Photo by Jo Harvey Allen.

Terry Allen and the Panhandle Mystery Band‘s Smokin the Dummy and Bloodlines Reissues, Featuring Remastered Audio and Expanded Artwork, Are Out Now.

Our reissues of songwriter and visual artist Terry Allen’s albums Smokin the Dummy (1980) and Bloodlines (1983), are out—shipping, in shops, and streaming—today, May 6, 2022, the day before Terry’s 79th birthday. (Today is also Bandcamp Friday, when Bandcamp waives their fee and passes on all revenues to artists and labels.) These two records comprise our sixth and seventh releases by Allen and the eagerly anticipated continuation of our acclaimed, GRAMMY-nominated archival series in collaboration with the artist. They have been very close to our hearts for twenty years; Bloodlines was the first Terry record I owned on vinyl, a gift from my friend John Ollman of the Fleisher/Ollman Galleryin Philadelphia, where Allen exhibited his artwork during the Chippy era.

Remastered from the original master tapes, the expanded editions of these two beloved, and interrelated, records represent the first-ever reissues on vinyl (unlike previous editions, the Smokin the Dummy CD also restores the original, unabridged tracklist, with “Cocaine Cowboy.”) Both vinyl and CD editions—gatefold and trifold, respectively—feature inserts with lyrics, new notes, and other texts (including a 1981 letter from Allen to his friend and mentor, the artist H.C. Westermann), as well as restored, new, and alternate artwork and photographs by Terry and Jo Harvey Allen and friends (now including more switchblades and skulls).

Read on for more details, and click below to buy and hear the albums.

Oh what a dangerous life …

Watch an unboxing video (it’s safe for work, we promise).

Smokin the Dummy (1980, PoB-065)

$3.00 – $35.00

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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.

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

[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

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)

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.

The Smokin the Dummy Button

Smoke the dummy (that’s Bob the Dummy to you) with Terry to commemorate our reissue of his 1980 album. Enhance any lapel with irreverent style and grace. This exquisite artifact measures 1.5″ in diameter, with a durable steel pin-back. The text on the rim reads: TERRY ALLEN & THE PANHANDLE MYSTERY BAND / SMOKIN THE DUMMY.

$3.00

In stock

BUY HERE

Bloodlines (1983, PoB-066)

$5.00 – $35.00

FORMAT

Clear

Purchase from PoB above or support via

Bandcamp (LP/CD/digital)
Other Options (physical/digital/int’l)

On his manifold fourth album, acclaimed songwriter and visual artist Terry Allen contemplates kinship—the ways sex and violence stitch and sever the ties of family, faith, and society—with skewering satire and affection alike. Bloodlines compiles thematically related but disparate recordings from miscellaneous sources both theatrical and historical: two songs written for plays; two full-band reprises of selections from Juarez; the irreverent hellfire-hitchhiker-on-highway ballad “Gimme a Ride to Heaven Boy” (featuring Joe Ely); and the poignant eponymous ode to the arteries of ancestry and landscape (the debut recording of eight-year-old Natalie Maines, later covered by Lucinda Williams).

Allen plunges even further into morbid role-play and mordant fable… The Jerry Jeff Walker-ish country shuffle “Gimme a Ride to Heaven Boy,” a tale of being carjacked by Christ on some desert highway, can be heard as both a funny story well told, and a contemplation of the perilous slenderness of the sliver that divides faith and credulity. – 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

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)

The first-ever vinyl reissue of Allen’s manifold, moving fourth album, remastered from the original analog tapes.
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 and friends; an insert with lyrics and original notes, 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 friends; and a six-panel insert with lyrics and alternate art.

The There Oughta Be a Law Against Sunny Southern California Bumper Sticker

Put some illegal vibrations on that bumper, and show the open road how you truly feel about SoCal. A ferocious full-band reprise of “There Oughta Be a Law Against Sunny Southern California,” originally released on Terry Allen‘s immortal 1975 debut album Juarez, appears on 1983’s Bloodlines.

Printed on thick, durable vinyl this 3″ x 11.5″ bumper sticker is resistant to scratches, sun, and water.

$5.00

In stock

BUY HERE

Terry Allen Tamale Shirts Are (Almost) Back in Stock (Again)

Is there any more perfect koan? We print these shirts in small batches to coincide with occasions such as today’s release. Get them while they last—they’re technically on backorder, but will begin shipping again next week. Hot tamales!

$25.00

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Terry Allen Live Dates and Events

Explore MemWars at the Blanton Museum of Art.

An exploration of memory, autobiography, storytelling, and songwriting through a three-channel video installation (featuring Allen and his wife and frequent collaborator, the actor and writer Jo Harvey Allen) and related songs, drawings, and texts, MemWars runs through July 10 at the Blanton Museum of Art in Austin, Texas.

On May 29, Terry Allen and the Panhandle Mystery Band are slated to play Wilco’s Solid Sound Festival at MASS MoCa in North Adams, Massachusetts.

On June 23, Allen will perform at OFF THE RAILS, the annual benefit for SITE Santa Fe in Sante Fe, New Mexico, with special guest Kurt Vile, whom Terry personally invited. Panhandle Mystery Band member and acclaimed solo artist Shannon McNally opens.

On November 3-8, Terry Allen and the Panhandle Mystery Band are slated to play the Outlaw Country Cruise West.

Additional dates will be announced soon.

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