sing-along of the celebrants raved on until the wee hours.

HS: What do you still treasure from your time working with Charlie Feathers? 

TF: The TeleVista camera opened many doors, and that's how I met Charlie Feathers – behind the lens stage-side when he was performing on a SUN records all-star bill at an open air show downtown. Soon I was visiting Charlie in the mornings at his house out on Lamar Ave. behind the Rebel Inn after his wife Rosemary had trundled off to work in a factory. Charlie stayed at home picking his Martin guitar and smoking Viceroys. We ate cat head biscuits Rosemary had left for us on the oven grate, while Charlie played tapes he was 'studying' on his 8-track cassette machine. Not only was his 3-octave vocal impressive, but he was the innovator of the hiccup-style vocal that was imitated by the best from Elvis to Lux Interior. I theorize he developed this hiccup from his practice of imitating bird calls and the vocal sounds of animals in the forests at which he was a master. Charlie was fiercely independent – the embodiment of the robust individual. He knew what his music should be and exactly how it should sound – stone rockabilly, which I have no doubt in my mind that he invented single-handedly. His legacy I always carry with me is, "Tav, if you're not doing something different, you're doing nothing at all."

HS: Across your career you've built an entire world from The Panther Burns to your film work and performances. With Desire on Ice, what do you feel you’re saying about where you are now, and where you’d like your work to head?

TF: The Desire On Ice album is more than a career bookmark. It is a pivotal threshold – a gateway to conscious refinement, composure, and savoir faire. My work as a deconstructivist has now reached such an extreme, that it has come full circle into the realm of consummation, of fabrication, and is no longer a process of shredding genres and patching together Frankensteins. Known for art-damage, I had to decorticate what went before me, so I could reconstruct all that in real time. Where it takes me and my comrades-in-arms into the future, is anyone's guess. Yet one thing is for sure, further exploration of the Orphic Mysteries will be a crucial part of that.

HS: Looking back on your years in Memphis, what do you carry most strongly from that time into your art today?

TF: After his tenure over the past 9-years living in Memphis, Mario can answer this question for us both.

MM: Memphis has the natural capability to attract different cultures, blend them, put them together to create something that it’s very unique. When that something unique comes out from the roots it’ll never go away, it’ll remain inside and outside of your persona. That’s what happened with rock’n’roll, Elvis and all the Sun Records artists, as well as Stax Records artists, Blues artists, and creative artists like Tav. Memphis gets in your persona without making you realize that is happening. It’s a sort of good "contamination." Tav has been all over the world but the Memphis brand is always around him, inside of him, and I can tell that he has contaminated me; Memphis has contaminated me. Now that I’m about to move to Nashville after being for 9 years in the Bluff City, I feel like I’m packing some Memphis vibes to carry with me into my next chapter. We can be wanderers, but the southern vibe of Memphis will always sound wherever we stroll.

HS: What's next after Desire on Ice?

TF: More than likely a screenplay for the next movie, but I have to approach that obliquely. Meanwhile, I intend to publish three (3) books of photography. Two (2) more books to follow my first one of early work, An Iconography of Chance: 99 Photographs of the Evanescent South. 

Desire on Ice is out now on Org Music and Frenzi Records.