Albums and Artifacts
BIO
Terry Allen is an internationally recognized visual artist and songwriter who occupies an utterly unique position straddling the disparate, and usually distant, worlds of conceptual art and country music. As Ken Johnson has observed in The New York Times, “There is just one person whose art has been seen in highbrow museums around the country and is an inductee of the Buddy Holly Walk of Fame in Lubbock. He is Terry Allen.” For over fifty years Allen has dedicated himself to confounding popular perceptions of contemporary art and country, and the traditional mutual alienation of their respective core audiences. His wide-ranging, border-crossing career reveals important insights about interdisciplinarity and collaboration, bridging and belying the widening divisions that define and distort American culture and politics, now more than ever. As Allen sometimes quips, “People tell me it’s country music, and I ask, ‘Which country?’”
Allen was born in 1943 and raised in Lubbock, Texas, the only child of a professional baseball player turned wrestling and music promoter father and a barrelhouse piano player mother. Over the course of a celebrated career that dates back to his graduation from Chouinard in 1966—spent living and working largely in California, New Mexico, and Texas—Allen has unflinchingly dissected the contested histories and cultural collisions of the American West. His ductile, and often darkly humorous, storytelling, refracted through a multiplicity of media—drawings, prints, sculptures, installations, theater, videos, radio plays, songs, and poetry—both typifies and transcends the limits of traditional narrative structures, demonstrating the mirages and ravages of memory, and the mutability of his American, often specifically Southwestern, mythologies. All of Allen’s most ambitious works—among them JUAREZ (since 1968), RING (1976–80), Anterabbit/Bleeder (1982–90), YOUTH IN ASIA (1982-92), DUGOUT (1993–2004), Ghost Ship Rodez (2007–10), and MemWars (ongoing since 2016)—incorporate visuals, performance, and music in various permutations.
ART
Allen’s art resides in the collections of the Met, MoMA, the Hirshhorn, MoCA Los Angeles, and LACMA and has been exhibited at Documenta and the São Paolo, Paris, Sydney, and Whitney Biennials. You can encounter his wry public art commissions across the US. He is the recipient of Guggenheim, NEA, and US Artists fellowships and numerous other awards. His art has been acclaimed by Artforum, Frieze, NY Times, LA Times, The New Yorker, and ArtNews. He has frequently worked closely with his wife of nearly sixty years, the actor, writer, and artist Jo Harvey Allen, and has likewise collaborated on projects with Bruce Nauman, Margaret Jenkins, and Al Ruppersberg, among others.
MUSIC
As a musician Allen has released more than a dozen albums, including the cinematic masterpiece Juarez (1975) and Lubbock (on everything) (1979), often cited as one of the most influential country albums ever. He has collaborated with David Byrne, Guy Clark, Steve Earle, Joe Ely, Don Everly, Butch Hancock, Jerry Jeff Walker, and Lucinda Williams, and his haunting and hilarious songs have been covered and championed by the likes of Bobby Bare, Ryan Bingham, Richard Buckner, Jason Isbell, Little Feat, Sturgill Simpson, and Kurt Vile.
Widely celebrated as a masterpiece—arguably the greatest concept albums of all time—his spare, haunting 1975 debut LP Juarez is a violent, fractured tale of the chthonic American Southwest and borderlands. Produced in collaboration with the artist and meticulously remastered from the original analog tapes, our 2016 reissue is the definitive edition of the art-country classic: the first reissue on vinyl; the first to feature the originally intended artwork (including the art prints that accompanied the first edition); and the first to contextualize the album within Allen’s fifty-year art practice. The deluxe LP package includes a tip-on gatefold jacket, printed inner sleeve, download code, and 24 pp. book with related artwork, lyrics, and essays by Dave Hickey, Dave Alvin, and PoB. The CD edition features replica jacket, inner sleeve, and a tipped-in 48 pp. book.
