Terry Allen’s “Pedal Steal: Chapter 4,” Texas Record Release Shows, + Radio Premieres.

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The fourth and final installment of Pedal Steal—the stunning conclusion!—has premiered today via Texas Monthly on the eve of the March 22nd release of Pedal Steal + Four Corners by Terry Allen and the Panhandle Mystery Band, who will perform a celebratory Record Release show in Dallas that same night at The Kessler (tickets).

Listen to Chapter 4 of Pedal Steal HERE, or below.

The legendary Texan artist 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 to Bruce Nauman, and his artwork resides in museums worldwide.

Head over to Texas Monthly for an interview with Terry, with a discerning essay by Christian Wallace, and to listen to “Pedal Steal: Chapter 4.”

Terry on radio: “One of the big differences between the kind of prefabricated images on television or in movies and with radio is that with audio, the densest moron can invent an image of what they’re listening to.”

Terry on the border wall: “It’s an obscenity. The idea of building a wall to keep people in or keep people out is moronic.”

“There are before-and-after moments in life; discovering Terry Allen was one of those for me. In the five or so years since my introduction, I’ve learned that you don’t just listen to or look at Allen’s art, you experience it. One of Allen’s most enduring and enigmatic lines, “Today’s rainbow is tomorrow’s tamale,” sounds like something Beckett might’ve written if he’d hung out with goat ropers and dipped snuff. [Pedal Steal + Four Corners] should be consumed whole and with attention, best served with a stretch of dark highway in a vaguely foreboding place.” – Texas Monthly

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—in a LP +3xCD + book set.

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.

Tune into WXYC HERE from 9pm–12am EST today, Thursday, March 21 to hear the entire Pedal Steal + Four Corners set broadcast on-air.

Listen to all available Chapters of “Pedal Steal” via Youtube (where you can also watch an unboxing video) or Spotify.

Terry Allen live appearances:

March 22 Kessler Theater Dallas TX (Record Release Show)

March 30 Cactus Music (1pm Meet & Greet) Houston TX

March 30 The Heights (performance) Houston TX

April 27 Crossroads of Texas Film and Music Festival Waxahachie TX

Dugout Preview

Dugout (1993) is the fifth and final piece on Pedal Steal + Four Corners. His most personal and autobiographical work, DUGOUT is based loosely on the lives on Allen’s father, a retired professional baseball player turned promoter of concerts and wrestling, and his mother, a barrelhouse-style piano player and “the first woman ever to be thrown out of Southern Methodist University in Dallas, for playing jazz with black musicians in Deep Ellum in Dallas.” Allen himself describes the DUGOUT cycle, which includes Dugout the radio play, as “a love story, an investigation into how memory is invented, a kind of supernatural-jazz-sport-history-ghost-blood-fiction that rolls across the late nineteenth century into the mid-twentieth century.”

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All artwork by Allen, from DUGOUT, 2000-2004.

Acclaim for Allen & Pedal Steal + Four Corners

Navajo chants blend into fuzzed-up steel guitar; dirty-realist narratives succumb to skeletal ballads; B-movie dialogue blossoms over a plaintive violin. Pedal Steal represents roots rock’s rarely encountered experimental fringe. – The Times

Terry Allen conjures bodies of work in which the borders between medium and material are blurred and bloodied, stained with memories and stoked by the throttling of life through time. His practice encompasses music, sculpture, video, painting, and theater, resulting in hybrid works that escape familiar categorization. It is the radio, however, that provides the soundtrack to Allen’s mythic Southwest, a wide open imaginary landscape haunted by denizens he describes as “climates” rather than characters. – Aquarium Drunkard

Complete and vibrant, all of these stories draw the listener in so deep they have to fight the urge to duck from a stray bullet or take a shower after a dirty motel room romp.– Houston Press

A+. Pedal Steal +Four Corners takes the idea of abbreviating his body of work to one or a few examples and blows it completely to smithereens. Whether listening at home or perhaps exploring the artist’s belief that the best way to soak all this stuff up is to hear it while out navigating a stretch of the open road, it becomes obvious that as he transcends easy classification, there is no other artist like Terry Allen. Suffice it to say, he’s a long way from outlaw country. – The Vinyl District

Think Sam Shepard with steel guitar, and you’ll get the idea.– The Independent

Allen takes no prisoners, pulls no punches.– Rolling Stone

Allen’s songs extract strangeness from the known world and use it as a means of acquiring greater knowledge.– The New Yorker

He’s pretty close to a master lyricist.– The NY Times

Riveting.– NPR

Singer-songwriter is only a small piece of the 75-year-old’s portfolio. The husband of artist and fellow Lubbock native Jo Harvey, Allen is better known to the art world as a blithely boundary-ignoring sculptor and painter, playwright, and video producer, often incorporating a wide variety of work into major conceptual art installations. And he’s not afraid to get weird.– Texas Highways Magazine

The idiosyncratic Texas songwriter and visual artist’s music pairs with Sam Shepard plays like lime goes with tequila; but the noir-ish radio plays comprising his Four Corners suite are Allen’s own. They’re animated by Allen’s mordant wit, dusty twang, scenic songs, kleptomaniac cattle queens, suicidal musicians, migrants, conmen, pill poppers, prostitutes, wayward sailors, and players including Butch Hancock, Rolling Stones saxophonist Bobby Keys, and inestimable narrator (and 1960s-era KPCC host) Jo Harvey Allen. Poetic aphorisms abound (“All good luck has death in it”) in this two-and-a-half hour package, and it’s all pungently, beautifully weird.– Pasadena Weekly

Conceptual pieces that defy logic, space and time. Tape recordings, spoken-word, distorted guitars, thunderous drum fills and haunting stories await you. These Sam Shepard-like narratives are literally stuff that dreams are made of.– Hub City Spokes

Stunning poetry. The lines themselves quiver with a raw vision rarely heard.– Pitchfork

I love Terry. He’s a funny son of a bitch.– Guy Clark

Rawhide and Roses Radio Show

*Jo Harvey Allen and Terry Allen photographed by Sharon Ely in 1982*

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.