Terry Allen and the Panhandle Mystery Band: Smokin the Dummy

$3.00$35.00

Recorded exactly two years after acclaimed visual artist and songwriter Terry Allen’s masterpiece Lubbock (on everything), the feral follow-up Smokin the Dummy is less conceptually focused but more sonically and stylistically unified than its predecessor—it’s also rougher and rowdier, wilder and more wired, and altogether more menacingly rock and roll. The first album by Allen to share top billing with the Panhandle Mystery Band, here featuring Jesse Taylor on blistering lead guitar alongside the Maines brothers and Richard Bowden, Dummy documents a ferocious new band in fully telepathic, tornado-fueled flight, refining its caliber, increasing its range, and never looking down. 

Recorded exactly two years after acclaimed visual artist and songwriter Terry Allen’s masterpiece Lubbock (on everything), the feral follow-up Smokin the Dummy is less conceptually focused but more sonically and stylistically unified than its predecessor—it’s also rougher and rowdier, wilder and more wired, and altogether more menacingly rock and roll. The first album by Allen to share top billing with the Panhandle Mystery Band, here featuring Jesse Taylor on blistering lead guitar alongside the Maines brothers and Richard Bowden, Dummy documents a ferocious new band in fully telepathic, tornado-fueled flight, refining its caliber, increasing its range, and never looking down. 

 

 

Highlights

  • The first-ever vinyl reissue of the feral 1980 follow-up to Lubbock (on everything), remastered from the original analog tapes. Unlike previous editions, the CD restores the original unabridged track list.
  • Deluxe LP edition features 140g virgin vinyl; a gatefold jacket and inner sleeve with restored, new, and alternate art and photos by Terry and Jo Harvey Allen; an insert with lyrics, original notes, and Terry’s letter to H.C. Westermann about the songs; and a high-res download code.
  • Deluxe CD edition features a trifold jacket and inner sleeve with original notes and restored, new, and alternate art and photos by Terry and Jo Harvey Allen; and a six-panel insert with lyrics and Terry’s letter to H.C. Westermann about the songs.
  • RIYL: Dave Alvin, Ryan Bingham, Bobby Bare, David Byrne, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, the Chicks, Guy Clark, Leonard Cohen, Bob Dylan, Steve Earle, Joe Ely, Little Feat, The Flatlanders, Blaze Foley, Jimmie Dale Gilmore, Butch Hancock, Jason Isbell, Robert Earl Keen, Kris Kristofferson, Lloyd Maines, Willie Nelson, Randy Newman, John Prine, Doug Sahm, Charlie Sexton, Bill Joe Shaver, Silver Jews/Purple Mountains, Sturgill Simpson, Kurt Vile, Jerry Jeff Walker, Lucinda Williams, Townes Van Zandt, Warren Zevon, Wilco.
  • Artist page/tour dates/links/back catalog

Physical format music purchases from the PoB webstore and Bandcamp include digital downloads when feasible. Some, but not all, pre-2023 vinyl pressings also include a download coupon. For digital preorders and high-resolution digital downloads, please visit our Bandcamp page.

Tracklist

A1: “The Heart of California (for Lowell George)” 4:30
A2: “Cocaine Cowboy” 3:04
A3: “Whatever Happened to Jesus (and Maybeline)?” 4:37
A4: “Helena Montana” 3:38
A5: “Texas Tears” 4:11
B1: “Cajun Roll” 3:35
B2: “Feelin Easy” 3:01
B3: “The Night Cafe” 3:58
B4: “Roll Truck Roll” 5:00
B5: “Red Bird” 4:22
B6: “The Lubbock Tornado (I don’t know)” 4:33

Catalog Number/Release Date

PoB-065 / LP, CD, Digital: May 6, 2022

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Album Narrative

SMOKIN THE DUMMY
PISS IN THE WIND
AMERICAN MUSIC
PLAY IT AGAIN

— Terry Allen, in a 1981 letter to H.C. Westermann

Following the 1973 Whitney Biennial, in which songwriter and visual artist Terry Allen and fellow iconic artist Horace Clifford “Cliff” Westermann both exhibited, Allen maintained a lively long-distance correspondence and exchange of artworks and music with Westermann, whose singular and highly influential art he admired enormously. In a February 1981 letter to his friend and mentor, written shortly after the late 1980 release of his third album Smokin the Dummy, while he and his family were living in Fresno, California, Terry explains the genesis of the album title:

