Truckload of Art: The Life and Work of Terry Allen by Brendan Greaves. Hachette Books, 2024. 576 pages.

BRENDAN GREAVES'S Truckload of Art: The Life and Work of Terry Allen was named one of The New York Times' "Best Art Books of 2024." It's the authorized biography of Terry Allen, an internationally acclaimed visual artist and iconoclastic musician whose work bridges contemporary art and country music. It's also the second form that a collaboration between Allen and Greaves has taken: Greaves's record label, Paradise of Bachelors, began rereleasing Allen's musical back catalog in 2016, kick-starting a fresh wave of acclaim, and introducing Allen's music to a fresh generation of fans. In April, I met Greaves in the Paradise of Bachelors office in Carrboro, North Carolina, to discuss his approach to biography, the influence of his training as a folklorist, and the context behind Allen's roiling music and art.

COURTNEY THOMAS: Terry Allen is an artist who bridges genres and mediums, working in sculpture and drawing, and creating music that was once described in The Village Voice as "some of the strangest art-rock you ever heard ... desperado dadaism." How did you approach building a narrative that frames his work as one coherent career?

BRENDAN GREAVES: Terry has always seen his art practice and his music practice and writing and theatrical work as "one big thing," as he likes to call it -- more of a tapestry, or integral art practice. Working with him before the book on reissues of his back catalog, I was careful to try to frame the music that we were reissuing within the context of the visual art and theatrical work that orbited it. The essays for those reissues emphasized the interdisciplinarity of the work and had images of the visual art and stills from performances, as well as drawings and lyrics.

I think Terry would tell you that one of the reasons that he enjoyed working with me and trusted me to do this book was because I was willing and able to look at it as one thing, which a lot of people hadn't done, critically speaking. I think, in general, other artists have an easier time considering the work of an artist who works in an interdisciplinary way -- it was more critics and institutions that struggled with it. But the more you look at his work, the more you realize that it really is completely integrated.

One of the fascinating things he told me was that if he was working on a drawing in the studio his hands would get sore, so he would sit down at the piano and play and work on songs. It was almost a mechanical exercise, to keep his body and mind limber and relieve cramping. I think that is part of how the work evolved in various media: the actual, physical act of working and making it lent itself to doing different things with his body.

Did he always have a piano in the studio?

Especially in L.A., there were so many homes and studios. When he was in Los Angeles, as an art student at Chouinard, he had a studio on campus. After graduating, he always maintained the studio in his home, his string of apartments with [his wife] Jo Harvey. And then later he had more dedicated spaces outside his home. He always tried to have a piano in the studio. I think there may have been a few gaps when a piano went missing -- famously, a Wurlitzer keyboard was stolen [outside his Silver Lake apartment].

He busted up at least one ...

Yeah, he took an axe to one. Another ended up smashing holes in the wall when they were trying to move it, so he sawed off [its] corners to fit it up the stairs in kind of a rage. He's never been precious about pianos. He was on the cover of Art in America in the '80s, standing by his piano. A huge portion of it is covered with chewing gum, globbed on almost like a pointillist painting, because he was working with chewing gum in some of his artworks at the time. It's hard to imagine someone else wanting to sit at this thing and play it; it's kind of repulsive.

Did your approach change between liner notes and essays on the music rereleases and Truckload of Art?

Certainly scale was one big difference. The book gave me space to really dig in. In fact, too much space -- the original draft was about twice the length of the final book, absurdly. The essays in the reissue booklets are slightly more formal and less personal, because I think the context and occasion called for a more critical look at the albums and the related art.

By the time I started working on the book, [Terry and I] were very close personally, about 20 years into our acquaintance. To tell the story of his career, I needed to address the fact that I was part of it, to frame that and position myself as a very minor character at the beginning and the end (the two parts that I narrated for the audiobook). I had to touch on my relationship with him, my personal feelings toward him -- and I thought it was important to foreground that, rather than try to ignore it or cover it up. [Describing one's positionality and relationship to an interview subject] is part of the folkloristic approach to research and writing. You're always trying to reframe the relationship and highlight your subjectivity.

Have aspects of Terry's story and self-description changed as your relationship with him has evolved?

Yes. As a lot of people who are frequently interviewed do -- and as people beyond a certain age are sometimes prone to do (I'd put myself in that category now, in my late forties) -- you end up repeating stories. It's a natural response when you're asked similar interview questions, or even when you're in a social situation. Tell this story. What about that time ...? And you have these stock stories that emerge and then are elaborated on or effaced in various ways. They can become more detailed or sometimes eroded into less detail. It's the way memory works, which was interesting to me because Terry's work addresses those issues very directly -- a lot of it is about memory and how memory functions or fails to function.

