Forming just after them in 1979, Panther Burns drew on obscure country blues music, Antonin Artaud's works like The Theatre and Its Double, beat poetry, and Marshall McLuhan's media theories for their early inspiration.

In 1977 and 1979, Alex Chilton, attracted by The Cramps' feral, flamboyant rockabilly style, had brought them to Memphis to record sessions he produced that were later released as Gravest Hits and Songs the Lord Taught Us.

Future Panther Burns drummer Johnson first performed publicly in a group called The Yard Dogs led by Alex Chilton in the summer of 1978; he made his first recording session appearance on Like Flies on Sherbert, drumming and bantering off-the-cuff, comical lyrics to "Baron of Love".

This Chilton album is sometimes panned in retrospective reviews today by writers expecting Big Star's chiming guitars and tight, power pop recordings, but at the time the album came out, it was praised by critic Robert Christgau and was influential among young Memphis alternative musicians breaking out of the late 1970s era of disco music and slick, mainstream radio rock and starting to create their own punk rock/garage music scene unrestrained by industry dogma.

The town, in turn, had taken the name in reference to a wild cat whose raids and nocturnal shrieks had so disturbed area residents in the 19th century that they set a canebrake on fire to keep it at bay after all attempts to trap or kill it had failed; the lore of the elusive animal shaking up a sleepy planters' hamlet appealed to the band.

Falco explained to the disgusted host that the group was merely a "neo-rumorist orchestra" for a TeleVista experiment, creating what he termed an "anti-environment" to make visible cultural treasures and older, local performers overlooked in the daily environment by mainstream society and the establishment.

A screen-print artist since the 1970s, Falco promoted many of the early 1980s local live shows by using hand-screen-printed posters which band members and friends helped him create and paste around midtown Memphis.

In 1980, New Orleans writer Bunny Matthews, explaining that he enjoyed the group's ability to put its audience "through changes", drolly summed up the experience: "No one is ever going to attend a Panther Burns recital and leave with mixed feelings".

The contrast between the strong, military beats of the drum corps dueling with Falco's occasionally out-of-sync vocals resulted in the wild, blues-rock chaos of songs on the album like the frenetic "Bourgeois Blues".

Panther Burns occasionally opened for major punk rock acts in the 1980s, appearing on double bills with some of their older heroes like Cordell Jackson, Jessie Mae Hemphill, and rockabilly great Charlie Feathers in the same time period, but usually headlined its own gigs at small clubs across the U.S., Canada, and Europe.

A 2006 minitour of Europe and the United States featured the main lineup from the previous several years performing with Falco: Roman drummer Giovanna Pizzorno with Parisians Grégoire Cat on guitar and Laurent Lo on bass.

Falco contributed to the varied artists album a liner notes essay and a Panther Burns song called "Real Cool Trash," which The Wire likened to "the rock 'n' roll energy" of The Cramps.

[2] With his signature Höfner fuzz-tone guitar and a stage presence characterized by his Argentine-styled pompadour, pencil moustache, smoking jacket, and urbane manner, Falco infused his shows with theatrical antics and a reverence for the originators of country blues and rockabilly.

In "Panther Phobia Manifesto", Falco referenced lines from influences as disparate as William S. Burroughs, Screamin' Jay Hawkins, Howlin' Wolf, Rod Serling, French psychedelic band The Dum Dum Boys, and Dadaist poet Louis Aragon, in wishing a "huge firedamp explosion" to closed-minded members of society who blindly follow the dictates of the establishment.

Set lists have included mutated covers of songs originally performed by such diverse artists as J. Blackfoot, Doc Pomus, Bobby Lee Trammell, Gene Pitney, Reverend Horton Heat, Jessie Mae Hemphill, R. L. Burnside, Mack Rice, and Allen Page (of the small 1950s Moon Records label helmed by early rock-and-roll producer/songwriter Cordell Jackson), among others.

Media confusion in categorizing led the band to eventually invent its own self-descriptive terms, such as "panther music" and "backwoods ballroom", also at times calling its tumultuous performance style "art damage".