MY KID BUKKA GOT A CHARLIE MCCARTHY DOLL FOR CHRISTMAS ONE YEAR WHEN HE MADE UP HIS MIND HE WAS GOING TO BE A VENTRILOQUIST. HE IMMEDIATELY PAINTED IT UP TO LOOK LIKE A VAMPIRE … AND I JUST AS IMMEDIATELY PUT ON A PAIR OF JO HARVEY’S SUNGLASSES AND THE SLEAZIEST JACKET I COULD FIND (western slime) AND SAT FOR FAMILY PHOTOS … ANYWAY, I BLEW RINGS OF SMOKE ON THE DUMMY AND BUKKA SAID I WAS SMOKIN THE DUMMY.

I GUESS IT RANG SOME KIND OF DEMENTED BELL …  

Westermann died shortly after receiving this letter, enclosed with a Smokin the Dummy LP, the minimalist black jacket of which Allen suggested that Cliff fold into a jaunty cardboard hat if he didn’t like the music. That response was unlikely, since Westermann loved Terry’s music, calling his debut record Juarez (1975) “the finest, most honest and heartfelt piece of music I ever heard.” 

Recorded at Caldwell Studios in Allen’s hometown of Lubbock, Texas during the summer of 1980, exactly two years after his masterpiece Lubbock (on everything) (released in 1979) manifested in the same jury-rigged room, the feral follow-up is less conceptually focused but more sonically and stylistically unified than its predecessor. It’s also rougher and rowdier, wilder and more wired, and altogether more menacingly rock and roll. This was by design. The Panhandle Mystery Band had only recently coalesced during those 1978 Lubbock sessions, Lloyd Maines’s first foray into production. Through 1979, they honed their sound and tightened their arrangements with a series of periodic performances beyond Allen’s regular art-world circuit, including memorable record release concerts in Lubbock, Chicago, L.A., and Kansas City. Terry sought to harness the high-octane power of this now well-oiled collective engine to overdrive his songs into rawer and rockier off-road territory. 

His first album to share top billing with the Panhandle Mystery Band, Dummy documents a ferocious new band in fully telepathic, tornado-fueled flight, refining its caliber, increasing its range, and never looking down. Alongside the stalwart Maines brothers—co-producer, guitarist, and all-rounder Lloyd, bassist Kenny, and drummer Donnie—and mainstay Richard Bowden (who here contributes not only fiddle but also mandolin, cello, and “truck noise theory,” the big-rig doppler effect of Lloyd’s steel on “Roll Truck Roll”), new addition Jesse Taylor supplies blistering lead guitar, on loan from Joe Ely (who plays harmonica here). Jesse’s kinetic blues lines and penchant for extreme volume—he was deaf in one ear from a near-fatal car accident—were instrumental in pushing these recordings into brisker tempos and tougher attitudes. Terry was feverish for several studio days, suffering from a bad flu and sweating through his clothes, which partially explains the literally febrile edge to his performances, rendered largely in a perma-growl. (By this point, he was regularly breaking piano pedals with his heavy-booted stomp.) 

Like the album title itself, the songs on Smokin the Dummy ring various demented bells. The tracks rifle through Terry’s assorted obsessions—especially the potential energy and escape of the open road, elevated here to an ecstatic, prayerful pitch—and are populated by a cast of crooked characters: truckers, truck-stop waitresses, convicts, cokeheads, speed freaks, greasers, holy rollers, rodeo riders, dancehall cheaters, and sacrificial prairie dogs, sinners seeking some small reprieve, any fugitive moment of grace. In an echo of “Amarillo Highway (for Dave Hickey),” which opens Lubbock (on everything), “The Heart of California (for Lowell George),” another driving song and the first track of Dummy, is dedicated to Terry’s recently departed friend, the leader of Little Feat, who covered Allen’s “New Delhi Freight Train” before he died.

