paste around midtown Memphis. They performed many of these Memphis concerts at local new music dive The Well (later called Antenna Club) with other area bands of the period. They also opened for The Cramps and played double bills with The Gun Club during this period in cities including New Orleans, New York, and Los Angeles. In the early 1980s they performed in an anti-nuclear rally with Allen Ginsberg at The Peppermint Lounge in New York. Reactions to the cacophonous, disjointed, amateurish side of the group's early performances varied from enthusiasm to disparaging ridicule. 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". Behind the Magnolia Curtain, the group's first album, was recorded in 1981 and released on the British Rough Trade Records label in 1982. The album featured on some tracks, including "Bourgeois Blues", an appearance by a small, marching drum corps that included blues artist Jessie Mae Hemphill, who had participated in her grandfather's Northern Mississippi fife-and-drums groups as a child. 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". "We were thrown off quite a few stages during that period", wrote Johnson. "Though we initially enjoyed the effect we had on club audiences, somewhere along the way we tried to clean up our sound". The recording was followed by the slicker rockabilly revival style of Blow Your Top, without Chilton's participation, and in 1984, the Jim Dickinson-produced Sugar Ditch Revisited album was recorded, featuring a more subdued playing style by Chilton along with New Orleans bassist René Coman. That year, following a brief tour opening for The Clash before irritable college audiences impatient for the main act, Chilton stopped touring regularly with the group to resume his increasingly minimalist solo touring and recording career. Chilton's restrained, evolving solo style was beginning to diverge from his previously fiery, strident Panther Burns guitar style that had often featured reverb and feedback; however, he continued to produce several of their later albums. Transition to less primitive performance style Since the more refined productions of Sugar Ditch Revisited and 1987's The World We Knew, the