PoB Celebrates First Grammy Nomination, for Best Album Notes for Terry Allen’s Pedal Steal + Four Corners.

PoB Celebrates First Grammy Nomination, for Best Album Notes for Terry Allen’s Pedal Steal + Four Corners.

What a surprise (the pleasant kind) to wake up to our first Grammy nomination (Best Album Notes), for our very own Brendan Greaves‘s exhaustive book accompanying Terry Allen‘s Pedal Steal + Four Corners, his collection of radio plays and long-form narrative works. This project was a massive curatorial undertaking for us (the book is 33k words), so this recognition is quite gratifying. Many thanks to the Academy, to our collaborators, in particular Secretly Distribution, Brendan’s editor Sal Borriello at The Reading List and transcriber David Smith, and of course to our friend Terry for entrusting his wild work to us. Gird yourselves for a whole lot more of it.

The thing about a Grammy nomination for Best Album Notes is that, unlike the audio, the notes are only accessible to those who have purchased the album. But we’d like everyone to discover this dimension of Terry’s work, so for a limited time, you can download and read the album book in its entirety HERE, for free, including Brendan’s nominated essay “‘The Radio … and Real Life’: Pedal Steal, Four Corners, and Other Panhandle Mysteries of the Wind.” Though the images are integral to the essay, you can download a text-only version of the book HERE, which is easier to read onscreen.

You can see the list of formidable fellow nominees here.

$14.00 – $34.00

FORMAT

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Or support via: Bandcamp (LP+3CD+book/digital) | Other Options (physical/DL/stream/international)

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DDEM8XBcIV0&list=PLGLGDT-9ZI4K3o6fQg91UksO3eTWt9gBx]

Buy Pedal Steal + Four Corners and Terry’s Other Masterful Albums

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!

: Photo by Pino Bertelli.

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. Raised in Lubbock, Texas, he graduated from Chouinard Art Institute in Los Angeles and has worked as an artist and musician since 1966. He has received numerous awards and honors, including a Guggenheim Fellowship and National Endowment for the Art Fellowships. His work has been shown throughout the United States and internationally, including Documenta and São Paolo, Paris, Sydney and Whitney Biennales and is represented in major private and public collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and The Museum of Modern Art in New York, Hirshhorn Museum in Washington DC, The Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) and L.A. County Museum of Art in Los Angeles, Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego (MCASD) and Houston and Dallas Museums of Fine Art.

Allen has released sixteen albums of original music, including the influential classics Juarez (1975) and Lubbock (on everything) (1979), both reissued in 2016 by Paradise of Bachelors. His most recent and highly acclaimed Paradise of Bachelors reissue of Allen’s theater and radio work is Pedal Steal + Four Corners (2019). His new album Just Like Moby Dick will be released January 2020, also on PoB. Allen has collaborated with David Byrne, Guy Clark, Steve Earle, Joe Ely, Don Everly, Butch Hancock, Bruce Nauman, Jerry Jeff Walker, and Lucinda Williams, and his 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. Terry Allen lives and works in Santa Fe, New Mexico, with his wife, actor and writer Jo Harvey Allen.

: Photo by Todd Wolfson.

Acknowledgments for Pedal Steal + Four Corners

A masterpiece cast on the biggest, blankest drive-in screen you ever didn’t see. As they used to say, the pictures are better on radio, and Allen is the biggest thing there’s ever been in radio pictures. Think Hunter S. Thompson rather than Garrison Keillor. Think Robert Ashley rather than Carla Bley and Paul Haines. If you wanted some kind of working/able comparison, it would have to be Bob Dylan’s Renaldo and Clara. Allen’s aural brilliance is to make narrative resemble music, and to let the music tell the story.

– The Wire

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

It literally jumped to being my favorite record. It’s so far-out, but so fine-tuned at the same time.

– Kurt Vile, Rolling Stone

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

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

Includes numerous moments of that surreal poetic western beauty that epitomises Allen’s finest work, an acid western musical companion to Cormac McCarthy or Jim Jarmusch.

– Uncut

The combined effect here is that of constant movement through lives led in the hinterlands.

– MOJO

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

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

Hear Two Singles from Terry’s Forthcoming Album Just Like Moby Dick

2020 is the Year of the Rat—Papa Rat.

This month, Allen announced his heartbreaking, hilarious new album Just Like Moby Dick—a spiritual successor to his 1979 masterstroke Lubbock (on everything)—out January 24. His first set of new songs since 2013’s Bottom of the World, the album features the full Panhandle Mystery Band, including co-producer Charlie Sexton (Dylan, Bowie, Lucinda) and stunning vocal turns from Shannon McNally, as well as co-writes with Joe Ely, Dave Alvin, and Jo Harvey Allen.