The Brooklyn Rail

Let’s hear it for nationalism! No, not the Christian kind, the blood-and-soil kind, the “American Exceptionalism” kind. Well, maybe the latter, but not in the way of government policy and imperialism: in the American vernacular, the way Americans walk and talk and write and make music (outside the academies). American style, American hubris, American tragedies, American genius; the blues, baseball, barbecue, blue jeans. Because for generations, general-interest nonfiction reading and writing has been dominated by political thinking and consensus building. The fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War is attributed to the exceptionalism of American defense spending and Saint Ronald Reagan—the two main sources of the pernicious decline of this country since 1980—when what brought about those victories was Levi’s, Coca-Cola, Michael Jackson, and the like. You can’t keep on keeping people down when they want to dance, sing, look cool, and enjoy some refreshments.

Being inside American culture can make it hard to see this, especially through that morass of political thinking and media. It can be hard to see genius for what it is, especially when it’s in the popular sphere, away from the institutional consensus of awards, grants, the rewarding for past success that is its own political dominance of cultural thinking. The mythical allure of the outsider almost never makes it through this barrier, but then the real outsiders are too complex, too multitudinous for most institutional thinking to grasp. That’s the case with Terry Allen.

As the parable of the blind men and the elephant has noted, it’s best to go piece by piece, and even then there’s way too much Allen to fit into one article in one section of a journal. This one is ostensibly about Brendan Greaves’s invaluable biography of Allen, which in five hundred-plus pages of text and extensive notes tells Allen’s story up to this point—he turned eighty-one in May—but demands a critical companion to the artist. And Allen is indeed an artist (although again, this article is about his music making) with an art school degree, university teaching experience, prestigious grants and fellowships, and works in multiple mediums collected by the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, etc., et al. He has written and made stage and radio dramas. But—and in no small part because of the immediacy and reach of the medium—he is most well known and has had the deepest effect as one of the greatest modern country musicians.

Country music, along with hip-hop, is the most prominent expression of the American vernacular—the way people think and what they talk about and how they say it. The genre is dominated by the industrial type production of songs and stars, a commodified celebration of the fetish for stuff like trucks, guns, and Budweiser. The pervasive de facto fundamental in American mass culture is worship of the dollar: forming and representing one’s personal identity and values—and community/subculture—through what one buys is the surface expression of this, and despite the ritualistic displays of virtue in the songs, celebrating buying manufactured country music is solipsistic and decadent (not to mention frequently racist and authoritarian). The music has always had a conservative bent—going back to what Ted Gioia has pointed out is its roots in ancient pastoral song making—but George H.W. Bush’s phony love for the Oak Ridge Boys and pork rinds didn’t so much make Republicans real populists as it co-opted the music into a narrow and ugly political conformity.

Standing against this is the vastness of America, the multiple cultures and cross cultures, and the likes of Allen. He’s less a country musician than someone who grew up in the Midwest and Texas making music as part of his family upbringing, and then singing songs about his slice of the American pie. The twang in his music is the sound of the American Southwest, not Nashville—songs that capture the permeable geographical and cultural borders of the Southwest, between aspirations and archetypes, how self-romanticization can lead to triumph and tragedy.

His first album, Juarez (1975), is still one of the finest and most singular concept albums of the recording era. In personable, intimate audio, Allen sits at the piano and narrates the story of two couples, both in love, who hit the road and collide with deadly results. Its honky-tonk murder ballads in song and spoken word were such a foundation to Allen’s work that the concept later extended into the radio plays heard on Pedal Steal + Four Corners. (Both albums have been reissued on Greaves’s Paradise of Bachelors label in lovely packaging that include details involving research and notes from Greaves.)

