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Legendary Texan artist Terry Allen recently spoke with Aquarium Drunkard about his upcoming release, Pedal Steal + Four Corners, and the groundbreaking Rawhide and Roses radio show that he produced, hosted by actor, writer, and longtime collaborator Jo Harvey Allen (who is also his wife of fifty-seven years).

Read the fascinating interview here.

Due for release on March 22nd, 2019, 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 LP + 3xCD + book set.

Today marks the release of the 3rd installment from Pedal Steal, the first long-form narrative recording Allen undertook with the support of the Panhandle Mystery Band (featuring master pedal steel player and producer Lloyd Maines, father of Natalie Maines of the Dixie Chicks), Jo Harvey Allen, and other collaborators including fellow Lubbockites Butch Hancock (of the Flatlanders) and Rolling Stones saxophonist Bobby Keys. The story elides the New Mexican pedal steel guitarist Wayne Gailey and infamous outlaw Billy the Kid into a spectral composite character called Billy the Boy, resurrected by a postmortem chorus in English, Spanish, and Navajo. Pedal Steal was originally composed and recorded as the Bessie Award-winning soundtrack to the eponymous dance piece by Margaret Jenkins Dance Co.

Listen to Chapter 3 of “Pedal Steal” HERE.

Listen to all available Chapters of “Pedal Steal” via Youtube or Spotify.

Rawhide and Roses Radio Show

Jo Harvey and Terry Allen’s Rawhide and Roses radio show aired on Sundays from 1967 to 1971 on the underground station KPPC-FM and AM 106.7, broadcast from the basement of the Pasadena Presbyterian Church (PPC). Terry produced and programmed, while Jo Harvey served as the host, writer, storyteller, and on-air personality; she was the first female country music DJ.

Listen to select Rawhide and Roses shows HERE.

While the jaw harp and fiddle of “They Gotta Quit Kickin’ My Dawg Around” rings out, Jo Harvey speaks, and as always when she talks, you can hear the smile in her voice:

Hi, this is Jo Harvey Allen, bringin’ you a little Rawhide and Roses, right on your corner, left at your heart, and straight on your way home. Rawhide and Roses: sashayin’ and dashayin’, rip-roarin’, wild and woolly, ripe and unpredictable, one hour of the best past, present, and future of pure downhome, honest-to-goodness country music. We’re gonna feature a loosely documented look into the backwater origins of honky-tonk glitter and the Cadillac glamor of the music that makes America home.

The program was documented, but only erratically; these five themed shows and fragments have been edited together from all known surviving tapes, which reside in The Allen Collection of the Texas Tech University archives.

Terry recently spoke with Texas Highways magazine about the archives and much, much more in a recent interview.

Terry Allen live appearances:

March 22 Kessler Theater Dallas TX (Record Release Show)
March 30 The Heights Houston
April 27 Crossroads of Texas Film and Music Festival Waxahachie TX

Torso Hell Preview

Torso Hell—the second piece on our Pedal Steal + Four Corners LP+3CD+book set is a direct and visceral articulation of Allen’s YOUTH IN ASIA body of work (1982–92) and its examinations of the psychological residues and betrayals of the Vietnam War. This “radio movie” about a quadriplegic Vietnam veteran’s torments and revenge shares the extreme violence and sexuality of its pulp inspirations, but presses into the realm of absurdity and metafiction, serving simultaneously as a parody of trashy B horror flicks and ponderous Hollywood Vietnam movies and as a vicious commentary on war and its endless rhetorical wake, the ways we abuse, exploit, and ignore our veterans while spouting inane pieties about honor, service, and patriotism.

L-R: 1987 Cassette release by High Performance magazine feat. Terry’s “Mickey Bob Death” (1986); “Station Break” (1986); “Treatment (Angel with dirty tracks)” (1988); “Big Witness (living in wishes)” (1988)

Bleeder Preview

Bleeder (1990) is the third tale on Pedal Steal + Four Corners. Allen’s Anterabbit/Bleeder (a biography) cycle (1982–90) deploys fact and fiction, drawn partly from the life a hemophiliac childhood friend, to explore the very nature of biography and history, the ways our language and memories fail and fool us with their feeble reenactments and fractured transmissions of the past filtered through our myopic present. Memories are hemorrhages, Bleeder suggests, that stain our speech, our stories, and our mark-making with Rorschach bruises of untruths, exaggerations, and fantasies. Once again, Jo Harvey Allen, pictured here in stills (along with related two-dimensional works), starred in both the theater piece and radio play. .

Reunion (a return to Juarez) Preview

Ostensibly the “simple story” of the fateful but arbitrary murder, in a “small, rundown mountain trailer” in Cortez, Colorado, of Navy boy Sailor and his new bride, the Tijuana prostitute Spanish Alice at the hands of Juarez-born pachuco Jabo and his LA girlfriend, the “rock writer” and bruja Chic Blundie, the narrative of Allen’s iterative JUAREZ cycle (1968–present) spirals outward, and inward, recursively through a palimpsest of possibilities, a constellation of connections. Reunion (return to Juarez) offers a retelling of the tale, deployed both as a radio play and as the soundtrack for the sculptural installation a simple story (Juarez) (1992), exhibited at the Wexner Center for the Arts, but originally conceived as stage set studies for a Juarez musical, co-written with David Byrne but never produced.

All works pictured by Allen, 1970s-1990s. .