“What makes us who we are — and how do we know?” That was the final line of an art magazine review I wrote of a Terry Allen exhibition at L.A. Louver in 2004–05. It is also the foundational question thoroughly and evocatively answered in the hefty, literary, and definitive new book Truckload of Art: The Life and Work of Terry Allen – An Authorized Biography, by Brendan Greaves (2024). An acclaimed visual artist and iconoclastic musician with more than one variety of devoted followings, Allen (born 1943) makes work that spans — or rather, manages to simultaneously occupy — the worlds of contemporary art, theater, film, and country music.
That mid-aughts exhibition was one of a three-part Los Angeles invasion that saw a multimedia installation at the Santa Monica Museum of Art and a stage play recorded live at the Skirball Center, for an NPR broadcast. I saw it all and wrote about most of it. Same with Allen’s subsequent L.A. Louver shows, in 2011 and 2019 — the latter specifically dedicated to an examination of Allen’s integral, inseparable, embryonically intertwined practices in visual art and alternative country. I’ve interviewed him several times and been to many of Allen’s Panhandle Mystery Band concerts. And yet it wasn’t until I had absorbed this new book’s granular and evocative exegesis of Allen’s ancestry, youth, education, influences, fears, failures, and triumphs — across the decades over which his now signature, interdisciplinary poly-dexterity evolved — that I finally understood how it all comes together.
For example, we art writers would often describe a suite of Allen’s neon-fringed assemblage-style sculptures or richly textured, surreal, symbol- and text-strewn drawings as “accompanying the 1971 album Juarez,” or “made at the same time as his new recordings.” My journey to Terry Allen runs through art galleries, but there are a range of music writers who have seen his appeal in reverse — not as a gifted artist who also writes songs but as a beloved, eccentric singer who also makes art. The late great Dave Hickey was the only critic who ever grasped the fullness of all of this and successfully addressed both aspects of Allen’s work equally and as a convincing whole — that is, until now.
To be fair, it took Allen years and years to work all this out for himself. And in some ways, the book’s subject is that very journey — the one wherein the artist moves falteringly but inexorably toward self-comprehension, all the while stock-taking, self-medicating, and trailblazing as they wait for the final piece to click into place.
Greaves relates Allen’s account of making his most important record, Lubbock (on everything), in the intricately woven, layered prose that characterizes the whole tome. “Even while living among the lush valleys, scenic mountains, and urban gridlock of the Golden State, the wide-open Panhandle landscape loomed large in the language and imagery of the songs Terry was writing, which he described in terms more cinematic than sonic: ‘The wind and the dirt are etched into West Texas music.’ In July 1978, he hoped to etch that wind and dirt into the grooves of a second record… Although in retrospect he could not have made Lubbock (on everything) anywhere else, in many ways Lubbock was the least likely place in the world for him to make a record, or to make anything, including amends.”
This most unusual life story unfolds across a landscape of beautifully penned digressions, memory pockets, and flash-forwards.
Allen’s oeuvre is already autobiographical, and this authorized biography’s strength is in weaving together not only the threads of Allen’s dual practice but also the further threads of his peculiar, marvelous, traumatic early life experiences and their immortal role as the subject of basically all the work he’s ever made and every song he’s ever written. “The moment the present ends, and memory begins,” Allen has observed, “it becomes fiction.”
Using Allen’s famous DUGOUT radio play and its constellation of related interdisciplinary iterations as the case study, Greaves writes, “DUGOUT is a mature work by a middle-aged artist stitching together the rags of the past and allowing the process to repair him reciprocally. But the closer you look, the clearer it becomes that Terry’s life and art alike have always been haunted by family history and by memory’s failing ever adequately to reconstruct or rehabilitate the collective and personal stories that we deploy to define ourselves.”
Greaves writes exhaustively and from his own perspective, as a folklorist and an art and music writer who has been observing and listening to Allen for decades. Greaves’s music label/culture hub, Paradise of Bachelors, has (re)released the seminal records Juarez (1975) and Lubbock (on everything) (1979), the albums that first put Allen on the culture map — and which Allen credits with the art world’s renewed interest in him. It was during the reissuing process that this expansive biography, which became a mountain — or a Texas plains tornado — of detail was conceived. It is an almost inconceivable amount of detail, but Allen lives so colorfully and Greaves writes so melodically that you don’t feel burdened by it, you just surf the funnel cloud.