The geographic focus of the story is Cortez, Colorado, and that name pops up in Allen’s music like a fever that erupts out of an endless, low-level infection. On Juarez it is where Anglo and Mexican cultures meet in murder. In the song “Cortez Sail,” from the currently out-of-print 1999 album Salivation (released by Sugar Hill Records), it’s a fun little town that happens to namecheck the conquistador who burned his boats on landing in the New World and destroyed the Aztec Empire. It starts as a jaunty, hitting-the-road song:

Yeah you're leaving LA / On a cloudy day … An you turn on your radio / An let the wind blow / With your rock n roll / Down the highway … You're going home / To Mexico

Then the minor key B section comes in:

Four hundred years ago / Down in Mexico / The Spanish galleons drew near … Yeah Cortez he come / With his men and his guns … An he wouldn't let no man / Talk him in to being anything other than / Conquistador bold / Yeah Pachuco to Paradise.

The protagonist returns, the “Colorado rain” washing away his “California past.” Because he’s a Pachuco too, he’s armed and the law is on his trail, which leads to “Paradise.” All this with a wry, charming twang and a little bit of shuffle, as if violence, real violence—not tough-guy-in-a-Cybertruck with a big hat and no cattle—the massacres and burned villages and subjugation that built the European expansion into North America, is as American as apple pie. Which it is: the continent a proving ground for the “exceptionalism” to come. The pastoralism of home and hearth, the small town where you’ll get lynched if you protest for the radical notion that all men are created equal, is built on top of an earlier, scorched pasture.

It’s not just the words, but the down-home music and Allen’s delivery that makes this work, just a friendly guy telling you a story that starts off entertaining then gets increasingly disorienting before it kicks your guts in the end. And you either cry or laugh. It bears repeating that Allen is one of few major American visual artists who have also had songs play on AM radio, so many listening to them in the car as they drive across the empty spaces of Texas. His most popular song is probably “Gimme a Ride to Heaven Boy,” a typical trucks/guns/beer/Jesus tune where the narrator picks up a hitchhiker who says “Gimme a ride to heaven boy / I'll Show you paradise / Yeah gimme a ride to heaven boy / My name is Jesus Christ,” and he needs to talk to “my dad.”

The driver tries to hide his beer, and his passenger tells him: “My friend, / I know you must think it's odd / But you got nothin to fear about drinkin a beer / If you share it with the son of God.” Sounds good! Except in the end the hitchhiker pulls a gun and steals the truck, singing as he drives away: “The Lord moves in mysterious ways / and tonight, my son … He's gonna use your car.”

The real masterpiece to these ears is Lubbock (On Everything) (reissued in 2016 by Paradise of Bachelors). The other albums you want to listen to again and again, Lubbock you have to be careful with because when you put it on, you don’t want to do anything else in your life, ever again. The above songs are mini-epics, full of twists and turns, Lubbock is more concentrated overall, vignettes and personal portraits that sound lighter but, if you listen at all, go deeper, are even more complex. It’s stories that take the small-town received values and pushes them to their logical conclusion, with humor and heartbreak, like “The Great Joe Bob (a Regional Tragedy)” and the lounge-samba of “Cocktails for Three.” The first track on the album is “Amarillo Highway (for Dave Hickey),” sliding pedal steel guitars spinning out a roadhouse tune about the late, great art critic that captures so, so much. There’s Hickey the gambler, popping pills, in all his plainspoken glory, and it was that plain speaking that made him glorious: discernment and sensitivity and perception written out in the vernacular. The song explains all that, and Allen too, and their place in American culture: “I don't wear no Stetson / But I'm willin to bet son / That I'm a big a Texan as you are / ’Cause / There's a girl in her bare feet / 'Sleep on the back seat / An that trunk is full of Pearl … and Lone Star.”

Lubbock also has the song that became the title of the biography. A waltz sways while Allen speaks and sings a story about an East Coast artist loading up a truck, “With the most significant piles / And influential heaps of Art Work / To ever be assembled in Modern Times.” The truck rolls over off the highway, catches fire,

an important artwork / Was thrown burning to the ground / Tragically … landing in the weeds … Yeah but nobody … knows what it means … And it's a terrible sight / If a person were to see it / But there weren't nobody around.

Allen saw it, and he probably thought that even if nobody knew what he was singing about, it would sure sound good to your ears if you were sitting at a bar in your jeans, two or three Lone Stars in. And that’s American art.