Truckload of Art

The Life and Work of Terry Allen—An Authorized Biography

De: Brendan Greaves

Narrado por: Jason Culp, Brendan Greaves

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.

Reseñas de la Crítica

“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, author of How Music Works

“Brendan Greaves is an unusually deft and perceptive historian of music and art, but he writes with so much heart and verve that after a few chapters, his prose starts to feel like its own song: wild, intelligent, rhythmic, true. His subject here—the inimitable Terry Allen, one of the deepest and most wonderful American artists I can think of—is so well-served by Greaves’s adventurousness and smarts. What a gorgeous, necessary book.”—Amanda Petrusich, The New Yorker; author of Do Not Sell at Any Price: The Wild, Obsessive Hunt for the World's Rarest 78rpm Records

“Blending West Texas fiction, hearsay, memoir, anthropological dig, and journalistic fact, Brendan Greaves has fashioned a biographical narrative that skillfully frames the life and times of the visual artist, singer-songwriter, playwright, raconteur, and beautiful dreamer known as Terry Allen. Only a Truckload of Art could do him justice. I couldn’t put it down.”—Rodney Crowell

“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

“When I was asked to write a few sentences about this new book on Terry Allen’s life and art, I immediately felt that it was an impossible task. Then I thought about Terry and all the times I have asked him impossible questions and received the most profound responses from him in one or two words. He has been, hands down, one of the most influential characters in my life, and I’m looking forward to having this book to reference and share with friends, family, and future generations who may look to find their way through life in art and music. Because today’s rainbow really is tomorrow’s tamale.”—Ryan Bingham

“Terry Allen is our modern Michelangelo—a painter, sculptor, and conceptualist informed by honky-tonk sensibilities and a singer-songwriter of incisive, vividly-depicted songs who knows his way around galleries and museums. His Florence is Lubbock, Texas, where a local boast was ‘Lubbock has more sky.’ This biography tells precisely how Terry Allen filled up all that empty space. It is the most detailed history of the making of a life in art that I’ve ever read.”—Joe Nick Patoski, author of Willie Nelson: An Epic Life; director of Sir Doug and the Genuine Texas Cosmic Groove