Truckload of art The life and work of Terry Allen : an authorized biography

Greaves describes singer, songwriter, and visual artist Terry Allen's wide-ranging and eclectic body of work as "elegant and raw, prayerful and profane, immediate and cryptic." He maintains that the Kansas-born, Texas-raised Allen occupies "an utterly unique" position in popular culture, straddling the seemingly very different worlds of conceptual art and country music. Allen ignores and even relishes these so-called distinctions, Greaves notes. In addition to Allen's numerous recordings (his concept album Juarez is among his best-known work), he has also created mixed-media drawings, installations, theatrical productions, radio plays, prose, poetry, and more. According to Greaves, by being an outlier and cult figure, Allen has been able to pursue his own creative pursuits while influencing and mentoring generations of younger artists from Jason Isbell to Sturgill Simpson to Jeff Tweedy, collaborating with the likes of Joe Ely, Lucinda Williams, and David Byrne. Greaves maintains that Allen's art is narrative in nature: "Much of it concerns the instability of memory." In this masterful biography of an uncompromising artist, Greaves follows Allen from his upbringing in Lubbock, Texas, through studying at Chouinard Art Institute in Los Angeles, where "he found his people," and on to Santa Fe, where he lives today. An endlessly fascinating biography of an endlessly fascinating artist.

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. Among key episodes, Greaves recaps Allen's tempestuous childhood with his dad, Sled, a professional baseball player turned showbiz promoter, and mom Pauline, a honky-tonk pianist and alcoholic; his early-1960s escape to California and rise as a multimedia artist (one of his installations featured rotting pig's hearts in an aquarium); his career as an alt-country pioneer; and his marriage to his high school sweetheart, actress and playwright Jo Harvey Allen. Greaves's loose-jointed narrative is a thrilling whirl of recording sessions, theater rehearsals, marital spats and makeups, and off-the-wall encounters with Elvis, the Manson Family, and others. The Allen that emerges is high-spirited, sometimes mournful, often jangling with tension, and uncompromising in his artistic vision. Scrupulous detail and raucous picaresque merge with evocative discussions of the artist's work (of an 1974 installation, Greaves observes, "The center panel, Gonorrhea Madonna, was built around a large, hand-tinted photo of a young girl, her awkward stance and deer-in-the-headlights expression... offset by a coy grin and adult evening wear. This provocative image... is in fact eleven-year-old Terry himself, in drag"). It adds up to a fascinating portrait of an American original. Meg Thompson, Thompson Literary. (Mar.)