TERRY ALLEN
Book excerpt by Brendan Greaves
Intro by Jason Gross
(June 2024)
My history with singer/songwriter/sculptor/painter/multi-media artist Terry Allen goes back to the early '80's when I picked up his second album Lubbock (On Everything) a few years after it came out on his own label. Throughout the double album, he created tales and personas of his Texas locale with unique humor and smarts. After gobbling up subsequent underrated albums like Bloodlines and Smoking the Dummy, I finally got the chance to speak to Allen in the late '90's for an interview where he talked about everything from his upbringing to his then-latest projects.
The thing is, at that time, there wasn't a hell of a lot about Allen online or much about many indie artists online in the pre-millennium days. PSF would get all kinds of emails asking about Terry's catalog and when he was touring, all of which we'd direct to his label then, Sugar Hill Records. We even got an email from David Soul of Starsky & Hutch fame, who knew Terry long ago and had the original manuscript of Juarez, Allen's long-running art-project and would-be stage play and his first album. Soul had a detailed idea about how to turn it into a stage play, as he detailed here in 2006:
"I did try desperately, back in the 70's, to place JUAREZ as a film. We did spend some really good times together. We were both kids then and didn't understand the business. Sadly, Terry and I have lost touch over the years ... but I still covet his passion along with my vinyl recording of JUAREZ and I now, lo these 30 years that have passed, I still think JUAREZ would make a brilliant stage play and film. I am living in London for the past 11 years and have been doing a lot of theatre here ... as actor, producer and director ... fringe, tours and the West End ... having just starred in both JERRY SPRINGER, THE OPERA and MACK & MABEL... This production can and should be mounted for the stage ... using film and video techniques integrated with story, characters, staging, words and music. I used the same concept for Sam Sheperd's FOOL FOR LOVE, which I directed and it worked a charm."
I did forward this on, but having been burned on the prospect before, Allen was only interested in getting back the manuscript, which never happened before Soul died early this year.
A happier event happened early this year when Truckload of Art was published. Here was the first authorized bio of Allen and his work, done by one of his collaborators, author/label head Brendan Greaves. Crafted through many interviews with Allen, his family, his friends and other artists, the book not only tells the story extensively but also insightfully.
After many emails with Graves, discussing the contents and ideas for excerpts, including the insane story of how the Juarez album came to be and details of later-day albums, I kept coming back to Lubbock (On Everything), not just because I still loved the album so much but also because the book pours over its history and behind-the-scenes creation and also provides some very illuminating thoughts on its contents, as you'll see in the excerpt below. And though Allen still has no intention of staging Juarez (as Graves details, "Allen doesn't consider them real people, but rather climates or energies, so the idea of fixing characters to faces feels wrong to him"), as you'll see here, there's a great case to be made for the second album being staged instead.
Also, see more about Terry Allen at the Paradise of Bachelors website and the La Louver website and also see Brendan Greaves' website
The original Panhandle Mystery Band at Caldwell Studios, summer of 1978: Kenny Maines, Lloyd Maines, Terry, and Curtis McBride. ("The Only Mountain in Lubbock" looms to the right.) Courtesy of Terry and Jo Harvey Allen.
Terry's tooled-leather portfolio, floridly inscribed as "The Terry Allen Silver Dollar Songbook," mapped the album's symmetrical structure of song groupings: exploring Lubbock through landscape and portrait songs, on the first vinyl side; on the second, critiquing the art world; and then, following an intermission of comical songs related to food, drink, and drugs, concluding side three with two songs about war. The fourth side lands squarely on the back of Terry's head, with the final four deeply personal autobiographical songs.
The blistering road-holler "Amarillo Highway (for Dave Hickey)" kicks off Lubbock with a faux-macho character study, an unreliable local narrator. The album version of the song serves as a self-conscious parody of the "outlaw" image and swaggering honky-stomp sound then being peddled by Waylon, Willie, Billy Joe, Tompall Glaser, and company. It constitutes a playful burlesque of male Texan bravado and machismo, its posturing and its props, with an arch wink that many contemporary listeners continue to miss.
