VIA PRESS RELEASE | “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
Truckload of Art is the definitive, deep-dive, authorized, and first-ever biography of Terry Allen, the internationally acclaimed visual artist and iconoclastic musician whose work bridges the disparate worlds of contemporary art and country music. “People tell me it’s country music,” Terry Allen has joked, “and I ask, ‘Which country?’”
For nearly sixty years, Allen’s inimitable art has explored the borderlands of memory, crossing boundaries between disciplines and audiences by conjuring indelible stories out of the howling West Texas wind. Tracing influences from his Lubbock, Texas childhood, spent amidst wrestling matches and concerts organized by his father, to his formative years in the explosive Los Angeles art scene of the 1960s, author Brendan Greaves meticulously captures twenty years of both Allen’s art and music careers.
With humor and critical acumen, Greaves deftly recounts how Allen built a cult following with pioneering records like Lubbock (on everything) (1979)—widely considered an archetype of alternative country—and multiyear, multimedia bodies of richly narrative, interconnected art and theatrical works, including JUAREZ (ongoing since 1968), hailed as among the most significant statements in the history of American vernacular music and conceptual art.
Drawing on hundreds of revealing, exclusive interviews with Allen, his family members, and many of his notable friends, colleagues, and collaborators—from musicians like David Byrne and Kurt Vile to artists such as Bruce Nauman and Kiki Smith—Greaves offers a poetic, deeply personal portrait of arguably the most singularly multivalent storyteller of the American West.
Released in conjunction with the publication of Truckload of Art, the “Gonna California” EP (Paradise of Bachelors, 3/15/24) 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 vinyl copies, 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. Pre-order from PoB to bundle with a signed book.
Gonna California will be available on March 15, 2024, along with the first digital release of the four-song “Cowboy and the Stranger” EP, comprising the first recording, in 2018, of a song written in 1969 and three solo demo recordings dating to 1968—previously available only on a 2019 limited-edition cassette.
