First edition of photographs by Gina Lee, an American poet, journalist, and dancer. This is a road book where the photographer is embedded as a dancer with Tav Falco & Panther Burns, an itinerant rock & roll band adrift on three continents. The camera of Gina Lee reveals undercurrents of timeless mystery hidden within each relentless photograph.
In concert the anthem “Gentleman In Black” takes on a life of its own and shoots off on strangely unexpected tangents, as if the song has its own consciousness and takes the musicians along with it for the ride. And it is a wildly unpredictable ride that careens and twists and turns itself inside out, then lingers suspended on a cosmic rift, and then re-forms and re-launches onward and outward, as if the song could go on forever.
There is Tav Falco, himself: the artist, enigmatic and alchemical. Blazing nonstop in ‘the zone’ — in that mysterious dimension that only musicians go to, his 1963 Höfner guitar magically staying de-tuned throughout and with its onboard, factory fuzz tone wailing.
There are many opportunities within these pages to get carried away in such rhapsodic reveries over these shows where the photographer accompanied the band as Tav’s tango partner. Ever ready to freeze an instant in time with her camera from quiet interludes to those seen peering through the still eye of a storm.
Onstage, backstage, on the road and on the street, these are fleeting moments — a passage through time and witness to each musician and singer in action and in repose. Not only what each photo portrays, but what the pictures collectively suggest, is the notion that Tav Falco and Panther Burns — like their shows, like “Gentlemen and Black” — could go on forever.
