In early 1979, Alex Chilton formed the Panther Burns with Tav Falco. Chilton was nearly a decade removed from his stint as lead singer in the Top 40 band the Box Tops and almost five years from his last recordings with Big Star, the pop band whose work had sparked a legion of dedicated followers. Over those five years, Chilton had begun his definitive move away from everything he’d done before. He made two solo records that had grown deliberately more simple and primal, crossing rockabilly with outrage, and he’d then moved himself behind the scenes to produce the first singles of the band the Cramps, rockabilly revolutionaries of an even more primitive sort. With his next project, the Panther Burns, Chilton found his least refined band to date and again pushed himself seemingly out of the spotlight, this time in the role of the guitar sideman. Yet he appeared to still have a great hand in the band’s direction. The Panther Burns had started almost as an art project, but a year later they had evolved into a rock ‘n’ roll dance band. They were like no other dance band around.

Jim Duckworth, a jazz guitarist who would soon join the band on drums, saw them for the first time in December 1980. “I’m walking down the street, I’m not even at the club yet,” Duckworth says, “and all I can hear—they’re on stage playing, and it’s in between numbers—but all I could hear was this shrieking, screaming feedback. Not your Jeff Beck-style feedback… more the guitar’s too close to an overpowered amp, shrieking feedback. It was that Metal Machine Music [Lou Reed’s 1975 experiment-in-noise record] on crack sort of thing… They had a synthesizer player. He had no conception of what they were doing. He played between tunes, during the tunes; it was all the same to him. They were doing this back-to-basics roots-rock thing and it was hilarious. It was the funniest fuckin’ show you ever saw. It was loose and it was raw and it really worked. When those guys were on, it was a beautiful thing.” read more