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It’s Not Only Rock & Roll
The Stones and my cousin Barry
Sometimes you miss things that you actually saw.
For instance, in the spring of 1984, I saw The Clash live in Knoxville, Tennessee. This was after they had split in two, and while I would have loved to see Mick Jones’ Big Audio Dynamite, seeing Joe Strummer’s Clash left me exhausted in a good way, and slightly deaf. It took a few days before the ringing stopped, but it was worth it to have been standing there, pounding my fist into the air with 4000 other fans while Joe screamed out the “London Calling” call to action.
What I missed, though I was there when they played, was the opening band who billed themselves as Panther Burns. Music historian Robert Gordon interviewed PB guitarist Tav Falco and asked about this show:
“It’s the closest I’ve been to a riot…Nashville was pretty rough, but in Knoxville they set us up in front of the curtain, my little four-piece doing this strange blues. Fistfights were breaking out, the audience cursing us. It was university students’ mentality, rednecks for the Clash…Alex was ghostly white, getting whiter. He threw up his hands and then the audience fucking went crazy…” (Memphis Rent Party, Bloomsbury Publishing, 2018, 164).
And then, apparently, they played “Bourgeoise Blues,” a song I didn’t know then and…
