Irresistible Mirror: On Terry Allen and the Art of Biography
Brendan Greaves | Truckload of Art: The Life and Work of Terry Allen | Hachette Books | March 2024 | 560 Pages
In the winter of 1957-58, 20 years after the gangster fugitives of the ‘30s and their Hollywood counterparts and two years before In Cold Blood’s Clutter murders, a Nebraska teenager named Charles Starkweather embarked on an eleven-person killing spree across Nebraska and Wyoming with his girlfriend, Caril Ann Fugate, beginning with a service station attendant, followed immediately by Fugate’s three immediate family members. The headlines that followed sparked panic across the Mid- and Southwest. Preachers, parents, government officials, anyone with a pulpit or dinner table condemned the acts as emblematic of the emergent rock and roll culture and the dangers of teen sex. Rumor spread that the killers had slaughtered everyone in Nebraska, most of Iowa, and were headed through Oklahoma “looking forward to murdering everybody in Texas,” where another teenage boy four years Starkweather’s junior had become enraptured by the spree.
Terry Allen was then a 15 year old high school student in Lubbock, Texas. The son of an ex-ball player turned music promoter and a barrelhouse pianist and cosmetician, Allen came of age in an immediate and broader world which mirrored the sexuality, transgression, and brutality which still constitutes the emotional basis of his raw revisionist music and art. He grew up serving drinks stageside while Elvis, Hank Williams, B.B. King and others shimmied and roared from the blue lights above. By 1958, his ears were immersed in the rhythm and backbeat and fractious, disaffected lyrics of insurgent teen rebellion pounding out of records by Bo Diddley, Chuck Berry, and Eddie Cochran. In school that winter, he dug his head into his desk and muttered “Go, Charlie, go!” and pictured Starkweather, “his greasy hair and ducktails and Levi’s hanging below his ass and punk collar sticking straight up with a Lucky Strike burning in his face,” sailing away over blue asphalt. “It really connected with rock and roll,” he said, “the wild romance and danger of it, making that run with your girl…”
Starkweather was an outlaw of the classical American mold. But within a year and a half, he was caught, condemned in the public and historical record, sentenced to death, and executed by electric chair. Months after, Allen’s father died and his mother, lost to days-long drinking binges, became perpetually absent. Allen, who had always kept notebooks and drawn cartoons and figures, inspired by comic books and the sailors’ tattoos of his mother’s brothers (ships, sailors, birds, and the sea are amongst the most consistently recurring symbols in his work), left Lubbock after graduation and pointed his Ford filled with all his meager worldly possessions towards the Pacific, hoping to enroll at Chouinard Art Institute in Los Angeles. In “Gonna California,” a song he wrote just before departing Lubbock, he sings “Gonna California, gonna leave tomorrow / Leavin’ this town and all of its sorrow behind me…” The change was an instrument of both personal and artistic preservation. “Whatever bullshit I said was the reason for going,” Allen later wrote, “the main one was to save my life.”
By 1971, he had married his hometown sweetheart, the writer-actress Jo Harvey Allen, worked his way through art school doing gardening and handyman jobs around the Hollywood Hills, and opened his first big show at a gallery in Los Angeles. JUAREZ Series: The California Section, was the first iteration of what became JUAREZ, a visual and aural body of work Allen has returned to over and over throughout the course of his life. Taken as a whole, it consists of drawings, constructions, songs, prints, installations, texts, a screenplay, musical theater, and multiple plays.
The show’s success fueled his naturally obsessive work ethic. As a teenager he’d worked two jobs and caroused late into the night, often sleeping only three hours a day. In California, he shut himself in the cinder block-lined room that was his studio, working day and night, taking thirty-minute cat naps, banging away on an upright piano, making sculpturally textured, high contrast drawings that evoked a visual limbo between the Surreal and the Mexican muralists. By 1975, he’d completed the series’ next two parts, The Cortez Section and The Juarez Section, and released his first studio album, also entitled Juarez.