There were those natural variations. Also, growing closer personally and having my wife, Samantha, and my son, Asa, be part of Terry and Jo Harvey's world and family to some extent, traveling together and being present in their home, the relationship deepened and more difficult details emerged. Certainly, over the course of working on the book, Terry shared a lot of things, especially about his childhood and his mother and family, that he said he never really said aloud to anyone. Maybe that's because I was relentless. I hope that it was also a function of comfort -- he was willing to dredge up some of those things and flesh out the stories where there had been gaps related to pain and pain trauma.

In the introduction to Truckload, you say that, in this "authorized biography project," Terry gave you a job of memorialization. But when his friend Guy Clark gave Terry a commission to memorialize him through a sculpture that incorporated his cremains, Terry wasn't super comfortable with it. Likewise, you describe how Terry wasn't comfortable working on the bronze he made of his friend, the famous BBQ chef "Stubb," as a memorial. How does your authorized biography project fit into that unease around memorialization in Terry's own work?

To memorialize is to confront mortality, and that's challenging and uncomfortable for all of us. When it came to Guy Clark, Terry assumed, or wanted to assume, that Guy's insistence that Terry should incorporate his ashes, his cremains, into an artwork was a joke. It was only upon Guy's death that he actually confirmed that it was real. Guy told other people right before he passed to "remind [Terry] that he needs to use my remains." It was a slight shock. Guy was ill for a long time, so his passing was not a shock -- but the revelation that what seemed like it could have been a morbid joke between friends was in fact something more serious was a bit of a surprise. And it took Terry a while to get beyond that and figure out what to do. The joke was that he was going to shove Guy's ashes up a sculpture of a goat's ass. He ended up putting them in a crow, which came out of a shared experience [they'd had with] crows and barbed wire nests in Terry's hometown of Lubbock, Texas, but it did take time to get there. I think it had to do with losing his friend and that grave responsibility of remembering in concrete form.

Terry was deeply uncomfortable with a lot of elements in my book research project. We talked every week, if not more, for a year. He told me he dreaded the conversations that we were going to have about his mom in particular. There's a lot of information he didn't know, and also [those] things he had never really said to anyone, maybe with the exception of Jo Harvey. To his credit, he worked through it all. His edits on the book were all factual, or sometimes chronological. He didn't ask me to remove anything because it was difficult, which is kind of hard to believe. I was dreading the conversation after his first reading -- and he read it several times, as did Jo Harvey. But they didn't cut anything. He told me, "Everything in there is true as far as I know, and it needs to be there. I need to confront it and other people need to confront that."

So he came to terms with it as a memorial, though there was additional discomfort after the book came out. He was initially resistant to wanting to promote it because, he said, "this is a book about me. It says so much personal stuff in it, some embarrassing stuff -- as any biography would. [...] I don't want to be there. This is your thing." The first event in which he participated at the Key West Literary Seminar -- where he did a performance of MemWars [based on a 2016 video installation artwork] with Jo Harvey and his son Bukka and Richard Bowden, and I read from Truckload -- changed his perspective, and he changed his tune and was excited to do more and more. We kept it up for over a year, these events at which he would perform autobiographical material from MemWars and I would read and then often we'd have a discussion with some moderator/interlocutor. And he got excited about that, because he was interested in framing my biography and his more abstract autobiographical work of MemWars together. It was a process, I guess, to make a long story short; he got there eventually.

The title of MemWars -- which consists of autobiographical storytelling by Terry and Jo Harvey, punctuated by performances of Terry's songs -- is this pun on memoir that contains hostility and acknowledges the fragility of memory. In Truckload, you retell some of the stories that Terry and Jo Harvey narrate in MemWars. What's different in your telling?

With anything I did to retell his stories, I did try to use his words as much as possible. It's still an act of translation. I could try to conjure his voice in my own prose, and I could quote him at length, which I did. But ultimately, it is translating.

I wanted to be clear about the aspects in his work that addressed fragility of memory, and hopefully draw the parallels [between that and] the project of writing the book itself, which engages in those risks of misinterpretation or getting it wrong. I did an enormous amount of fact-checking.

You even end up fact-checking his theater piece Dugout (1999-2006), which is based on his family stories.

Yes, there's a lot his parents didn't tell him. They're much older and they both had very wild lives. His mom was a barrelhouse piano player and cosmetician/beautician and his dad was an itinerant, sometimes professional ballplayer and coach. There were things that were not appropriate to tell Terry or that [the family] didn't want known, the most dramatic of which is that Terry's dad Sled's first wife, Viola, was institutionalized toward the end of her life with syphilitic insanity -- which was definitely something that no one told Terry. There's a big rift in the families between Sled's first wife's family and [Terry's mom] Pauline and Terry. And it's clear now why that was the case. That was a real shock.

I remember when I told him about Viola, and also told him that it didn't seem like Sled and Pauline, his mom, were actually married. (They may have been common-law spouses, just through Texas law.) And there was sort of a silence. I didn't know if I should interpret it as a chilled silence, or a moment of anger or sadness. And then, in typical fashion, he made a joke out of it: "Well, I always suspected I was a bastard. I didn't know I was a syphilitic bastard."

