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Performance still from Pedal Steal dance performance at BAM.

Legendary Texan artist Terry Allen occupies a unique position straddling the frontiers of country music and conceptual art; he has worked with everyone from Guy Clark to David Byrne to Lucinda Williams, and his artwork resides in museums worldwide. Allen’s newest release, Pedal Steal + Four Corners was announced in January with the premiere of “Pedal Steal: Chapter 1” from American Songwriter, just a few days ahead of a performance on January 19th by Terry Allen and the Panhandle Mystery Band at the Paramount Theatre in Austin, TX for the third year running. The show received glowing praise from the Austin American Statesman and featured contributions from the aforementioned Byrne, along with Charlie Sexton, Lloyd Maines, and Shannon McNally. Allen also recently returned from the Outlaw Country Cruise, where he performed alongside friends and collaborators like Flatlanders Butch Hancock (who appears on Pedal Steal), Joe Ely (whose wife Sharon Ely appears on Pedal Steal), Steve Earle, Lucinda Williams, and Bobby Bare, all of whom have recorded with Allen and/or covered his songs.

Due for release on March 22nd, 2019 via Paradise of Bachelors, 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.

Listeners can now enjoy the second installment of Pedal Steal, which Allen created as the Bessie Award-winning soundtrack to a dance piece by Margaret Jenkins Dance Co. that premiered at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 1985. Pedal Steal was 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), actor and writer (and Terry’s wife) 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: Chapter 2” features Bobby Keys playing “Sentimental Journey”; salacious, hilarious commentary on motel-room sex from Butch Hancock; more of Allen’s “Billy the Boy” song cycle (a highlight of recent live shows); and disturbing B-movie dialogue about a missing child.

Watch Pedal Steal+Four Corners Unboxing Video

Pedal Steal + Four Corners will be available 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) 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. Roger Corman tried to option the film rights; Jesse Helms tried to ban them; now you can own them!

The five works on Terry Allen’s Pedal Steal + Four Corners were all created during a period of intense, condensed creativity spanning eight years, are all closely related to his interdisciplinary bodies of visual art and performance, and are all set in the American Southwest and West. Like Allen’s songwriting, which only nominally fits within the realm of country music (“Which country?” Terry quips), his work for radio, and his long-form narrative audio recordings more broadly, appropriate the general form and format of the genre, or medium, of popular radio dramas—monologue, dialogue, songs, interstitial instrumentals, and diegetic sound cues within a roughly thirty minute running time—but transform it into something much denser with meaning within a postmodern art context. They prefigure similar podcast experiments by decades.

A Pedal Steal Preview

Dedication to Roxy Gordon & Douglas Kent Hall: Highways, Honky-Tonks, & Cantinas

Pedal Steal + Four Corners is dedicated to Roxy Gordon and Douglas Kent Hall. Choctaw/Assiniboine writer/musician Roxy Gordon recorded voiceover for Allen’s 1985 sculptural installation China Night, pictured here and on the album cover, at the Fresno Art Center. The installation explored the Vietnam War era links between Southwestern American Indian and Southeastern Asian cultures, what Allen called the “Laos/Taos” connection. 

As Terry told us:

“The whole piece was about the Southwest, the aftermath of the American Indians and Hispanics that had gone off to war, courtesy of the USA, to visit their ancient relatives in Vietnam, who had thousands of years before crossed the Bering Strait and come down through the Americas and become what we call Native Americans. So it was like a return home in a perverse way. It was all told through this installation of this quarter-scale adobe rathole bar that I called China Night. There’s a neon sign in the window of the bar that the “K” and the “A” are burned out, so it’s “China Night,” but originally it was “Kachina Night”—kachinas are ghosts, presences of the dead, in Pueblo culture. Then the soundtrack played in the back of it, where it was Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, with the Seven Dwarves as the Vietcong.”

In Fresno, Gordon also reminded Allen of legendary New Mexican pedal steel player Wayne Gailey, who—along with Billy the Kid—inspired the narrative of Pedal Steal, written shortly after the China Night exhibition. 

Photo of Roxy Gordon by Peter O’Brien.

Photographer/writer Douglas Kent Hall (1938–2008) collaborated with Terry Allen on photography expeditions during which they would explore the highways, honky-tonks, & cantinas of New Mexico, West Texas, and Northern Mexico. Hall shot the slides projected on the screen of The Beauty drive-in of the Pedal Steal dance performance by Margaret Jenkins Dance Co. that premiered in 1985 at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. While the original Fate CD release of Pedal Steal/Rollback featured a cover photo of abandoned desert-roadside ice machines by Sharon Ely, the Sugar Hill CD reissue featured a b/w highway photo by Douglas Kent Hall, reproduced on the LP sleeve of our edition.