Allen’s deeply moving (and hilarious) critically acclaimed satirical second album Lubbock (on everything) (1979), a complex memory palace to his West Texas hometown, is often cited as the urtext of alt-country, one of the most important and influential country records of all time. Produced in collaboration with the artist and meticulously remastered from the original analog tapes, this is likewise the definitive edition: the first to correct the tape speed inconsistencies evident on all prior versions; the first U.S. vinyl reissue; the first CD to restore the full track listing; and the first to contextualize the record within Allen’s career. The deluxe 2×LP package includes a tip-on gatefold jacket with lyrics, printed inner sleeves, download code, and 28 pp. book with related artwork and photos, an oral history by Allen, and essays by David Byrne, Lloyd Maines, and PoB. The 2×CD edition features replica jacket, sleeves, and tipped-in 52 pp. book.
Recorded exactly two years after Lubbock (on everything), the feral follow-up Smokin the Dummy (1980) is less conceptually focused but more sonically and stylistically unified than its predecessor—it’s also rougher and rowdier, wilder and more wired, and altogether more menacingly rock and roll. The first album by Allen to share top billing with the Panhandle Mystery Band, here featuring Jesse Taylor on blistering lead guitar alongside the Maines brothers and Richard Bowden, Dummy documents a ferocious new band in fully telepathic, tornado-fueled flight, refining its caliber, increasing its range, and never looking down.
On his manifold fourth album, acclaimed songwriter and visual artist Terry Allen contemplates kinship—the ways sex and violence stitch and sever the ties of family, faith, and society—with skewering satire and affection alike. Bloodlines (1983) compiles thematically related but disparate recordings from miscellaneous sources both theatrical and historical: two songs written for plays; two full-band reprises of selections from Juarez; the irreverent hellfire-hitchhiker-on-highway ballad “Gimme a Ride to Heaven Boy” (featuring Joe Ely); and the poignant eponymous ode to the arteries of ancestry and landscape (the debut recording of eight-year-old Natalie Maines, later covered by Lucinda Williams).
Pedal Steal + Four Corners collects, for the first time, Allen’s radio plays and long-form narrative audio works—two and a half hours of cinematic songs, stories, and country-concrète sound collage—in a deluxe gatefold edition, including one LP, three CDs, a DL code, and an exhaustive 28pp. color booklet boasting the first in-depth essay to explore this singular body of work; dozens of images of Allen’s related visual art; and full scripts and credits for all five pieces (a total of 33k words). Pedal Steal (1985), originally composed as a soundtrack to a dance performance, appears on vinyl for the first time, as well as on CD. Torso Hell (1986), Bleeder (1990), Reunion (a return to Juarez) (1992), and Dugout (1993) comprise the Four Corners suite, radio plays broadcast on NPR and never before released, now spanning two CDs. All audio has been meticulously remastered from the original tapes. Fans of Allen’s violent masterpiece Juarez will find much to love in these haunting Southwestern desert dramas, which feature Jo Harvey Allen, Lloyd Maines, Butch Hancock, Stones saxophonist Bobby Keys, and many others. Roger Corman tried to option the film rights; Jesse Helms tried to ban them; now you can own them!
Allen’s heartbreaking, hilarious new album Just Like Moby Dick, his first set of new songs since 2013’s Bottom of the World, features the full Panhandle Mystery Band, including co-producer Charlie Sexton (Dylan, Bowie, Blaze), Shannon McNally, and Jo Harvey Allen; mainstays Bukka Allen, Richard Bowden, and Lloyd Maines; and co-writes with Joe Ely and Dave Alvin. The connections to Melville’s masterpiece are metaphorical and allusive, as elusive as the White Whale. The masterly spiritual successor to Lubbock (on everything), Just Like Moby Dick casts its net wide for wild stories, depicting, among other monstrous things, Houdini in existential crisis, the death of the last stripper in town, bloodthirsty pirates (in a pseudo-sequel to Brecht and Weill’s “Pirate Jenny”), the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (in the “American Childhood” suite), a vampire-infested circus, mudslides and burning mobile homes, and all manner of tragicomic disasters, abandonments, betrayals, bad memories, failures, and fare-thee-wells.
Videos
News
Truckload of Art: The Life and Work of Terry Allen Publication Day.
Today is the day—Truckload of Art publication day and, aptly,...
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Boogie: Six New Terry Allen Songs + Truckload of Art Book Tour Events.
Truckload of Art: The Life and Work of Terry Allen, the...
