Renaissance Man
Truckload of Art: The Life and Work of Terry Allen—An Authorized Biography
by Brendan Greaves.
New York: Hachette Book Group, 2024.
527 pp. $34 Hardcover.
Reviewed by
Rich Kelly
Terry Allen is an apt subject for biography. Allen’s life invites observers to approach his work from multiple angles, challenging us to understand its complexity. Perhaps a book isn’t enough. Maybe Brendan Greaves’s Truckload of Art: The Life and Work of Terry Allen—An Authorized Biography requires an accompanying album, series of drawings, video screens of Texas panhandle scenes, and an avant-garde theater piece to get to the core of Allen’s art and impact. Unrealistic expectations aside, Greaves’s tome is a strong, highly readable start at grasping the project of Allen’s life.
Allen’s artistic legacy is staggering. Allen is, and is likely to remain, the only person to be awarded fellowships for his art from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and the Townes Van Zandt Songwriter award.
For Greaves, a museum curator and gallerist, Allen was first a California based conceptual artist whose work today graces museums around the world as well as public spaces across the United States. Other readers know Allen as a seminal figure in the world of Texas country music with little or no knowledge of his other endeavors. As co-owner of Paradise of Bachelors, a record label, in part, created to rerelease Allen’s formerly obscure Juarez (1975) and Lubbock (on everything) (1979) LPs, Greaves is equipped to recount Allen’s life and career.
The author’s prose is often so well constructed that the reader has to look for punctuation to determine if the words are Greaves’s or Allen’s, a true accomplishment considering the subject’s extraordinary use of language. Greaves’s background in the art world is apparent in his descriptions of and analysis of Allen’s visual art although the author occasionally descends into the sort of artspeak that may lose some readers.
The Allens’ participation is also invaluable. Allen’s notebooks documenting his life and art, (“Maybe these notebooks are my art” Allen wondered), provide Allen’s real time state of mind that would be impossible to gain otherwise. The notebooks and the centrality of Allen’s life to his art are so integral to Greaves’s work, the finished product is a sort of biography of an autobiography. Interviews with Allen’s wide-ranging circle of family and friends, most importantly Terry’s wife of more than a half century, Jo Harvey, brings an intimacy and depth to the story secondary research could never provide.
Greaves’s work, like Allen’s, is heavily centered around geography. The book begins with Allen’s parents, Sled, a local baseball hero turned wrestling and music venue owner and promoter, and Pauline, a barrelhouse piano player with a mysterious and salacious past. Dissatisfied with the offerings of life in Lubbock, Allen makes a desperate flight to Los Angeles to study art. Learning his craft in 1960s Los Angeles, Allen displays an impressive Zelig like ability to interact with major cultural figures. Having already met performers such as Hank Williams, Elvis Presley, Bo Diddly, and, obviously, Buddy Holly through Sled’s venue, Allen has chance encounters with a dazzling array of luminaries in Los Angeles including Marcel Duchamp, The Doors, Sam Shepard, Andy Warhol, Don Everly, murderess Sexy Sadie of the Manson Family, and Wink Martindale, among others.
The first narrative arc of Greaves’s work is Allen fleeing Lubbock for art only for his art compelling him back to the Texas panhandle. As the work travels through Lubbock and into Allen’s current home of Santa Fe, it settles into more of a list of Allen’s works, accomplishments, and relationships, particularly as Allen becomes a quirky, but revered figure in the world of Texas country music. Here, again, we see another gallery of stars enter Allen’s life, this time more predictably as Joe Ely, Butch Hancock, Jimmie Dale Gilmore, Guy Clark, and Lloyd Maines, the center of Texas country music for the last half century, all have deep panhandle roots. There are, however, still surprises. Talking Heads frontman David Byrne becomes a close friend and co-conspirator with the Allens. Tommy Lee Jones and Cormac McCarthy also appear.
As Terry becomes a respected artist and musician, a conflict occurs toward him displaying his multimedia works. For Allen, all senses are engaged in trying to convey his vision. A showing may have paintings, drawing, sculptures, soft lead elements that attendees can imprint into themselves, smells of West Texas dirt, video, theater performances, and live and recorded music. Allen attempted these sorts of displays since the early 1960s, waiting, impatiently, for the concept of multimedia presentation to be truly embraced.
A third key theme is the Allen family, particularly Jo Harvey and Terry’s long marriage. The book closely tracks, if not analyzes, Jo Harvey’s transformation from mother and housewife to accomplished writer and actor. Many readers will also be interested in the lives of the couple’s sons, Bukka and Bale, an accomplished musician and visual artist respectively. The cooperation of the family does come at a literary cost. While the story of Terry Allen presented here is no hagiography, his shortcomings are frequently highlighted. Greaves covers Allen’s long struggle with prescription opioids, and he repeatedly details both Allens being “jealous” without referencing any extramarital partners. These insinuations are subjects without objects. In the end, this is a small price to pay for the private insights of the Allens and their circle, which pays off in an excellent, highly readable exploration of the art and life of one of Texas’s most important creative couples.
Rich Kelly pioneered what came to be called Texas country as a radio format during his time as an undergraduate at Texas State University. Currently, he lives in his native Austin, where he has taught high school for twenty-three years as well as teaching history at Austin Community College.