Chapter 4 of Ross Johnson’s Upcoming Memoir
Spacecase Records is proud to be working with former Alex Chilton/Panther Burns drummer and rock writer Ross Johnson again, this time on his memoirs. Ross is already over 30 chapters in and seemingly everything in his life is covered: growing up in Arkansas in the 1950s, working with Alex Chilton, playing with Charlie and Bubba Feathers, etc. And women. Of course, women have been an obsession of the Baron’s since Eisenhower was in office. Each chapter is a vignette into Ross’s life, and over the course of the next few weeks we’ll be uploading preview chapters. Not only does this take the burden off of me -- I don’t have to produce anything -- but it’s been a joy to read these chapters as Ross completes them. Pending the United States is still functioning, we aim to have Ross’ book out sometime around summer 2019. Steve Hesske and I will be editing; Mor will be laying it out. Anyhow, without further ado -- chapter 4.-Ryan Leach
Days Abroad In 1999 three musician friends who shall remain nameless here (although I am sure you would recognize their names) were asked to do a tour with Tav. They all asked if I thought it would be a good idea to do so. No longer touring but still occasionally recording and playing live with him in Memphis and close environs at the time, I replied that it probably would be a very instructive experience for them all. I said that after completing a Panther Burns tour, any subsequent tour they ever did would be a walk in the park compared to the misery that awaited them on the road with Tav. I did not intend to blame or besmirch Tav with that previous paragraph because after doing a final single with just the two of us for Spacecase in the summer of 2017, we have resolved to just be friends from here on out, a new experience for both of us, believe me. He has a reliable booking agency and several stable touring bands throughout the globe now so a Panther Burns tour can be rigorous these days but certainly not the horror they were in the 1980s and 1990s. In those decades though a Burns tour was usually quite difficult (not always; there were exceptions). I chose not to go on most of them after the first few forays out of town. There just seemed to be a curse of some sort on those tours no matter how hard Tav worked to organize them adequately (and he always did). The general rule of thumb was that the band that began a Panther Burns tour was not the one that finished it. There would always seem to be midnight defections or on-the-road firings with mad scrambles to replace absent members for the rest of the tour. In that regard, Tav was always successful, somehow finding replacements whether they played well on stage or not. Of course, the Burns were never known for being very musical up until recent years. To say that our purpose was to punish audiences as much as to entertain them would be very true. Our first brief tour was a trip to Austin, Texas, in March of 1979 to play a couple of Alex solo dates there. Chris Stamey was flown in from NYC to play bass while Tav, Alex and I drove down from Memphis. On the way there Alex was rolling a joint on a shoe box top when a Texas State Trooper cruiser turned on its flashing lights behind us. I yelled at Alex to dump the contents of the shoe box out the car window while Tav insisted otherwise. Chilton dumped it and the Trooper just issued Tav a verbal warning for speeding. I flew home from the gig rather than ride back with the police magnets that Tav and Alex seemed to be driving together. That heralded the beginning of the touring curse for me. The first night went better than expected musically, I thought. Chris commented that he was surprised that I could actually play somewhat adequately, but he was uneasy and embarrassed to be playing such amateurish noise in public, saying he was trying to get a major label record deal in Manhattan and couldn’t afford to be seen or heard with a group as ugly sounding as we were that night. He did not show up the next night so an audience member subbed on bass briefly until a bouncer ejected him from the stage. Years later while playing with a jazz band at Peter Holsapple’s first wedding in Memphis, Chris told me he spent the next couple of days walking around Austin and sleeping under some bushes until his flight time back to New York. Anything to keep from playing with the Panther Burns. And then there were the two dates opening for the last pitiful version of the Clash in Nashville and Knoxville in the spring of 1984. The audiences in both cities hated us with a passion, booing us throughout our set and pelting us with ice, shoes, cups, coins, cheap jewelry, and even a bra, I believe. It was rather thrilling to be booed at by thousands of people instead of just 50 or 100 people in a club. The band was not getting along well either. Alex insisted on Tav and myself riding with him to Nashville where he delivered a scathing lecture on our inadequacies, both musical and personal. A verbal dressing down from the late Alex Chilton was never a pleasant experience. I can recall most of them; there were several during the twenty years I played with him off and on. The Clash’s management wanted us to open several more dates on their tour, but I absconded once again, choosing to fly back home to work my job as an academic reference librarian. There are plenty more nightmarish tour tales to tell, but I’ll return to the subject a little later in this slim volume.
