Truckload of Art
The Life and Work of Terry Allen—An Authorized Biography
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
*A New York Times Best Art Book of 2024*
The definitive, authorized, and first-ever biography of Terry Allen, the internationally acclaimed visual artist and iconoclastic songwriter who occupies an utterly unique position straddling the disparate, and usually distant, worlds of conceptual 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.
In Truckload of Art, author Brendan Greaves exhaustively traces the influences that shaped Allen’s extraordinary life, from his childhood in Lubbock, Texas, spent ringside and sidestage at the wrestling matches and concerts his father promoted, to his formative art-school years in incendiary 1960s Los Angeles, and through subsequent decades doggedly pursuing his uncompromising artistic vision. With humor and critical acumen, Greaves deftly recounts how Allen built a career and cult following with pioneering independent 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 interviews with Allen himself, his family members, and his many notable friends, colleagues, and collaborators—from musicians like David Byrne and Kurt Vile to artists such as Bruce Nauman and Kiki Smith—and informed by unprecedented access to the artist’s home, studio, journals, and archives, Greaves offers a poetic, deeply personal portrait of arguably the most singularly multivalent storyteller of the American West.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this rollicking debut biography, Greaves, founder and owner of the record label Paradise of Bachelors, traces the knock-about life of artist, playwright, and country singer Terry Allen from his Lubbock, Tex., boyhood to international success. Among key episodes, Greaves recaps Allen's tempestuous childhood with his dad, Sled, a professional baseball player turned showbiz promoter, and mom Pauline, a honky-tonk pianist and alcoholic; his early-1960s escape to California and rise as a multimedia artist (one of his installations featured rotting pig's hearts in an aquarium); his career as an alt-country pioneer; and his marriage to his high school sweetheart, actress and playwright Jo Harvey Allen. Greaves's loose-jointed narrative is a thrilling whirl of recording sessions, theater rehearsals, marital spats and makeups, and off-the-wall encounters with Elvis, the Manson Family, and others. The Allen that emerges is high-spirited, sometimes mournful, often jangling with tension, and uncompromising in his artistic vision. Scrupulous detail and raucous picaresque merge with evocative discussions of the artist's work (of an 1974 installation, Greaves observes, "The center panel, Gonorrhea Madonna, was built around a large, hand-tinted photo of a young girl, her awkward stance and deer-in-the-headlights expression... offset by a coy grin and adult evening wear. This provocative image... is in fact eleven-year-old Terry himself, in drag"). It adds up to a fascinating portrait of an American original. Meg Thompson, Thompson Literary.
