Order Pedal Steal + Four Corners

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Terry Allen’s  Pedal Steal + Four Corners, our most deluxe and detailed release to date, is out worldwide today, in stores and streaming. Celebrate with the man himself at record release shows in Dallas (tonight) and Houston (March 30, with a meet and greet and album signing at Cactus Music the same day.)

Watch an unboxing video of the LP+3CD+book set, and listen to all 2.5 hours of audio, below.

Legendary Texan artist Terry Allen occupies a unique position straddling the frontiers of country music and conceptual art; he has worked with everyone from Guy Clark to David Byrne to Lucinda Williams, and his artwork resides in museums worldwide. Pedal Steal + Four Corners collects, for the first time, Allen’s radio plays and long-form narrative audio works—two and a half hours of cinematic songs, stories, and country-concrète sound collage—in a deluxe gatefold edition, including one LP, three CDs, a DL code, and an exhaustive 28pp. color booklet boasting the first in-depth essay to explore this singular body of work; dozens of images of Allen’s related visual art; and full scripts and credits for all five pieces (a total of 33k words).

Pedal Steal (1985), originally composed as a soundtrack to a dance performance, appears on vinyl for the first time, as well as on CD. Torso Hell (1986), Bleeder (1990), Reunion (a return to Juarez) (1992), and Dugout (1993) comprise the Four Corners suite, radio plays broadcast on NPR and never before released, now spanning two CDs. All audio has been meticulously remastered from the original tapes. Fans of Allen’s violent masterpiece Juarez will find much to love in these haunting Southwestern desert dramas, which feature Jo Harvey Allen, Lloyd Maines, Butch Hancock, Stones saxophonist Bobby Keys, and many others. Roger Corman tried to option the film rights; Jesse Helms tried to ban them; now you can own them!

TERRY ALLEN LIVE APPEARANCES

Mar. 22 (TONIGHT): Kessler Theater (Record Release Show), Dallas, TX
Mar. 30: Cactus Music (1pm Meet & Greet), Houston, TX
Mar. 30: The Heights, Houston TX
Apr. 27: Crossroads of Texas Film and Music Festival, Waxahachie, TX

Dedication to Roxy Gordon & Douglas Kent Hall: Highways, Honky-Tonks, & Cantinas

(A Pedal Steal Preview)

Pedal Steal + Four Corners is dedicated to Roxy Gordon and Douglas Kent Hall. Choctaw/Assiniboine writer/musician Roxy Gordon recorded voiceover for Allen’s 1985 sculptural installation China Night, pictured here and on the album cover, at the Fresno Art Center. The installation explored the Vietnam War era links between Southwestern American Indian and Southeastern Asian cultures, what Allen called the “Laos/Taos” connection. 

As Terry told us:

“The whole piece was about the Southwest, the aftermath of the American Indians and Hispanics that had gone off to war, courtesy of the USA, to visit their ancient relatives in Vietnam, who had thousands of years before crossed the Bering Strait and come down through the Americas and become what we call Native Americans. So it was like a return home in a perverse way. It was all told through this installation of this quarter-scale adobe rathole bar that I called China Night. There’s a neon sign in the window of the bar that the “K” and the “A” are burned out, so it’s “China Night,” but originally it was “Kachina Night”—kachinas are ghosts, presences of the dead, in Pueblo culture. Then the soundtrack played in the back of it, where it was Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, with the Seven Dwarves as the Vietcong.”

In Fresno, Gordon also reminded Allen of legendary New Mexican pedal steel player Wayne Gailey, who—along with Billy the Kid—inspired the narrative of Pedal Steal, written shortly after the China Night exhibition. 

Photo of Roxy Gordon by Peter O’Brien.

Photographer/writer Douglas Kent Hall (1938–2008) collaborated with Terry Allen on photography expeditions during which they would explore the highways, honky-tonks, & cantinas of New Mexico, West Texas, and Northern Mexico. Hall shot the slides projected on the screen of The Beauty drive-in of the Pedal Steal dance performance by Margaret Jenkins Dance Co. that premiered in 1985 at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. While the original Fate CD release of Pedal Steal/Rollback featured a cover photo of abandoned desert-roadside ice machines by Sharon Ely, the Sugar Hill CD reissue featured a b/w highway photo by Douglas Kent Hall, reproduced on the LP sleeve of our edition.

Torso Hell Preview

Torso Hell—the second piece on our Pedal Steal + Four Corners LP+3CD+book set is a direct and visceral articulation of Allen’s YOUTH IN ASIA body of work (1982–92) and its examinations of the psychological residues and betrayals of the Vietnam War. This “radio movie” about a quadriplegic Vietnam veteran’s torments and revenge shares the extreme violence and sexuality of its pulp inspirations, but presses into the realm of absurdity and metafiction, serving simultaneously as a parody of trashy B horror flicks and ponderous Hollywood Vietnam movies and as a vicious commentary on war and its endless rhetorical wake, the ways we abuse, exploit, and ignore our veterans while spouting inane pieties about honor, service, and patriotism.

L-R: 1987 Cassette release by High Performance magazine feat. Terry’s “Mickey Bob Death” (1986); “Station Break” (1986); “Treatment (Angel with dirty tracks)” (1988); “Big Witness (living in wishes)” (1988)

Bleeder Preview

Bleeder (1990) is the third tale on Pedal Steal + Four Corners. Allen’s Anterabbit/Bleeder (a biography) cycle (1982–90) deploys fact and fiction, drawn partly from the life a hemophiliac childhood friend, to explore the very nature of biography and history, the ways our language and memories fail and fool us with their feeble reenactments and fractured transmissions of the past filtered through our myopic present. Memories are hemorrhages, Bleeder suggests, that stain our speech, our stories, and our mark-making with Rorschach bruises of untruths, exaggerations, and fantasies. Once again, Jo Harvey Allen, pictured here in stills (along with related two-dimensional works), starred in both the theater piece and radio play.

