Brendan Greaves: Truckload of Art: The Life and Work of Terry Allen – An Authorized Biography

Acknowledgments

* Selected as one of The New York Times’ Best Art Books of 2024 and Garden and Gun’s Southern Books We Loved This Year *

“A lovingly attuned biography … able and detailed … This is either the musician or the artist biography of the year.” 

– The New York Times (Best Art Books of 2024)

The Allen family’s life has been as much an inspiration for me as Terry’s wonderful art and music. I wondered to myself, “How does a creative person navigate family life, and life with friends, with their creative life?” This book is the instruction manual.

– David Byrne, author of How Music Works

Terry Allen’s creative depth has guided his life, leading him to become the great artist, writer, and musician he is. Like a tornado, he has swirled a community around himself, drawn together by his generosity and inclusivity. It is wonderful that Brendan Greaves has written a book that is as complex and compassionate as Terry and as moving and raw as his art and music. 

– Kiki Smith

Blending West Texas fiction, hearsay, memoir, anthropological dig, and journalistic fact, Brendan Greaves has fashioned a biographical narrative that skillfully frames the life and times of the visual artist, singer-songwriter, playwright, raconteur, and beautiful dreamer known as Terry Allen. Only a Truckload of Art could do him justice. I couldn’t put it down.

– Rodney Crowell

Terry Allen is my hero, and Brendan changed my life when he introduced us. It’s about time they change your life too.

– Kurt Vile

Brendan Greaves is an unusually deft and perceptive historian of music and art, but he writes with so much heart and verve that after a few chapters, his prose starts to feel like its own song: wild, intelligent, rhythmic, true. His subject here—the inimitable Terry Allen, one of the deepest and most wonderful American artists I can think of—is so well-served by Greaves’s adventurousness and smarts. What a gorgeous, necessary book.

– Amanda Petrusich, The New Yorker; author of Do Not Sell at Any Price: The Wild, Obsessive Hunt for the World’s Rarest 78rpm Records

Written with the narrative verve of a great novel and a poet’s eye for enchanting detail, Truckload of Art is an inspired, definitive illumination of the life and genius of a vital American artist.

– Wells Tower, screenwriter and journalist; author of Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned

Terry Allen is our modern Michelangelo—a painter, sculptor, and conceptualist informed by honky-tonk sensibilities and a singer-songwriter of incisive, vividly-depicted songs who knows his way around galleries and museums. His Florence is Lubbock, Texas, where a local boast was “Lubbock Has More Sky.” This biography tells precisely how Terry Allen filled up all that empty space. It is the most detailed history of the making of a life in art that I’ve ever read. 

– Joe Nick Patoski, author of Willie Nelson: An Epic Life; director of Sir Doug & the Genuine Texas Cosmic Groove

When I was asked to write a few sentences about this new book on Terry Allen’s life and art, I immediately felt that it was an impossible task. Then I thought about Terry and all the times I have asked him impossible questions and received the most profound responses from him in one or two words. He has been hands down one of the most influential characters of my life, and I’m looking forward to having this book to reference and share with friends, family, and future generations who may look to find their way through life in art and music. Because today’s rainbow really is tomorrow’s tamale.

– Ryan Bingham

Truckload of Art is a monumental work that captures the passionate, complex life of an artist whose career blends visual art and country music with unique power. Brendan Greaves unveils the supercharged art and music worlds created by Terry Allen, from his formative years in Lubbock, Texas, to California and Santa Fe, New Mexico. Truckload of Art brilliantly captures the soul of a truly great American artist who embraces his Texas roots and energizes them with his genius at every step of his career.

– William Ferris, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; author of Give My Poor Heart Ease: Voices of the Mississippi Blues; former chair of the National Endowment for the Humanities

Once upon a time when I lived in Pasadena and Terry and Jo Harvey were in Fresno, I was there with my wife working at a stone quarry and had dinner and stayed the night with them. We cleaned squid, and Jo Harvey made a lovely dinner.

The next morning all of us had violent diarrhea and we quickly ran out of toilet paper and then every possible useable paper-like material. 

When we returned home, I bought and shipped a large box of toilet paper from a restaurant supply store. Terry sent one back painted black, which still sits on my dining table, used as a candlestick holder. 

Terry and Jo Harvey—friends as long as we last.

– Bruce Nauman

Masterful … An endlessly fascinating biography of an endlessly fascinating artist.

– Booklist (starred review)

[A] rollicking debut biography … a thrilling whirl … Scrupulous detail and raucous picaresque merge with evocative discussions of the artist’s work … It adds up to a fascinating portrait of an American original.

– Publishers Weekly

Dazzling … [Greaves’s] research is as meticulous and exhaustive as his writing is inspired … He deftly moves between biography and criticism, unpacking Allen’s famously inscrutable drawings and verses, capable of spooling in and out of one another for decades as if gliding along a Möbius strip, through empathetic understanding of where the artist has been … A true testament to commitment from both artist and biographer.

– MOJO

A long, detailed, and fascinating book … Greaves does an excellent job illuminating the probable sources for some of [JUAREZ’s] abiding enigmas … For fans, this book will be revelatory. Greaves has done his homework and presents it beautifully … Use this book as a codex to untangle [Allen’s] wonderful web.

– The Wire

Greaves does an admirable job describing the ecumenical contexts and nuances of what are often indescribable works. But he does an even grander job, with clear but measured affection, getting onto the page the contexts and nuances of Terry Allen, an utterly unique figure at the crossroads … of American art, however you define it. 

– Garden and Gun

“[An] exhilarating investigation of a life spent in the act of constant creation … [Greaves] is a compassionate biographer with the perceptive eye of an art critic.” 

– Aquarium Drunkard

Greaves proves uniquely situated to understand Allen’s works … [He] has laid an invaluable foundation for understanding Allen’s life and work … drawing throughlines from Allen’s life across his intertextual artistic narratives.

– Austin Chronicle

9/10. [Greaves] assembles a persuasive argument in which Allen can be viewed as the godfather of alternative country.

– Uncut

In Greaves, Allen has found a meticulous and empathetic Boswell … Truckload emerges not as a standard tale of the rise and fall (or fall and rise) of a tortured genius outsider/outlaw, but a patient study in artistic process and memory, the cultural intricacies of the twentieth-century West, and in people, how they scar and save you, like the lightning in Allen’s song “Cortez Sail”—“tearing the clouds, then closing the tear.”

– 4 Columns

With Greaves’s help, Allen tells his most compelling story yet, the story of his creative life.

– Texas Highways

A summation and exemplar of a collaborative art practice that is as much ethos as it is any single song or sculpture or image … part of the art vortex that is Terry Allen. 

– Observer

The biography spends ample and appropriate time on its subject … Greaves does a fine job braiding the “distant worlds of conceptual art and country music” via interviews, archival research, and Allen’s personal journals.

– Chapter 16

This absorbing, brilliant biography … [is] more than just the definitive look. Greaves has, with meticulous research and a prose-like style, given us a template for all such books in the future—essential reading on one of America’s greatest artists. 

– The Big Takeover

Greaves skillfully and sensitively tracks Allen’s life … [His] finest accomplishment in the book is his ability to capture Allen’s indelible and unique voice.

– Recliner Notes

Greaves puts the reader in the shotgun seat for a drive through the entirety of Allen’s existence … it makes for quite the journey. 

– Rhode Island Suburban Newspapers

The music is the place to start with Mr. Allen’s oeuvre. Truckload of Art is the set of concrete blocks on which to place it.

– The New York Sun