From the crucible of Memphis honky tonks and inelegant dives, Tav Falco\’s Panther Burns reared its flaming, woolly head in 1979. Soon Falco, known then only as the \’Beale Street Blues Bopper\’, led his group of errant electric troubadours into the vortex of New York\’s new wave/no wave anti-art scene. As purveyors of art-damage Dixie-fried style, the group embodied the wreck-a-billy ethos that the New York downtown scene was craving. Excruciating performances around Gotham drew the attention of Geoff Travis, founder of Rough Trade records in London. With the shrewdness of a record entrepreneur with no ear for music, Travis commissioned the first album of Panther Burns.

Drawing from their brutal live set forged in rented cotton lofts on
Front St. and in a country & western joint called The Well. Joining Falco in the core group of Alex Chilton, drummer Ross Johnson (fired during the sessions), contra bassist Ron Miller, and fill-in guitarist Jim Duckworth, were the marching Tate County, Mississippi Fife and Drum Corps of blues cane fife player, Napoleon Strickland. Together they evoked on vinyl the agonizing terror of a feral panther trapped by disgruntled farmers in a stand of wild cane bamboo that the planters\’ posse had set ablaze. The legendary Panther Burned brightly down on Panther Burns Plantation and still does.

When the first album, entitled Behind the Magnolia Curtain, was released in 1980, instantly the bar was lowered for everyone in the music world who was really listening. The 2nd album Blow Your Top was recorded with the group of road warriors that had joined the fold of PANTHER BURNS including New York no wave drummer, Jim Sclavunous. It was a bit of a strange, yet holy alliance formed with one foot on the 4th Chickasaw bluff of the Mississippi River and the other standing at the foot of Grant\’s Tomb. The album was thusly released world-wide in 1983 with the predicted dubious results. However, the movements of the band drew attention from senior critics in the New York Times, landed full page spreads in Andy Warhol\’s Interview Magazine, and sundry publications like the East Village Eye.