The JUAREZ narrative, inspired by Starkweather’s run, tracks four characters across three sections: Sailor and Alice meet in San Diego and elope to Cortez, Colorado at the same time Jabo and his L.A. girlfriend, Chic Blundie, return to Cortez, Jabo’s hometown (intercut with scenes of the Aztec genocide perpetrated by the town’s conquistador namesake). There, Jabo and Chic commit a double murder, shooting the former two and lighting out to Juárez, Mexico. Along the way, they “get drunk / fuck / cry-to-believe together”; turn the radio up and “[crash] the state lines”; move to the noise of slide guitar, piano, analog rain; fall into and out of the sky as pastel and graphite skeletons, doves, wide-mouthed fish, and burning hearts in a dark mosaic of fractured timelines, geographies, and styles. As Allen told his biographer, Brendan Greaves: “I never thought of the characters in JUAREZ as actual flesh and blood people, as much as I thought of them as climates, emotional climates or atmospheres in a state of dispossession, always in motion. They were constantly shape-shifting and changing and colliding with one another, moving through these geographical focal points.”
Truckload of Art: The Life and Work of Terry Allen, Greaves’ new authorized biography and the first Allen biography to be written, grafts JUAREZ’s three part structure onto Allen’s life, divided again along geographic lines: Lubbock, California, and Santa Fe, where the 81 year old Allen now lives and works. The biography, published by Hachette in March of last year after six years of writing and many more of research, both formal and informal, is the latest archival project in a long collaborative effort to revive and contextualize Allen’s last 50 years of artmaking. Since 2015, Greaves, the founder and owner of the record label Paradise of Bachelors, and Allen have been “collaborating closely on a campaign to reissue [Allen’s] music within the context of his visual and theatrical art.” In those ten years, Paradise of Bachelors has reissued Allen’s first four albums with accompanying prints, lyric sheets, and essays, compiled his radio plays and audio works into one deluxe set, and released his first studio album in seven years, Just Like Moby Dick (2020). The campaign, Greaves writes in his introduction, “involved in-depth archival research and countless hours of interviews and oral recordings with Allen, his family members, and his myriad friends and associates.”
By 2018, the groundwork had been laid. The archive, the interviews, the relationships were in place. The story had been lived. That summer, Allen asked Greaves to help him tell it. From the start, the project presented its own unique set of difficulties. Any authorized biography of a living figure has the dual advantage and weakness of access overseen and managed (or manipulated) by its subject. “This is, of course,” Greaves writes, “fertile but treacherous territory for a biographer.”
Allen himself has tackled the absurdities and conflicts of biography and autobiography throughout his work. As the characters in Dugout reflect about aging and memory: “Your life just turns into a bucket full of stories, with a little bitty hole in the bottom. . . . Or a bucket full of holes, with a little bitty story in the bottom.” In Bleeder, the inscrutable eponymous character candidly assesses “the whole idea of biography” as “pure bullshit, some powdered-up, sick, perverted form of necropholia.”
Yet despite Allen’s legitimate concerns about being torn open, cut apart, reduced to isolated anecdotes, what we might call premature necrophilia, he seems to have given Greaves complete trust and freedom to tell his stories as Greaves saw them. In Truckload of Art, Greaves’ approach to storytelling, as he tells us in the “Methodology” section at the back of the book, lies somewhere between privileged observation and collaborative ethnography. Like most authorized biographers, he knows that his professional relationship with his subject is predicated upon the restoration and promotion of his subject’s legacy and image, and therefore cannot be “objective,” at least not in the way journalists and historians pretend to be. Unlike other biographers, he is willing to say so. His background, he explains, is in folklore, “a discipline that, at its best, foregrounds subjectivity and strives to avoid positioning those about whom we write as clinical ‘subjects,’ instead regarding them as consultants and teachers, partners in production, and perhaps even as friends.”