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Terry Allen Week in LA: Concerts, Book Events, Art, and More
See Allen's artwork at the Frieze Los Angeles art fair,...
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A Truckload of Terry Allen: Two New EPs, Signed Books, and Tamale Shirts
Preorder Terry Allen's archival Gonna California and Cowboy and the Stranger EPs...
Read MoreLIVE
October 8, 2024 – New York, NY, 6pm, at David Zwirner: Amarillo Highway (for Dave Hickey) — a conversation about Dave Hickey and Terry Allen with Terry, Jarrett Earnest, and Brendan Greaves, featuring a musical performance by Daniel Milewski. This event is free, but capacity is limited. RSVP by emailing events@davidzwirnerbooks.com (there will also be a waiting list).
October 9, 2024 – Brooklyn, NY, 8pm: MemWars + Truckload of Art (Truckload of Art Road Show) live at Brooklyn Music School, featuring full-band performance, reading, discussion with Randy Kennedy, and book signing, presented by Blank Forms (tickets).
October 10, 2024 – Brooklyn, NY, 8pm: Terry Allen and the Panhandle Mystery Band live at Pioneer Works, presented by Blank Forms (tickets).
October 22, 2024 — Santa Fe, NM, 6pm: Truckload of Art Road Show live at SITE Santa Fe, featuring a MemWars duo performance by Terry and Jo Harvey Allen, a book signing, and a discussion with writer, director, and producer Joan Tewkesbury, presented by Collected Works.
October 25, 2024 — Marfa, TX, 6pm: Truckload of Art Road Show live at Crowley Theater, featuring a MemWars duo performance by Terry and Jo Harvey Allen, a book signing, and a discussion, presented by Marfa Book Co. and Webb Gallery.
Acknowledgments
No veteran country songwriter sounds more attuned to the national mood. His songs still feel like little guidebooks for staring down a harsh universe.
– The Washington Post
Mr. Allen’s magic strength is that he can keep two or more big ideas in the air at once, juxtaposing them without explicitly merging them until they kind of belong together: sex and real estate, love and colonization, greed or guilt… He’s pretty close to a master lyricist.
– The New York Times
A reigning deity of a certain kind of country music since the mid-70s.
– The New York Times
It has always been a fool’s errand to frame Allen in terms of other artists—there was nobody like him before he showed up, and the subsequent 40 years have been equally light on plausible peers.
– Uncut
The kind of singular American artist who expresses the fundamental weirdness of his country.
– The Wire
Allen’s songs extract strangeness from the known world and use it as a means of acquiring greater knowledge. This is an old man’s confirmation of a young man’s speculation, which is as good definition of wisdom as any. [Juarez is] a series of beguilingly off-kilter songs about Texas, California, and Mexico, held together by spoken interludes that gave it the feel of a movie.
– The New Yorker
His catalog, reaching back to 1975’s Juarez, has been uniformly eccentric and uncompromising, savage and beautiful, literate and guttural.
– Rolling Stone
Nobody else does country music like Terry Allen… There’s not a wasted word or extraneous musical lick.
– Los Angeles Times
He’s one of the last wild geniuses left who hasn’t been commercialized by the media. For 50 years, he’s sung neo-honky-tonk art songs in a thick-tongued Lubbockian drawl that makes Waylon Jennings sound as patrician as William F. Buckley Jr.
– Observer.com
A true modern day Renaissance man… renowned for his effortless command and outrageous combination of disparate genres and media, according to the task at hand.
– Dave Hickey
There may be no greater maverick than Terry Allen in all of country music from the mid-’70s onward.
– AllMusic
There is just one person whose art has been seen in highbrow museums around the country and is an inductee of the Buddy Holly Walk of Fame in Lubbock, Tex. He is Terry Allen, [and] he favors a style you might call Old West Psychedelic.
– Ken Johnson, New York Times
From football heroes gone wrong to noble floozies to farmers fiddling while Washington burns, he’s a tale-spinning poet of the Panhandle.
–Robert Christgau
Little official country music is this good. The music cranks and lopes along, stops and starts again; there are a lot of holes in it, a high-plains silence that always waits behind the music, as if to tempt Allen into shutting up again.
– Artforum
I love Terry. He’s a funny son of a bitch.
– Guy Clark
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