Truckload of Art Publication Day

“Real Entertainment”: An advertisement for Sled Allen’s Arena in Lubbock, Texas, starring four-year-old Terry, 1948.

Today is the day—Truckload of Art publication day and, aptly, also the first day of spring.

You can find the hardcover—which is stunning, with both b&w and color image inserts—as well as the ebook and audiobook (author Brendan Greaves reads four chapters, with Jason Culp adeptly handling the rest) at your favorite booksellers.

If you’re so moved, reviews on Amazon and Goodreads are apparently very helpful in this digital age we occupy (or which occupies us). Thank you.

Join Brendan and friends—including the Allens in Austin—at the below events (more TBA).

Here are some reflections from Brendan:

My first book, Truckload of Art: The Life and Work of Terry Allen, is out today, March 19, published by Hachette Books. It’s hard to know how and what to feel after five years intimately entrenched in the Allen memory mines, and it’s uncanny seeing the result manifest in physical form in piles on my office floor. It’s all in there, everything I’ve got, and nothing I write here can adequately explain quite how it happened. Love, I realize, was the engine.

“Stock up on whiskey,” Terry advised me yesterday about publication day, “and stay drunk all day … I might do the same.”

I’ll be reading at Flyleaf Books in Chapel Hill this evening with David Menconi (drinks at Lucha Tigre to follow). I’d love to see you there, as well as at the other tour stops. Looking forward to raising a few glasses.

It’s a long book, and the acknowledgments section is accordingly long, but special thanks are due to Terry and the Allen family, especially Jo Harvey Allen, Bukka Allen, and Bale Allen, for welcoming me into their family and into their memories, and to my own family, especially Samantha Greaves and Asa, for their steadfast support and patience, even when I was most unmoored. Thank you to my agent Meg Thompson ; my editor at Hachette, Ben Schafer, and the rest of the Hachette team; my editor at The Reading List, Sal Borriello; and to Katelin Dixon at the Allen archives at Texas Tech, among so many others.

And I’m grateful to y’all, to anyone who spends the time with these stories. Thank you.

RSVP for Free Truckload of Art Book Events

Beginning with a publication-day launch at Flyleaf Books in Chapel Hill on March 19, Brendan is hitting the road this spring on the Truckload of Art for a series of readings, book signings, and discussions in North Carolina and up the Northeast Corridor, as well as a special Truckload of Art Road Show + MemWars concert event with Terry, Jo Harvey, and Bukka Allen with Richard Bowden in Austin.

These events are all FREE, but space is limited. Please see details and RSVP at the below link if you’re able to attend. Stay tuned for more events TBA.

Buy the book from PoB (while supplies last):

$34.00

FORMAT

Gonna California EP (PoB-076)

Gonna California imagines an alternate reality where Allen’s long-lost first studio recordings, captured with a full band in LA in 1968, saw a proper release. (Instead nearly the entire pressing was destroyed by a fire set by the so-called “Hollywood Arsonist,” and remaining copies were repurposed in artworks.) This first-ever (re)issue edition, limited to 500 copies—few of which remain—features recently rediscovered and remastered early (and superior) mixes of both songs; the original liner notes by Allen; an excerpt from the book; a lyrics insert; and Allen’s contemporaneous visual art in an arresting gatefold jacket.

Buy Gonna California vinyl 7″ (few copies remaining) from PoB:

$34.00

FORMAT

Cowboy and the Stranger EP (PoB-054)

Comprising the first recording, in 2018, of a song written in 1969 and three solo demo recordings dating to 1968—all previously unissued—Cowboy and the Stranger was originally a co-release of L.A. Louver and Paradise of Bachelors, on the occasion of Terry Allen’s 2019 retrospective drawing exhibition The Exact Moment It Happens in the West (Stories, Pictures, and Songs from the ’60s ’Til Now) at L.A. Louver. Originally limited to an edition of 500 cassettes, it is now available digitally for the first time.

Buy Cowboy and the Stranger digital album from PoB:

$5.00 – $15.00

FORMAT

Early Reviews for Truckload of Art

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

“[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

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

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

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

TERRY ALLEN LINKS

BRENDAN GREAVES LINKS

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