The night they recorded an accelerated final take of "New Delhi Freight Train" was particularly memorable for Terry: "Everybody was in an anxious, elevated state, I remember, trying not to blow it. It became the longest track on the record, and we just kept playing it, because we liked what was happening so much. You can hear me laughing all over the end; I was lost in it." It is not the only song that articulates the passing of time by manipulating the structure, tempo, and duration of the performance itself. "The Wolfman of Del Rio" tracks the two characters' voyage into adulthood and the maw of nostalgia by transitioning to a completely different chord progression three minutes in. The final verse's harmonic changes mirror the characters' changes, as "they circle one another / armed with the lives from their past." "For a long time I thought the coda at the end of the song was another song entirely," Allen reflected. "It wasn't until on a random fluke I put them together that I realized, now it's a song." On "The Girl Who Danced Oklahoma," a dilatory bridge marks the march of years with an extended two-chord vamp, an instrumental ellipsis so hiccupingly repetitive it might almost be mistaken for a skipping record instead of a segue:
"The Girl Who Danced Oklahoma" was about time, what time does to people. I think it's also about nerve, about the courage to go somewhere else, to be someone else. . . . There are those long repetitious chords that happen between the first part of the song and the last part, where at the end of it I say, "And ten years later. . . ." We've actually played that instrumental section for ten, twenty minutes, where everybody takes a ride through time in the middle of it. Then there's this woman who is all different at the end of it . . . a farm girl dancing naked. Free maybe . . . free, but probably crazy too.After his exodus in California, he himself felt "free, but probably crazy too." Lubbock had transformed in the interim, evidently, but so had he:
When I actually got there and recorded, the experience was so amazing for me on every level as far as the musicians and people I met, it changed everything. It really wasn't until we were listening back to the whole record after we'd just mixed it that I realized these songs I had written about that place were actually affectionate toward it and the people there. My feelings about Lubbock were so internally different than the attitude I had been expressing externally. And it was kind of shocking to me, because I suddenly realized how much I actually cared about the place, and how important it was to me and what I did.
In its final form, Lubbock movingly reflects one of the weirdly wrenching (or reassuring) processes of adulthood, the realization that you have been irrevocably shaped by your past, your hometown, and your family, whether you like or it not--no matter how much you might, like Jesse James in "New Delhi Freight Train," "welcome the run from what [you] done"--and that you can either reconcile with that happy and horrid fact or continue to wriggle strenuously away.
With these twenty-one songs, written more than a thousand miles and half a continent away in California, Terry shifted modes from the sordid, violent mythology of Juarez to piquant prodigal-son satire that perfectly conveys his mordant wit. As Terry told me, revealingly, about songwriting, "If it's not a lie, it's probably satire." Satire and sarcastic humor suffuse West Texan culture, and for Allen, when deployed properly, they provide a standard of aesthetic quality. "I've always thought of the Lubbock songs as mostly satirical," he clarified. Moreover, "I've always thought of pretty much everything good I've ever done, or anybody else has ever done, as satire." The trick to teasing is walking the tightrope between provocation and adoration. It is on his second album where Allen first achieved that precarious counterpoise, which has characterized his career since. It may be satire--at least until the final few songs, which take a turn toward the nakedly personal--but Allen is also deeply compassionate toward his subjects, even when they are ridiculous or pathetic. Especially when they are ridiculous or pathetic--and at their most vulnerable--these all-too-human characters come alive. Lubbock exposes an accidental capitulation to home, to rootedness, and to love.
Jo Harvey and Terry at Caldwell Studios in Lubbock during the recording of Lubbock (On Everything, July 1978. Courtesy of Terry and Jo Harvey Allen.
It's fitting that the penultimate song on the album is Jo Harvey's. Her contributions to Lubbock are undeniable and indelible. She not only sang backup and shot the iconic jacket photos of Don Caldwell's uncle's red vinyl chair--embellished with cartoon cactus, yellow ashtray, and whiskey bottle--and Terry hiding behind his hands, but she effectively single-parented Bukka and Bale while Terry worked in the studio. In the most evocative and beautifully composed photo surviving from the sessions, Jo Harvey leans over a pegboard wall toward the "mountain," captured in mid-coo while Terry snarls in mid-howl over the grand piano. Her lefthand ring finger sports a small inky smudge, easy to miss unless you know what it is--the matching Parisian tornado tattoo that she and Terry share in lieu of wedding rings, an abiding symbol of their devotion, another freak force of nature. Lubbock (on everything) is, among other things, a chronicle of the first two decades of their long love story.
