So if it’s too late for me to learn anything from this same ugly 'lesson in life' that I keep repeating over and over to no avail, what can any budding performance junkies or fellow bar band lifers learn from my pitiful tale? Well, a few things, I hope. As with any other disorder, it’s very important to be able to identify the symptoms of the illness. If you find yourself onstage at a tiny toilet club on a Tuesday evening well after midnight and the number of people in your band outnumbers the bar staff and the drunks lingering at tables cuz they’re too sloshed to get up and leave, you might be a performance junkie. If you offer to pay people to play with you at a Sunday night jam session at a local club where no cover charge will be asked for at the door, you might be a performance junkie (and a real dumbass too). If you lose your handshake deal with Long Gone John’s Sympathy For the Record Industry label (the ghetto where most Memphis garage banders of one stripe or another get their start and finish in Obscure Indie Label Land) for reasons of musical ineptitude, bad artwork and the sheer force of your unbearable personality, you might be a performance junkie (and a real jerk to boot since it takes a lot to get kicked off that label, but I managed to achieve that distinction). If you record a track so awful and vile that it gives you a piss shiver to listen to it on playback in the studio and you opt to let the engineer do the final mix just so you won’t have to hear it again, you might be a performance junkie.

Can this illness be cured, treated or managed somehow? Tapering won’t work; that is clear. The only approach that does seem to help is to let the junkie pursue his destructive path to its logical conclusion where even a gig at a nursing home wine & cheese party becomes unobtainable. Typically, performance junkies never know stage fright, but at some point a healthy sense of 'stage shame' may spontaneously appear. One day the junkie wakes up and is simply too embarrassed to set foot on a stage or in a recording studio again. Not unlike the unpredictable, spontaneous remission known as “maturing out” that some heavy narcotics users experience after decades of addiction, embarrassment and humiliation may yet save the day, and enable the PJ to cease his manic music making activities and recover some small measure of fragile sanity. Or, in a final act of self-destruction, the performance junkie books vanity recording time at a local studio (or worse, purchases recording equipment for use in a home studio) to perform original material and then sets up an artist’s website to promote and retail these self-released recordings. Oh yeah, just before the addict implodes he or she will attempt to join NARAS. And that truly is the end.

Since 1978 Mr. Johnson has played and recorded with a host of unique talent. Those he will acknowledge are Alex Chilton, Tav Falco’s Panther Burns, Cordell Jackson, Charlie Feathers, Jessie Mae Hemphill, Mudboy & the Neutrons, the Gibson Brothers, 68 Comeback, Jeffrey Evans, the Young Seniors, and the Ron Franklin Entertainers. He’s still trying to forget the rest (and they him).

EDITOR'S NOTE: I lived in Memphis for several years in the late '70s, and Ross Johnson was one of my best friends. We were the same age, had a mutual best friend (Mark Raney), and very similar tastes in music, films, and humor. Ross had written for Creem magazine in their heyday under a pseudonym, and was one of Lester Bang's original proteges at the magazine. Ross is, I must say, one of the funniest people I've ever met, and smart as a tack, to boot. After the demise of Big Star, Ross drummed with Alex Chilton in one of his first (those who saw them say best) post-Big Star bands, The Yard Dogs. The band more or less morphed into Tav Falco's backing band, Panther Burns -- the classic lineup being Chilton on guitar, Ross standing playing a single snare drum, and Tav singing and playing guitar. You can hear Ross on drums on Chilton's underground classic Like Flies on Sherbert, where he also takes the lead vocal on the classic Elvis death song "Baron of Love, Pt. 2" (on the master tapes was a "Pt. 1" sung by Chilton); his singing credit was omitted because he feared some Memphis Elvis fanatics might do him bodily harm if they heard it.

The local Memphis hipsters at that time (circa '79) used to come to every Panther Burns gig; there weren't many of us, maybe a dozen, most in bands except for myself, Mark, and Dennis McHaney, who often ran the sound board. People who didn't live in Memphis at the time don't really comprehend how very, very few Big Star fans there were in town when the group were actually together. The initial Panther Burns fans were all Big Star fans. Their regular hangout was a former strip joint turned biker bar turned gay club turned c&w joint called The Well, on Madison a few blocks to the west of the 'good' part of the street. Between Ross or Dennis or Randy Chertow (of the late, lamented Randy Band, the unheralded founder of the post-Big Star original music scene that survives to this day in Memphis) working the door, we seldom actually paid to get in. I'm sure I saw Chilton play upwards of 50 times in 1979-1980, before I moved to Austin. A typical crowd was Mark, Dennis, myself, and about five others, including a few neighborhood alkies who'd been there drinking since the morning.

By the early '80s, The Well had become The Antenna Club, and Memphis again had a vital original music scene, and Panther Burns drew large crowds in their own right. But in the '70s, Panther Burns could clear rooms and empty large halls of people more readily than anyone I've heard before or since. Panther Burns could be hilariously funny. Tav in the early days was a modern-day equivalent of The Legendary Stardust Cowboy or Tiny Tim, and a Panther Burns show was more nearly performance art than music. To his credit, tho, it has to be admitted that he rediscovered an enormous amount of very cool regional blues and rockabilly that might well have been lost to time without him, and also to note that he turned a lot of Memphis folks who later themselves would go on to play and write about music into huge rockabilly fans.

Dennis used to tape the gigs, and I've played highlights of them literally hundreds and hundreds of times over the years (and no, don't ask me for copies; won't happen). The best bits were always when Tav was out in the parking lot. Then Alex and Ross would play songs as a duo, and were always entertaining and sometimes, only sometimes, absolutely brilliant, when the alcohol level was just right, and genius shone through. I still treasure the moments (and the friendships, all of which I kept). As Mr. Johnson himself remarked on a particularly lubricated night (when they'd just about emptied the place out): "It cost you three bucks to get in tonight, and five bucks to get out." -- Kent Benjamin, Associate Editor, Pop Culture Press

back to top