Reunion (a return to Juarez) Preview

Ostensibly the “simple story” of the fateful but arbitrary murder, in a “small, rundown mountain trailer” in Cortez, Colorado, of Navy boy Sailor and his new bride, the Tijuana prostitute Spanish Alice at the hands of Juarez-born pachuco Jabo and his LA girlfriend, the “rock writer” and bruja Chic Blundie, the narrative of Allen’s iterative JUAREZ cycle (1968–present) spirals outward, and inward, recursively through a palimpsest of possibilities, a constellation of connections. Reunion (return to Juarez) offers a retelling of the tale, deployed both as a radio play and as the soundtrack for the sculptural installation a simple story (Juarez) (1992), exhibited at the Wexner Center for the Arts, but originally conceived as stage set studies for a Juarez musical, co-written with David Byrne but never produced.

All works pictured by Allen, 1970s-1990s. .

Dugout Preview

Dugout (1993) is the fifth and final piece on Pedal Steal + Four Corners. His most personal and autobiographical work, DUGOUT is based loosely on the lives on Allen’s father, a retired professional baseball player turned promoter of concerts and wrestling, and his mother, a barrelhouse-style piano player and “the first woman ever to be thrown out of Southern Methodist University in Dallas, for playing jazz with black musicians in Deep Ellum in Dallas.” Allen himself describes the DUGOUT cycle, which includes Dugout the radio play, as “a love story, an investigation into how memory is invented, a kind of supernatural-jazz-sport-history-ghost-blood-fiction that rolls across the late nineteenth century into the mid-twentieth century.”

? ? ? ? ⚾️ ? .
All artwork by Allen, from DUGOUT, 2000-2004.

Acclaim for Allen & Pedal Steal + Four Corners

Navajo chants blend into fuzzed-up steel guitar; dirty-realist narratives succumb to skeletal ballads; B-movie dialogue blossoms over a plaintive violin. Pedal Steal represents roots rock’s rarely encountered experimental fringe. – The Times

Terry Allen conjures bodies of work in which the borders between medium and material are blurred and bloodied, stained with memories and stoked by the throttling of life through time. His practice encompasses music, sculpture, video, painting, and theater, resulting in hybrid works that escape familiar categorization. It is the radio, however, that provides the soundtrack to Allen’s mythic Southwest, a wide open imaginary landscape haunted by denizens he describes as “climates” rather than characters. – Aquarium Drunkard

Complete and vibrant, all of these stories draw the listener in so deep they have to fight the urge to duck from a stray bullet or take a shower after a dirty motel room romp.– Houston Press

A+. Pedal Steal +Four Corners takes the idea of abbreviating his body of work to one or a few examples and blows it completely to smithereens. Whether listening at home or perhaps exploring the artist’s belief that the best way to soak all this stuff up is to hear it while out navigating a stretch of the open road, it becomes obvious that as he transcends easy classification, there is no other artist like Terry Allen. Suffice it to say, he’s a long way from outlaw country. – The Vinyl District

Think Sam Shepard with steel guitar, and you’ll get the idea.– The Independent

Allen takes no prisoners, pulls no punches.– Rolling Stone

Allen’s songs extract strangeness from the known world and use it as a means of acquiring greater knowledge.– The New Yorker

He’s pretty close to a master lyricist.– The NY Times

Riveting.– NPR

Singer-songwriter is only a small piece of the 75-year-old’s portfolio. The husband of artist and fellow Lubbock native Jo Harvey, Allen is better known to the art world as a blithely boundary-ignoring sculptor and painter, playwright, and video producer, often incorporating a wide variety of work into major conceptual art installations. And he’s not afraid to get weird.– Texas Highways Magazine

The idiosyncratic Texas songwriter and visual artist’s music pairs with Sam Shepard plays like lime goes with tequila; but the noir-ish radio plays comprising his Four Corners suite are Allen’s own. They’re animated by Allen’s mordant wit, dusty twang, scenic songs, kleptomaniac cattle queens, suicidal musicians, migrants, conmen, pill poppers, prostitutes, wayward sailors, and players including Butch Hancock, Rolling Stones saxophonist Bobby Keys, and inestimable narrator (and 1960s-era KPCC host) Jo Harvey Allen. Poetic aphorisms abound (“All good luck has death in it”) in this two-and-a-half hour package, and it’s all pungently, beautifully weird.– Pasadena Weekly

Conceptual pieces that defy logic, space and time. Tape recordings, spoken-word, distorted guitars, thunderous drum fills and haunting stories await you. These Sam Shepard-like narratives are literally stuff that dreams are made of.– Hub City Spokes

Stunning poetry. The lines themselves quiver with a raw vision rarely heard.– Pitchfork

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

Rawhide and Roses Radio Show

Jo Harvey and Terry Allen’s Rawhide and Roses radio show aired on Sundays from 1967 to 1971 on the underground station KPPC-FM and AM 106.7, broadcast from the basement of the Pasadena Presbyterian Church (PPC). Terry produced and programmed, while Jo Harvey served as the host, writer, storyteller, and on-air personality; she was the first female country music DJ. Aquarium Drunkard recent premiered five themed shows: Truckers, Old & New Songs, Honky-Tonks, Animals, and Water.