Truckload of Art

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.