Any novelistic undertaking would benefit from a story that sparks up in mid-century Lubbock, Texas, at the wrestling matches and concerts the hero’s former professional baseballer father promoted. Allen’s parents, as Greaves writes them, “existed simultaneously within the culturally and morally narrow confines of mainstream Lubbock society and totally outside that world, within the alternate dimensions of professional sports, music, and entertainment, which trafficked in importing often outlandish and dangerously radicalized and sexualized sounds, sights, and corporeal feats from far-flung locales to the ostensibly prudish and sometimes puritanical Panhandle.”
“The truth,” as Allen has often insisted, “is multiple.”
Then there was the time Elvis Presley came to dinner, and Allen’s growing desire to leave town, his subsequently formative art school years in 1960s Los Angeles (including cameos by Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray, and Andy Warhol), and a latter-day problematic but fruitful return to Texas — all before the denouement we already know is coming: making history in the worlds of both American music and conceptual art. Allen even ends up donating his archives to Texas Tech University in Lubbock.
This unusual life story unfolds across a landscape of beautifully penned digressions, memory pockets, and flash-forwards, and is shaped by notebooks, process materials, personal archives, and hundreds of interviews with Allen and his lifelong best friend, wife, and creative collaborator of decades, Jo Harvey Allen. As the book recounts, Jo Harvey and Terry Allen’s Rawhide and Roses radio show aired on Sunday mornings from 1968 to 1970 on the noncommercial station KPPC-FM and AM, “broadcast from the basement of the Pasadena Presbyterian Church. It was a country music show (broadly speaking) produced and largely programmed by Terry and hosted and helmed by Jo Harvey, making her, by most reckonings, the first female on-air country music radio DJ in history.”
Many notable friends made their cameos on this program, including musicians David Byrne and Kurt Vile; iconic painter Ed Ruscha; conceptual artist Bruce Nauman; fearless, convention-defying sculptor Kiki Smith, who called the book “complex and compassionate”; and early conceptual-art pioneer Allen Ruppersberg, with whom Allen founded the artists’ cooperative exhibition space Gallery 66, in East Hollywood. David Byrne later directed Jo Harvey as the iconic “Lying Woman” character in True Stories, establishing a relationship with Hollywood that continues to the present day — as when, for example, Terry and Jo Harvey delivered a sharp-edged gem of a scene in Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon.
For imparting information, the book can’t be beat, with nearly 140 pages of indices, expansive text notes, citations, and sourcing. No anecdote left behind, nor branch of the family tree unscaled. But its special charm is the homey quality of the prose, mirroring the tenor of Allen’s own work in its intimacy and gentle surrealism, frank relating of sometimes difficult and/or bizarre true facts, and the clarity with which the story catches up to the present day, where it was always headed and through which prism the tale had been framed all along. At one point, Greaves elegiacally describes Allen’s ancestry: “Pioneers and border-crossers to a person, they were, by and large, rugged agrarian hillfolk of the Ozarks and Appalachia — people often denigrated as hillbillies — from communities cast in the fastnesses and dappled folds of mountain hollers, the topographical opposite of the Llano Estacado.”
Like Allen’s best work in picture and song, the book moves between elements of crisply saturated clarity, softly distant silhouettes, truth and legend, political critique and radical honesty, pain and laughter, sex and death, music and noise, sound and vision. Allen is a unique kind of artist and this is the unique kind of book his life and work deserve; to that end, Greaves makes no secret of his personal affection for and professional collaboration with Allen. But he turns this total lack of objectivity into a superpower when it’s time to demonstrate a feel for the reality of the characters and deep empathy for the protagonist.
“‘The truth,’ as Allen has often insisted, ‘is multiple,’ and it is my hope that this biography braids a fair-minded — if not cold-blooded — parallax perspective from Terry’s memories, my research, and our friendship.” Thus Greaves manages to transcend the flawed-genius tropes and instead flood the zone with warts-and-all humanity — which is what we want not only out of biography but also out of plays, films, novels, songs, and art. ❖
Shana Nys Dambrot is an art critic, author, and curator based in Los Angeles and is the arts editor at LA Weekly. In 2022, she was awarded a Rabkin Prize for Visual Arts Journalism.