As a curator, folklorist, and critic, Greaves knows that the materials shape the story. In Truckload of Art, they act as signposts that dictate the narrative’s inner logic. From 1960, three months after his father’s death, Allen kept journals and notebooks which document the evolution of his thought, projects, personal relationships, and “authorial persona,” gradually shifting in content and penmanship, from “juvenile cursive” to the “Montblanc-inked all-caps of his mature style.” “The notebooks,” Greaves writes, “like so many of his projects, epitomize Allen’s encyclopedic impulse toward absorbing and reflecting, literally, everything . . . to record the entirety of his experience, in case any scrap might inform, transform, or be incorporated into his art.” They reflect his credo: “When it happens, I want to be there.” So he records every thought, image, gesture. He goes to the studio every day, regardless of burnout. Whenever or wherever it happens—on the road, at a movie, in a photo or invented memory—he’s there. “It’s not a career,” he told Greaves, “it’s a way you choose to live. Your time shifts to that.”
The notebooks and what Greaves calls Allen’s “autobiographical texts”—the various drafts of MemWars (a “series of drawings, texts, and a video installation”) and DUGOUT (“Allen’s body of work that explores his parents Sled and Pauline Allen’s remarkable lives and his own childhood”)—form the book’s material core. They offer both rich and dangerous ground for an artist’s biographer. For Allen, art is experience and vice versa. “There is no difference,” he has written, “between the ‘real’ and the ‘imaginary.’” In this sense, Truckload of Art is just as much a biography of a mind as it is of a life or a body of work. Over the book’s some 500 pages, we learn of its anxieties and preoccupations (memory, violence, disaster). We learn of the lived moments it narrativizes, uses as frames and symbols. And we learn of its ragged, spiraling course across various projects and media. We watch JUAREZ emerge, we see and hear interconnected or stand-alone exhibitions, performances, records, soundtracks, as well as collaborations with Jo Harvey. We witness the birth of his two sons, his mother’s death, marital troubles, his and Jo Harvey’s move to Santa Fe. We see the works he made of them.
In the summer of 1978, halfway through the biography’s “California Section,” Allen returns to Lubbock. We turn the page and see the bold, black chapter lettering (a typographical imitation of Allen’s all-caps aesthetic): “THE ONLY MOUNTAIN IN LUBBOCK.” The cyclical fatedness of his life and work makes this unsurprising. “That’s what art does,” Allen has said. “It takes you into these weird circles back into yourself.” “Although in retrospect he could not have made Lubbock (on everything) anywhere else,” Greaves writes, “in many ways Lubbock was the least likely place in the world for him to make a record, or to make anything, including amends.” Following his father’s death, Allen used Lubbock as a scapegoat. That summer, at thirty five and a father himself, “with a fledgling art career but few musical prospects,” he returned to make his second record in a state of relapsed grief and stood over the graves of his father and Buddy Holly (a Lubbock native and childhood hero), buried months apart in the same cemetery. “I never really knew Lubbock,” Allen told Greaves, “until I went back to record Lubbock (on everything).”
On his first day at Caldwell Studios, Allen met Lloyd Maines, the pedal steel, dobro, and slide guitarist who from that moment on would be his most consistent musical collaborator and member of his backing group, a loose, rotating conglomerate called the Panhandle Mystery Band. “Terry walked in the front door wearing a pair of snakeskin boots and carrying a bold leather-bound notebook full of songs,” Maines recalled. He stood by the grand piano while Allen, in his usual, peculiar method of introducing his compositions, played Maines the entire album in sequence:
They began tracking the next night, the evening of Monday, July 17, cutting both “Amarillo Highway” and “High Plains Jamboree,” the first two tracks on the album, and proceeding through each subsequent song in nearly exactly Allen’s predetermined track sequence, with only a couple deviations, over the course of the next two weeks. Terry’s tooled-leather portfolio, floridly inscribed as “The Terry Allen Silver Dollar Songbook,” mapped the album’s symmetrical structure of song groupings: exploring Lubbock, through landscape and portrait songs, on the first vinyl side; on the second, critiquing the art world; and then, following an intermission of comical songs related to food, drink, and drugs, concluding side three with two songs about war. The fourth side lands squarely on the back of Terry’s head, with the final four deeply personal autobiographical songs.
