Terry Allen is one of music’s biggest secrets. His 1970s albums won rave reviews on release. For years they were on critics’ top lists and referenced as influences by in-the-know artists.Allen, now 73, always on the wild-West Texan frontier between alt-country and visual art, has now reissued “Juarez” (1975), seen by some as the best concept album of all time, and its 1979 follow-up “Lubbock (On Everything)” with their companion artworks.Their creator’s art can be found in museums worldwide – Allen is known as a painter, sculptor, and even a Guggenheim Fellow. While he has worked with everyone from David Byrne to Lucinda Williams, his first two albums are stunning, often described with labels like “Americana” and “outlaw country.” Both make a strong case for his talent.“Juarez” plays a little like a crazy road movie which intertwines two couples (a sailor with a prostitute and a pachuco with his lover); their relationship ends in violence. “Lubbock” is a revisiting of Allen’s home town, famous for Buddy Holly and many more.Byrne has contributed an essay to the “Lubbock” reissue. He writes: “Maybe I can convince you that appreciation for Terry’s art, and this is surely art, is widespread. It goes well beyond Texas. In my opinion, it’s art that uses a popular form, hijacks that accessibility and familiarity, and says things you’d never expect those forms to say.”Below, Terry Allen answers a few questions in an interview with BLOUIN ARTINFO.How did the albums come about?There were two distinct things that happened with them, in retrospect. “Juarez” came out of a whole body of the work I was doing at the same time, drawings and sculpture and songs. I liked the idea that a song could tell one aspect of a story and a drawing could show another aspect. But “Juarez” was a story that wrote itself. I literally started songs and it is almost like I don’t know where they came from, they just started coming and it kind of resolved itself after about three or four years of work. I know that sounds a little evasive, but it’s really true! It was like a flood of images and information that was all coming together at the same time.For “Lubbock (On Everything),” I think the first song was “Truckload of Art.” After I finished “Juarez,” I started compiling those songs which I had written over time and there was an autobiographical thread in the songs, the images, the time they were written, and people they were written about. It fell into place as one thing. So the records were very different in how they were constructed, but they both have a thematic narrative that runs through both of them.You portray really strong characters — are they based on real people or a composite?My feeling about those characters — I have never thought of them as humans, as people. I think of them more like conditions or climates that are in motion, moving in and out of one another and colliding with one another, affecting one another and changing into one another. So they are characters, but even in the drawings there are no faces.Some people think “Juarez” would make a good movie, like “On the Road” or “Thelma and Louise.”I was never interested in it being a movie because I could never see faces. I did it once as a one-woman show, for my wife [of more than 50 years], Jo Harvey Allen, as a narrator who became all four of these characters. Then David Byrne and I wrote a musical theater piece for it and I did a series of installations, studies for possible sets for something that was never realized. Yes, I did write a screenplay, but that was pretty enigmatic because I did not look at the people with the exception of a few certain shots, for example you would see a close-up of [the character] Chic with her hair with razor blades in it.The experience making that piece has bled over into pretty much everything I have ever made – the idea that music and visual and writing can all function together, and not necessarily as a movie or theater particularly, just as an entity.These albums’ sales do not measure up to their deserved acclaim...Both of them have gone through a lot of incarnations. Both were initially on Fate Records, which was my own record company in partnership with a printmaker, a guy named Jack Lemmon in Chicago of Landfall Press. We had no clue on how to distribute anything or deal with any of the mercantile aspects. I basically did gigs and sold them from the back of a car or gave them away. They were licensed to Sugarhill until this recent release by Paradise of Bachelors. So they have had life but it's been pretty much under the radar and they stick their heads up once in a while. But I couldn’t be happier with this new package that both of them are in. The works with it give people a better idea of where they came from.In terms of neglected cult classics, you have been bracketed with Nick Drake, some of the obscure Tom Waits, and many more – are these fair comparisons?You know, I just never think about that! I never think these albums are old in that sense. “Juarez” came out of the 1960s culture, and “Lubbock” came of the reality of me when I left that place and then came back, almost like a prodigal in a sense. [Allen had been a professor of art at California State University.] As far as where they fit in a scheme of stuff that is being unearthed I don’t know, I don’t think of it that way!It seems like your relationship to Lubbock was a love-hate one. Is that fair?I think that’s fair, but it was pretty much an adolescent love-hate thing. Because it is using your hometown and what you don’t like about it to propel you out of there. In a sense, you never see your needs until you leave, and you never see the place until you come back. Then you realize that it is much richer or denser than the conception you had of it when you forced yourself to hate it to leave.What did local people say about the Lubbock record? You used a lot of local musicians in the recording.We did a big concert with all the band members that are still alive last February at the university and played the entire album, which I had never done live. Then Texas Tech University is taking all my wife’s and my archives, which includes all the notebooks and journals and drawings over the last 55 years. So I think they have made peace with me and I have made peace with them because we are very excited, especially about the archives.How do you feel about people doing PhDs in the works of Terry Allen?(Laughs) It is totally Martian!There is a real humor in some of the songs – football heroes and noble floozies... I can imagine you had a lot of fun doing those songs.Yes! Well, we are a pretty funny species and I don’t think the hilarity has changed much. If anything, we are getting funnier.Are there any songs on those first two albums you’d recommend as a good starting point?My suggestion would be close your eyes, just put the needle down and let it roll!Might there be more reissues?Maybe “Pedal Steel,” I don’t know. I also have a few songs that were not fully developed some time ago. My desire is also to do something brand new.Terry Allen’s albums are out now on Paradise of Bachelors. Live shows include Marfa on October 29 and Austin on January 14.
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