Terry Allen: Gonna California

Album Narrative

Over the course of two days, April 15 and 23, 1968, at Wally Heider Recording, Los Angeles, a jittery, twenty-four-year-old Terry Allen laid down at least nineteen takes of “Gonna California” and perhaps seven of “Color Book,” two older songs he felt would complement each other on his aspirational first single. The latter, a thumbnail portrait of a thirty-three-year-old mama’s boy artist still living at home in “eternal puberty,” is a fittingly faux-naive match for the vivid A side, written about, and on the eve of, his departure, on January 4, 1962, from Lubbock, Texas (where he left behind his mother Pauline Allen and soon-to-be-betrothed Jo Harvey Koontz) for LA (where he planned to attend Chouinard Art Institute). In 1962 teenaged Allen was both the “bluebird rider in a red-panel truck,” with “snakes in [his] mind” and the little boy moving “from crayons to confusion.”

It was Terry’s first experience in a professional recording studio. Co-producers
George Tipton and David B. Nelson brought in a band of seasoned, and visibly bored, session musicians, including accomplished guitarist Mike Deasy of the Wrecking Crew. Allen, who found it challenging enough to play in a group setting with friends in the Black Wall Blues Quintet, was completely out of his element among these professional strangers. He was a nauseated bundle of nerves. On the surviving tape either Tipton or Nelson begs him over the control room mike to loosen up: “Try and relax a little bit, Terry.” They reminded him repeatedly, and with increasing annoyance, not to bob his head, keeping his mouth trained at all times a demure distance from the microphone, and not to tap his boot audibly, severely cramping Terry’s style and stymying his performance. “They might as well have put me in a straitjacket,” he recalled with enduring frustration. “It was unbelievable bullshit.”

Despite Terry’s considerable discomfort, he finally did manage to capture some
acceptable takes. Unknown musicians later overdubbed additional instrumentation on “Gonna California,” including a strident fiddle and an incongruously overripe muted trumpet. “Color Book” remained comparatively, and mercifully, unadorned, featuring just the original session quartet of piano, guitar, bass, and drums. (The masters have been lost, and for this release we have substituted rawer, earlier mixes featuring only guitar overdubs
on “Gonna California,” which Terry prefers.) Nelson sent dubs of the tape around to various labels, but there were no bites (though Chet Atkins of RCA at least replied politely, if curtly).

Nelson guided Terry through the mastering and production processes, arranging to press 1000 copies of a 45rpm seven-inch vinyl single, 500 labeled as “promotional copies” and 500 without that designation, for Allen to distribute, sell, or give away as he saw fit. Terry finalized the label materials the same week in late September 1968 that his younger son Bale was born. Early the next year, while awaiting the pressing, he prepared a printed insert he titled “The Terry Allen Year Book,” with an arch autobiography.

On a visit with Nelson and Tipton to A&M Records, Allen spied a Herb Alpert gold record framed on the wall and decided that was the perfect way to immortalize his first recording. He inquired where such gilded mementoes were manufactured and, in 1970, when he had some extra cash, he ordered one himself, and hung it on his wall at home, calling it Sonshine, 1960–1970, its title, flanking the word “Self-Portrait,” engraved on a bronze plaque.
In a tribute to his young sons, the orange label listed the (imaginary) record label as Bale Creek, catalog number 101, and the fanciful publisher as Bukka Cain, ASCAP. “People were very impressed,” he commented snidely. The gold record was also a memorial to itself—and to Terry’s abbreviated early recording career—because when the pressing of the workaday black PVC version of the single was completed in early 1969, nearly no one heard it.Before he or Nelson could even pick up the pressing, it was almost entirely destroyed, while still sealed in its factory cardboard boxes, in a warehouse on Sunset, by a fire set by the so-called “Hollywood Arsonist.”

Allen was able to salvage between fifty and eighty intact copies from the charred and melted remains, some of which his friend Allen Ruppersberg featured as an overcooked meal in his 1969 participatory art environment Al’s Café. Terry eventually repurposed “Gonna California” for the musical Chippy (1993–1994), but he quickly abandoned “Color Book.” Few people have heard the lost single, and fewer still these unreleased alternate mixes.

Brendan Greaves
Excerpted and adapted from Truckload of Art: The Life and Work of Terry Allen
(New York: Hachette Books, 2024)