These four compositions, “My Amigo,” “The Pink and Black Song,” “The Thirty Years Waltz (for Jo Harvey),” and “I Just Left Myself,” were of a bare, emotional fragility unseen since “Gonna California,” his lyric salute to Lubbock and West Coast rebirth. Amidst swirling waltzes, phasers and steel, verses rattle and turn: “And when the blue of your eyes / Met my blues down inside / Well I knew . . . that we two . . . could fly”; “Well / I just left myself today / Hell / I couldn't wait to get away / There’s still a smear /Across the mirror / That I have been / But it won’t / Reflect on me / Again.” More than any other album, Lubbock showcases the full sweep of Allen’s range, the depths of his musical and thematic roots. Across its 20 songs, we feel the shift from the symbolically evocative Juarez to compositions grounded in an autobiographical “I” or close third observer of composites and character ciphers, in which Allen hid large pieces of himself.
We are all re-living the future, consequently . . . all art is viewed from behind, Allen wrote in 1976, in the prologue of RING, a multimedia piece he worked on prior to, concurrent with, and after the recording of Lubbock. Greaves takes this quote, a made-to-order metaphor for the art of biography, as his epigraph. To a biographer, RING itself is irresistible, a trick mirror Allen seems to be holding up to himself. In classic archetypal form (the figures in his songs are often anonymous), it follows two characters, HE and SHE, both writers, but unlike the Allens, childless: “Their relationship, corrupted by his addictions to alcohol and gambling and her paranoia, devolves into mutual accusations of infidelity,” Greaves writes. “He stops writing anything but angry letters and telegrams, inheriting her sensitivity and paranoia, and She begins writing, usurping his words. Having thus merged or traded aspects of their identities, the couple separates.” Her career takes off; his evaporates into benders. Eventually, he commits suicide. “She remarries and fades into obscurity.” Here, we have an alternative narrative to the Allens’ own “Thirty Years Waltz”: “the storms and the rains,” “the fears and the pains,” “the wars and the games” which, as the song chronicles, often threatened and pushed their relationship into violent, irreconcilable extremes.
The life of an artist, the demands of agents, projects, institutions, none of it is easily reconcilable with love and commitment and giving oneself over to another. Over the years, Terry and Jo Harvey found ways to collaborate in both writing and performance. They found inspiration and creative energy in each other’s work and ideas, but also, due to frequently diverging careers, endured long periods of travel and separation. When they did reunite, long-standing resentments and addictions undermined their relationship. Throughout the ‘80s, Allen tried to quit drinking, smoking, taking pills, but always relapsed. He had chronic insomnia, chronic headaches from withdrawal after finally flushing his supply for good in January of 1989. He disapproved of Jo Harvey’s film career, “both because he thought the work was beneath her talents, and that she should only be performing scripts she wrote herself or his own work, and because he hated how it took her away from home and back to L.A. They fought about that too.”
And yet, they stayed together, overcoming the tests of will, of ego, of love. The weight of this fact is not lost on Greaves. He remarks, in one of the book’s last chapters, on
…the longevity, tenacity, and sempiternal beauty of the Allens’ marriage and family in the face of trauma and discord and sometimes ruthless jealousy, both self-imposed and external. I can’t think of any comparable examples of prominent artists who have stayed together as a couple for so long, collaborating regularly, while also maintaining distinct careers.
He admits, in its closing pages, that “it is no accident that the dawn of my close working relationship with Terry followed the death of my own father, Kenneth Greaves,” in 2013, and that “in the wake of my dad’s death, I was perhaps subconsciously seeking some paternal presence in my life.” And so, we return from whence we came. Death and grief, those great motivators, bring us full circle: “Suddenly, reminded of limited time, the project of inhabiting the world of Juarez and opening it to a wider audience felt somehow more urgent to me,” Greaves writes. In 2015, the licenses for Allen’s back catalog finally expired. That year, he and Greaves licensed his first two records to Paradise of Bachelors and began their reissue campaign. Now, at long last, we have an Allen biography. In Greaves, Allen has found the kind of friend, curator, and collaborator every great artist deserves. One who is often noticeably absent during their twilight years, when they are abandoned, out of print and circulation, forgotten by history, invisible to the present. With the joint reissues of Juarez and Lubbock in 2016, “Allen’s late-career renaissance,” Greaves writes, developed “into a full-scale revival.” “Revivals” of this sort can last anywhere from a day to generations into the future. I suspect this one is far from over.