Next month sees the publication of Brendan Greaves’ Truckload of Art: The Life and Work of Terry Allen – the definitive, deep-dive, authorized, and first-ever biography of Terry Allen. “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 humour 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.
Brendan Greaves is the founder and owner of the record label Paradise of Bachelors and has collaborated on numerous projects with Terry Allen, including Pedal Steal + Four Corners, for which he earned a Grammy nomination for Best Album Notes. A folklorist, essayist, and lapsed art worker, he studied at Harvard and UNC, and lives in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, with his wife, Samantha, and son, Asa.
Terry Allen is my hero, and Brendan changed my life when he introduced us. It’s about time they change your life too.
– Kurt Vile
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
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.
Pre-Order the EP (limited-edition vinyl 7”/digital): https://lnk.to/PoB76
Hachette Books | March 19, 2024 | Hardcover | 576 Pages | ISBN: 9780306924545
Reviewed on KLOF Mag:
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