Truckload of Art

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. Allen’s adventures in art and music, from the mid-1960s through his recent renaissance, Greaves asserts, offer a fascinating alternate, or parallel, history of American artistry. It is a history in which established geographies and genre barriers do not hold—in which a song can also be a sculpture, and a play can spring forth from drawings—in which an unlikely confluence of Californian conceptualism and Texan country-rock challenges our preconceptions about the limits and borders of expressive culture, the longevity and productivity of artist marriages and creative partnerships, and what one artist can accomplish in one lifetime. Like Allen’s life work, Greaves’s deep-dive critical biography joins music, visual art, and theater—braiding histories both personal and cultural—in the service of exploring the strange terrain of memory, of conjuring indelible stories, horrific and hilarious alike, out of the howling West Texas wind.