These love songs do not lie. Allen's 1986 sculpture Them Ol' Love Songs Just Keep Commin' On & On & On [sic] is his monument to venerable Lubbock venue the Cotton Club, but the title's sentiment likewise describes Lubbock (on everything) , his labyrinthine memory palace to his hometown. On Lubbock, the satirical impulse never eclipses the humanizing impulse; it is, instead, an engine of empathy. The Great Joe Bob and the narrator of "Oui (a French Song)" both give up their dreams, of football and sculpturing," respectively, for different kinds of prison. While Joe Bob "traded in the pigskin / for the penitentiary," a literal jail, the protagonist of "Oui" wonders if it's true that "it's pathetic / when you give up your aesthetic / for a blue collar job in the factory," a sad assembly-line simulation of sculpture: "puttin' plastic leaves on the plaster palms." Both characters are archetypes, but not stereotypes. Terry is not so much lampooning brutish jocks and depressed struggling artists as he is tapping into the complex circumstances that created and undid them--even when those circumstances may not have been entirely legible to the songwriter at the time: "I have an entire drawer full of clippings people have sent me of the same story as 'The Great Joe Bob'--a football hero robs a liquor store and goes to the pen. There were a couple of specific high school football players that I thought of when I was working on that song, but it's not about the people as much as it's about that circumstance." Similarly, although "Lubbock Woman" later "became almost an iconic character," Terry "wasn't thinking of a particular person or anything when [he] wrote it." She is, notably, one of many strong female characters that inhabit Lubbock. Allen agreed but demurred regarding the significance, explaining that "those are just the people that live in those songs." But even in "The Beautiful Waitress," a song that can elicit cringes from contemporary listeners more sensitive to the pervasiveness of sexual harassment and the toxicity of the male gaze, the subject of the narrator's diner fantasy gets the last and best line. According to Terry, "The spoken part about drawing horses is almost verbatim an exchange I had with a waitress in Fresno."
In the liner notes, Allen dedicates the record to his mother and the memory of his father. He thanks a prodigious list of people and places, concluding with gratitude for "Jo Harvey, Bukka & Bale, highways and a flat horizon (best of the best)." But he also includes an unusual epitaph-as-epigraph in the form of three in memoriam curses, or, as he calls them, "the three 'fuck yous,'" memorializing his three departed friends Stanley ("fuck viet nam"), Peter ("fuck hollywood"), and Danny ("fuck bad blood"), damning the causes of their untimely and tragic deaths and providing a key that helps unlock the record's hidden dimensions of grief.
Everything, Lubbockites will tell you--Dallas, Fort Worth, Austin, San Antonio, Marfa, Albuquerque, Santa Fe, Oklahoma City--is about a five-hour drive away. True to its title's winking, extravagant ambition, Lubbock (on everything) not only summons a city on the High Plains but likewise attempts to encompass everything, sublime and banal alike, in a great, untidy embrace: love and heartbreak; marriage and its (dis)contents; family and childhood; driving and travel; the art world and its classist contortions; booze and pills; sports and play; agriculture and foodways; the ambitions, failures, frustrations, and satisfactions of labor and art; crime and war and violence and peace; the mirages of memory; the passing of time; and finally, poignantly, the dissolution and disappearance of the self.
With the album's final movement, its reckoning with identity ends, having come full circle from Amarillo Highway," whose narrator has denied his own humanity with the bravado of nihilist momentum and rejects any hope for salvation or transcendence. He has resigned himself to the vicissitudes of fate, shackled to the midnight road and the five hour intervals between the Hub City and everywhere else. Eighty minutes later, the scouring winds of the Llano Estacado, that echoless void of home and horizon, have abraded that machismo to reveal the unguarded vulnerability of "I Just Left Myself," whose narrator finally achieves an escape from himself--an insubstantial, spectral self that was only ever "a mirror" anyway. "I didn't float," Terry sings, "I didn't fly / I did not transcend," accompanied only by his piano (the rest of the Panhandle Mystery Band has been stripped away too, for the only solo performance on the record). Is this freedom or surrender, apotheosis or oblivion? Terry appraised "I Just Left Myself" as "a cosmic existential joke." Like many of his jokes and his lyrics, it is rendered visible, and risible, only through the context of its darkness--backlit, a constellation perforating the clear night sky over the High Plains, a matrix of pale stars by which to navigate that boundless sea of grass.
