Blood Sucking Maniacs: Blood Sucking Maniacs

Album Narrative

As a child—this would have been sometime in the mid-1970s—Terry and Jo Harvey Allen’s son Bale assembled in the front yard of their Fresno home a curious device, an elaborate congeries of crucifixes and mirrors suspended in deadfall. It was, the fledgling artist patiently explained to his bemused parents, a vampire trap.

Half a century later, Blood Sucking Maniacs, the record by the eponymous Allen family band, resembles, in its own manner—that is, unwieldy and convoluted, ardent and hammy, slightly deranged—a vampire trap in both construction and intent. A bricolage of potent symbols and spare parts, wary of the eternal, at once affectionate and defensive, vulnerable and dangerous, fiercely protective of past and future wounds. In other words, a family—or a mechanism for one specific family to write (and interpret) itself.

These maniacs, ten kin, span five generations and 121 years. In order of descending seniority: Pauline Allen, Terry’s hellraising, barrelhouse piano-playing mother, who died in 1984 but joins the party through a transmission from beyond the grave; Jo Harvey and Terry, the matriarch and patriarch, who, separately and together, inhabit myriad artistic endeavors; Bukka, their firstborn, an accomplished songwriter and studio and touring musician; Bale, their younger son, an equally accomplished visual artist, gallerist, and drummer; their three grandsons, Sled (a drummer, entrepreneur, and fisherman; see the “some like to fish” lyric in theme song “Blood Sucking Maniacs”) and Calder (another songwriter, musician, and fisherman), Bale’s two boys, and Bukka’s son Kru (a piano-playing football star); their granddaughter-in-law Sophie (music industry executive and mother), and finally, Sled and Sophie’s baby boy, Lucky Marlo, Terry and Jo Harvey’s first great-grandchild, whose fetal heartbeat opens and closes the record with the actual (ultra)sound of coursing Allen blood.

Terry has designated four additional official Maniacs, surrogate family members adopted into the Allen family fold: Richard Bowden and Lloyd Maines (credited as the “Blood Brothers”), the benevolent bedrock of the Panhandle Mystery Band since the first day of recording Lubbock (on everything) in the summer of 1978, and real-life brothers Charlie Sexton and Will Sexton (the “Bastard Children”), who, between them, have collaborated with the Allens and just about anybody else you can imagine. Though their bloodlines are, genetically speaking, different, these maniacs have drunk deeply of Allen blood, and their sympathetic playing elevates these recordings.

The songs collected herein are miscellaneous and multiplex, comprising heartrending ballads and arch in-jokes on a spectrum from sublime to unabashedly sentimental, mordant to doting. These contradictory qualities, too, are redolent of family. The unifying principle here is not so much blood harmony as blood entropy.

Appropriately, Terry and Jo Harvey contribute the greatest number of pieces to Blood Sucking Maniacs—five each, if you include their joint rendering, tender and succinct, of the blues standard “It Hurts Me Too,” here titled “When Things Go Wrong” (because “the struggle of love,” of relationships, “is the important part,” as Terry told me). Jo Harvey wrote “Let It All In” with their dear departed friend Susanna Clark, a songwriter and artist whose paintings grace the covers of classic albums by Willie Nelson and her husband (and Terry’s fellow Rockin’ Taco), Guy. One hundred toasts with “one hundred sangrias” culminate in this wise counsel of renewal: “Don’t shut out no snakes / They might wind up friends / It’s all worth the wonder / Worth going insane again.”

The concert staple “Shuck Some Corn,” Jo Harvey’s most beloved poem, here appended as a coda to Bukka’s “These Four Rocks,” manages to encompass both metaphysical riddle and randy joke, playfully prodding the mystery of identity as subsumed and redeemed by family, by blood. (What is left after you “gobble and gnaw / and suck it raw”? “A secret.”) “Down to the River,” Jo Harvey’s moving duet with Terry, a paean to their love of, and through, travel and the record’s spiritual centerpiece, contains its most singular and breathtaking image. We are suddenly transported to the Bay of Bengal, “Where bonfires reflect the slow dark oxen / Where a hundred blue sails draw against the dawn.”

In the past few years Calder, under Charlie and Bukka’s mentorship, has emerged as a formidable young presence among Austin songwriters. His three songs here demonstrate a distinctively earnest and mindful style that recalls his uncle Bukka’s deliberate approach to songwriting, epitomized by “These Four Rocks.” On one of their countless drives between Fresno and Lubbock, the Allens pocketed four small stones from the side of a road through the Mojave Desert, outside Needles. They claimed them as family totems of togetherness, one for each of them, eventually tattooing them on their hands as a quadrangle of dots.

The writing and recording process, which took place mostly at Terry and Jo Harvey’sSanta Fe home and a local studio, the Kitchen Sink, was, according to Jo Harvey, “the most joyous time of all of us working together,” a culminating project for these inveterate family collaborators. “You could hear music coming from all over the house … Calder was learning piano from Kru, Kru was learning accordion from Bukka—everyone was learning new licks and just having so much fun.” Such joy was not without logistical challenges. “Getting everybody together was like herding cockroaches,” Terry reported. Sled’s poem “Santa Fe”and Calder’s “Arroyo Nights” invite us behind the adobe walls of the Allens’ home for such a gathering, fueled by Topo Chico, tequila, Malbec, and black coffee, suffused with the heady aroma of pork pozole and green chile chicken enchiladas, and the raucous sound of Texan voices raised in laughter and song.

Pauline appears as an inscrutable but benign specter, with her first-ever appearance on record, in two fragments captured on cassette tape by Terry at her home in Amarillo in the 1970s. The second, W.C. Handy’s foundational “St. Louis Blues,” was her favorite song, which Terry incorporated into his family epic, DUGOUT, as leitmotif. (Kru’s piano improvisations conjure his great-grandmother’s insouciant virtuosity on the instrument.) “Red Leg Boy,” another artifact of DUGOUT, invokes Terry’s father Sled, a wrestling and music promoter and professional ballplayer. Sled’s namesake, his great-grandson, introduces the song, just as he did as a four-year-old on Terry’s 1999 record Salivation, though a couple of octaves lower this time. On the chorus, four generations call out to their forebear from a fifth.

“It’s all one thing,” Terry has often said, when confronted by confused critics, of his multidisciplinary practice, which embraces music, art, writing, and theater. The same formula applies to the Allens’ conception of art and family—it’s all one thing, or it can be.Notwithstanding the popular misconceptions about the romantic life of the hermitic artist and his hermetic art, family need not be an inconvenience or impediment to sidestep on the path to artistic fulfillment or career success (whatever those two absurd, abstract metrics might mean). Art and family need not present separate or parallel conditions and experiences but can, as in “Bloodlines,” the reprised title track of Terry’s 1983 album, flow together in confluence.