Terry Allen: Juarez

Acknowledgments

The path that Allen chose was even wilier [than his country music contemporaries]: smuggling his outsider storytelling into the art world, leaning on his gnawing Texas twang to ground his imaginings in an uncivilized landscape. With Juarez, Allen conjures a still-Wild West, at once romantic and grotesque, nourishing and mystical…. It’s a dialogue between the freedom to move, to flee, to choose one’s destination, and the power to dominate — or the powerlessness of being dominated. The juxtaposition of such notions makes human agency feel vital, tenuous and jealously guarded indeed. The fact that Allen isn’t the least bit hung up on being linear or realistic in his telling of these tales make them all the more riveting. 

– Jewly Hight, NPR Music’s Songs We Love

A singular moment in the history of country music [and] one of the most singular and underrated works in the history of US conceptual art. Lubbock (on everything) and Juarez are restless travelogues, songs of feeling out of place and in search of home. 

– Dan Fox, Frieze

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

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

Grim, funny, epic and intimate all at once, Juarez belongs in a genre unto itself … timeless. His catalog, reaching back to 1975’s Juarez, has been uniformly eccentric and uncompromising, savage and beautiful, literate and guttural.

– Rolling Stone

9/10. A lovingly remastered version of the nebulous country classic. This riveting artifact, now with Allen’s original artwork and extensive booklet, only improves with age. A thing of intense beauty… 

– Rob Hughes, Uncut

Juarez is a remarkable album in every sense… a beautiful package.

– Garth Cartwright, The Guardian

Terry Allen’s Juarez is a cornerstone work of Americana. Drawing on elements of Tex-Mex and norteno music, and delivered by Allen with a wild, lonesome spirit, it’s like an American offshoot of the Mexican narco-corrido tradition. It’s a fascinating oddity streaked with sex, violence and sorrow, a sort of seedcorn of the Robert Rodriguez aesthetic, presented complete with the lithographs that accompanied the original.

– Andy Gill, The Independent

8.0. Juarez retains its kick 40 years on. What stands out in revisiting it now is the stunning poetry of the lines themselves … [which] quiver with a raw vision rarely heard in folk or country. While Juarez has been reissued a few times over the decades, only with Paradise of Bachelors’ deluxe new reissue are Allen’s peculiar visuals again wedded with the music.

– Andy Beta, Pitchfork

One of the great conceptual masterpieces of Americana and the source text of almost everything the outlaw country star and master surrealist has done since. 

– The Wire

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 masterpiece, one of the great songwriter records. It stands equal with classics like Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks and Newman’s Good Old Boys, and it stands equal (or above) any made in the decades since.

– Dave Alvin

The single greatest concept album of all time… Juarez is an experience, one that can break your heart with the sweetness of “What of Alicia” or “Dogwood” or put the sting of whiskey in the back of your throat with the hard, crass thumping of “Border Palace” or “There Outta Be a Law Against Sunny Southern California”. This little-known Terry Allen album deserves a larger audience, a new and much bigger set of listeners to puzzle over this eccentric classic.

– PopMatters

Grounding high art. Every sound and insinuation on this 1975 recording is the farthest point from passive and will stay with you like a tattoo. The music and performances (bad-ass piano playing, slide guitar, and a voice that you’d better take seriously or else) on this work are only to be experienced and not explained.

– Richard Buckner

One of the more fascinating country albums of its time, like Willie Nelson’s Red Headed Stranger as reimagined by Tarantino. There may be no greater maverick than Terry Allen in all of country music from the mid-’70s onward. 

– AllMusic

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 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

Seminal 70s recordings Juarez and Lubbock (On Everything) are resolute, meant to be absorbed in their entirety. With humor and a gift for songwriting, each finds Allen subtly giving the middle finger to any and all expectations of what Country is or should be… Very few concept albums drum up and maintain the sincerity and reverence that Juarez encapsulates. 

– Aquarium Drunkard

Not quite country and not quite rock, the music of Juarez is as unique as the man himself. Allen’s voice is incredible; he shifts from mellow Texas drawl—a more nasal Randy Newman—to bloodcurdling intensity from line to line. Against the darkness of the material, Allen’s singing and songcraft manage to convey humor and warmth, elevating the story and music out of the realm of pulp.

– Clinton Krute, BOMB Magazine

4 stars. This is barrio poetry writ widescreen … an atmosphere where Randy Newman’s Good Old Boys meets Dylan’s Desire, with Cormac McCarthy buying shots. Repeated listens will quickly have Juarez clawing at the brain and the heart. Here finally is a soundtrack for an imaginary film where your imagination is allowed to run wild in the borders between myth and reality. 

– Mike Goldsmith, Record Collector Magazine

A vortex of sex and violence.

– David Byrne

The songs are vivid, desperate, poetic, and brutal, like the anti-Randy Newman.

– MOJO

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

Throw Lynch’s violent masterworks Blue Velvet and Wild at Heart in a blender with Burroughs’s Naked Lunch and Bowles’s The Sheltering Sky, and you’re getting warm.

– Houston Press

A. His music defies easy categorization, as it uses his home state of Texas and the American West as a canvas to explore the drama and humor of existence. Juarez endures as one of the great concept albums and underlines Allen’s value as a true original.

– Joseph, Neff The Vinyl District

Juarez continues to sounds fresh and contemporary today. His ability to spin a memorable yarn that continues to echo in the mind long after it’s gone can leave one mute with admiration. Terry Allen is a fucking genius.

– The Big Takeover

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

– Guy Clark

People tell me it’s country music, and I ask, “which country?”

– Terry Allen