As on Lubbock, many other songs are older, culled from a decade and a half of songbooks, demos, and worktapes. Allen wrote “Red Bird,” a deceptively simple ditty that combines two longstanding fascinations—New Orleans and bird symbolism—as an art student in L.A. in 1964 and performed it on Shindig! the following year. He considered it his first “real” song worth keeping, and it rates as the personal favorite of many of his oldest friends, including Bruce Nauman. “Cocaine Cowboy,” composed in 1968, lent its title to a 1974 play by Allen’s colleague George Lewis, starring Terry’s wife and collaborator Jo Harvey and featuring his own dada-inspired costume designs, including a giant Gogolesque ambulatory nose wearing a cowboy hat. “Roll Truck Roll” and “The Night Cafe,” a diptych of automotive dramas, with counterpoint perspectives on the labor cultures of trucking and food service, both date to 1969. (During this era, Allen was a great enthusiast and denizen of diners, particularly Denny’s, and Jo Harvey wrote and performed a play called Counter Angel, based on her oral histories with truckstop waitresses.) The glowering, bruised 1975 rodeo song “Helena Montana” was inspired by his friend Dave Hickey’s fine rodeo number “Calgary Snow” and Terry’s impending participation in The Great American Rodeo exhibition at Forth Worth Art Museum the following year. 

The other four songs, like the aforementioned “The Heart of California,” were of more recent vintage. One of only two covers in Allen’s catalog (the other is David Byrne’s “Buck Naked”), “Whatever Happened to Jesus (and Maybeline)?” interpolates Chuck Berry’s automotive lament within a skewed gospel song of Allen’s own devising, a characteristic imbrication of sacred and profane gestures. Allen completed the furiously frayed album closer “The Lubbock Tornado (I don’t know),” about the devastating 1970 tornado (still a painful local memory ten years later), in a hot Texas Tech practice room during the recording sessions. It takes the American vernacular tradition of disaster ballads into sinister and hilarious spaces, implicating governmental, religious, and alien conspiracies—including the Lubbock Lights—as possible meteorological motivations. In 1980, as in 2022, we can rationalize any calamity with conspiracy theories. 

In other words, this is deathless American music. Play it again. 

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Acknowledgments

A weirdo country classic. A tremendous collection of rowdy honky-tonk stompers in which Allen takes a sort of defiant relish in the barrel-bottom lives he narrates … [with] something of the belligerent snarl of the 1970s outlaw country records of David Allen Coe or Johnny Paycheck.

– Uncut

Stuffed with waggishly eclectic gems, all alive with their author’s rebel-eye view and populated by the kinds of hard-luck heroes found in one of Harry Crews’ brutally funny yarns. Eccentric, emotional, poetic, and acerbic, this is Allen sowing the seeds for alt-country’s unruly crop.

– Record Collector

[By the 1980s], he’d already earned fans in David Byrne and Little Feat’s Lowell George, and it’s easy to hear why. Allen had a fever for much of the recording, but his Panhandle Mystery Band pushed him to new heights… The guitars are louder, the beat is wilder and Allen makes the journey sound almost metaphysical: “Jesus Christ on the dash / won’t keep it from the crash / and every curve’s just your nerves closing in.” The open road promises freedom, but in Allen’s hands, it can also be an existential trap.

– NPR Music

No veteran country songwriter sounds more attuned to the national mood. His songs still feel like little guidebooks for staring down a harsh universe.

– The Washington Post

A reigning deity of a certain kind of country music since the mid-70s.

The New York Times

The kind of singular American artist who expresses the fundamental weirdness of his country.

– The Wire

It has always been a fool’s errand to frame Allen in terms of other artists—there was nobody like him before he showed up, and the subsequent forty years have been equally light on plausible peers.

– Uncut

Some of the strangest art-rock you ever heard … desperado dadaism. Dummy is environmental art at its best.

– The Village Voice (1981)

Like The Grapes of Wrath revisited … masterfully done. Call it Lubbock New Wave. It’s going to offend some people, like the best rock and roll should. One of the best albums I’ve heard in a long time, period. Dazzling.

– The L.A. Times (1981)

A song cycle with a dark/darkly comic take on religion, its best-known song is the glorious “Gimme a Ride to Heaven Boy,” where a driver gives a ride to a gun-toting, hitchhiking Jesus.

– MOJO

One of the most compelling American songwriters working today. He is making the most unique art-pop of our time … The bloodlines coursing through this alternately rueful and rowdy work are the marks of blood as a sign of family lineage, an effect of violence, an emblem of sex and death, the price of sacrifice and sacrament.

– L.A. Herald Examiner (1984)

I’ve never heard such a consistent assortment of unpopular styles.

– Dave Hickey (1983)

To me he is an exceptional songwriter whose vocal qualities, which don’t shy away from the dirty tones, don’t have to hide behind his songs at all.

– Ox Magazine

Two different masterpieces.

– Ox Magazine