To be clear, Terry Allen doesn't have syphilis, but his dad may have. That was a very dramatic moment in our relationship, and in the researching and writing of this book. And how to present that -- it seems like that's the case from her death certificate and hospital records, but will we ever really know what was going on? No.

The book is divided into three place-based parts. Why structure the book that way?

The structure mirrors the structure of Juarez, his first major and longest-lasting body of work, started in the late '60s. Juarez tells a simple story. It's a murder tale split up geographically between Texas and California, and then Ciudad Juárez. So it made sense, given the importance of that body of work, to deal with Terry's story in a similar way. And conveniently, he spent his whole life, despite a lot of travel internationally, in basically three places: in Lubbock, Texas; in California (both L.A. and then Fresno); and then in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Those are the places he's lived. Anywhere else has just been a visit. And place figures very prominently in all his work.

"Part II: The California Section" is the book's longest. How are the mythos and reality of California present in it? What happens there that can't happen anywhere else?

He always tells the story of leaving Lubbock as an escape. He needed to leave town to become an artist -- to survive, even, his mother's behavior. California was somewhat arbitrary. He always says that he and Jo Harvey flipped the coin between New York and L.A., but the reality is actually that he didn't get into Pratt and he did get into Chouinard, which he always conveniently skips. (I had to look at his diaries and his journals to see that he even applied anywhere else, because he never told anyone he did.)

Even after school, L.A. continued to inform him and his work. Music was obviously exploding in L.A. at that time. His band, Black Wall Blues Quintet, got to open for the band Love and play at all kinds of interesting spaces. He got to see the Velvet Underground when they were there with Warhol's Exploding Plastic Inevitable, and had some creepy run-ins with the Manson girls at their friend Pete Duel's house. It was a complete inversion and explosion of everything he had known in Lubbock. Possibilities for life and living as an artist opened up for him.

Then he ended up in Fresno teaching at Fresno State and felt much more constricted. Universities have rules and administrations that he chafed against. He complained a lot about it at the time and called Fresno "Fresnoia," but he made important friends there and stayed, really, to raise their kids, Bukka and Bale, because it seemed like a saner and safer place for them to grow up at that time than Los Angeles, with its smog and Manson murders.

Beyond memorialization, the Mansons are one instance of this theme of death that emerges in the biography.

Death is definitely a thread throughout in terms of Terry's own story, family history, and loss of early friends of his. His friend Stanley "Roadrunner" McPherson's death in Vietnam was particularly devastating and formative for him, then the loss of his parents.

His work does address death over and over again, and this idea of violence -- specifically, American violence, frontier violence -- figures prominently in Juarez and elsewhere. Those extremes of behavior, whether it's murder or madness, in the case of Ghost Ship Rodez (2008-10) and [Antonin] Artaud, have allowed Terry to explore narratives that are nonlinear and to explore those kinds of disturbed, internal, psychological landscapes that move through external landscapes, particularly of the Southwest, but also elsewhere.

In the book, you note things that Terry and Jo Harvey experienced that seemed like omens: a friend who died unexpectedly had recently given them a table with a skeleton carved into it, a crow knocked Terry out of the path of an oncoming truck, and Jo Harvey saw a woman in an empty apartment, with a crow's head in front of her face. Why did you choose to incorporate these perceived signs into the more concrete narrative of the events of their life?

Those are mysteries that they talk about, through which they've marked episodes in their lives, especially difficult episodes. It's interesting. It's sort of an old-fashioned thing to do -- to see these signs in the natural world and attribute meaning to them in our lives. A lot of that comes from Jo Harvey, who is naturally more [superstitious] than Terry and who's willing to kind of point to those signs and symbols, and try to make sense of them, or attribute meaning to them. Terry will grumble or make fun of her when she talks that way, but he believes too. When Jo Harvey was dealing with cancer, his run-in with what he calls "the blood angel," the nurse in the hospital -- that was one that came from him. Most of [the others] have come from Jo Harvey, and he either adopts them or rejects them -- but he always talks about them.

I think they're signposts in this grand story of memory that he's telling through his work. My background and interest in folklore also made those stories feel significant to me, and they kind of offered thematic devices or tropes. Certainly, birds appear throughout all of Terry's work, so the crow story was an important one. He doesn't know why birds are important to his work, exactly. He can't articulate it, but they're everywhere. For them to appear in his real life -- an actual bird -- felt relevant.

Brendan Greaves is the founder and owner of the record label Paradise of Bachelors, in which capacity he has closely collaborated on numerous projects with the artist and musician Terry Allen, including Pedal Steal + Four Corners (2019), for which he earned a Grammy nomination for Best Album Notes. A former art dealer at Philadelphia's Fleisher/Ollman Gallery and thereafter North Carolina Arts Council's director of public art and community design, he now curates and writes about vernacular art and music in the American South and beyond, with essays published by Yale University Press, Duke University Press, and University of North Carolina Press. Greaves studied art at Harvard University and folklore at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he lives with his wife, Samantha, and son, Asa.