Truckload of Art: The Life and Work of Terry Allen
By Brendan Greaves
Available 19 March 2024, preorder now via hachettebookgroup.com
SELECTED REVIEWS
"Call him what you want: the patriarch of Lubbock creatives, the greatest living visual artist from Texas, the other Texas music godfather besides Willie, the storyteller of the American West. It’s all pretty much true." - Joe Nick Patoski
full review, PDF | texashighways.com
"Prolific, profane, and voracious, he’s spent decades flourishing outside the mainstreams of the art world and the music world, save for occasional moments when the mainstream happens to intersect with his intuitive route. There’s a good chance he’s your favorite artist’s favorite country singer, or your favorite country singer’s favorite artist." - W Furgeson for Aquarium Drunkard
full review, PDF | aquariumdrunkard.com
"In this rollicking debut biography, Greaves, founder and owner of the record label Paradise of Bachelors, traces the knock-about life of artist, playwright, and country singer Terry Allen from his Lubbock, Tex., boyhood to international success." - Meg Thompson
full review, PDF | publishersweekly.com
"Country artist, conceptual artist, Texas artist: a celebratory biography of the rangy life and work of Terry Allen." - Zack Hatfield
full review, PDF | 4columns.org
"Greaves’ latest project is a book, “Truckload of Art: The Life and Work of Terry Allen” (Hachette Books). It tells the story of an artist who is at least as much of a multi-hyphenate as Greaves himself: musician, visual artist, writer, performer and all-around iconoclast Terry Allen. A native of Buddy Holly’s hometown of Lubbock, Texas, Allen is known for creating everything from sprawling musicals set in Mexican border towns to the “Notre Denver” gargoyle sculptures found in Denver International Airport." - Maris Whitley
full review, PDF | artsorange.org
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.
