Interview with Brendan Greaves on Truckload of Art: The Life and Work of Terry Allen – An Authorized Biography

Despite releasing multiple records over his career and receiving generous critical acclaim as a visual artist, the work of Terry Allen in both music and the visual arts has felt like a secret that his fans keep in reserve to share with only those deemed worthy. The semi-obscurity of Allen’s work can partially be attributed to a reputation in the art world that is separate from music and vice versa. His renown has changed over the past decade, thanks to the re-release of Allen’s best records and career-spanning retrospectives and is now culminating with last month’s publication of Truckload of Art: The Life and Work of Terry Allen – An Authorized Biography by Brendan Greaves. 

Greaves is the natural choice to tell the story of Allen’s life as he is the founder and owner of the record label Paradise of Bachelors, which has represented Allen and his musical catalog since 2015. Greaves’ intimacy and close working relationship with Allen is evident throughout Truckload of Art. He examines all aspects of Allen’s work and life, drawing from Allen’s notebooks and archives (housed at the The Terry and Jo Harvey Allen Center for Creative Studies at Texas Tech, which Allen has joked should be called the “Allen Center for Unlearning”) and ongoing conversations with Allen, his wife and sometime collaborator Jo Harvey (who deserves to be the subject of her own biography), and Allen’s coterie of artists, musicians, and critical champions.

Greaves skillfully and sensitively tracks Allen’s life from his beginnings in Lubbock, TX, to art school at Chouinard Art Institute (now CalArts), and then on to the varied artistic endeavors, projects, and obsessions that Allen devoted himself to over the years. He ensures that Allen’s visual artwork, songs (including “The Beautiful Waitress,” featured in a previous Recliner Notes post), artistic process, and life story all receive equal treatment in the biography.

Greaves finest accomplishment in the book is his ability to capture Allen’s indelible and unique voice. Truckload of Art is infused with commentary from Allen and peppered with one-liners that are easily read with Allen’s West Texas accent in one’s ear. A few examples include: “If it’s not a lie, it’s probably satire;” “Art is about all of our senses, stupid;” and the true definition of art is, “To get out of town.” Greaves uses Allen’s phrase “Essential weirdness” to describe the song and the book’s namesake “Truckload of Art,” an early musical breakthrough for Allen. The phrase also works as a fitting and apt description of Allen’s work.

Recliner Notes interviewed Greaves soon after the publication of Truckload of Art to discuss biographical models for his approach, the enduring fascination of Allen’s Juarez project, inadvertent phone calls with the seminal art critic Dave Hickey, and much more. 

Recliner Notes: Because of the breadth of Allen’s work, you were tasked with describing artwork that readers may not have seen and music that they may not have heard as well as weaving in the process Allen used to achieve all of that work. At the same time, you were trying to present his life story. Out of all of those components, what was the most challenging?

Brendan Greaves: Well, it’s interesting, I think, currently, more people are familiar with Terry’s music than his visual art just because it’s easier to access, particularly in recent years. But that wasn’t always the case. He’s always done both and more, but early on, he definitely made his name as a visual artist first and was known as a visual artist first. So, it was challenging, describing the work in a way that was both legible to the reader and also maintained the critical eye. My background is in art and folklore, so I’ve written a lot about art, but it’s not easy to do so when your reader might not have seen the work, which doesn’t travel a whole lot, so fewer folks have seen it, especially on the East Coast. His main gallery, L.A. Louver, is located in Venice, California, and so that’s the place to see the most work at once. But I guess of all the threads that you mentioned, the personal story, I suppose, was the most challenging just because of the intimacy of it and having to work closely with Terry to remember and to dredge up sometimes difficult memories, and to bring some things to light that he was not even aware of that weren’t part of his own memory or experience.

Recliner Notes: Yeah, that was absolutely fascinating. At the beginning of the book, you quote Allen about his ambivalence about biography and even the nature of truth. How interested was he in the research you found about his family? Did he care about “correcting the record” or his understanding of family history and family dynamics, or was he still ambivalent?

Brendan Greaves: Maybe he ended up in an ambivalent place eventually [laughs], but it took him a while to get there. I think he was fairly vexed and confused initially, when some of this information came to light, particularly about his parents and their relationship and the timing of their relationship. He told me at one point, “I always suspected that I was a bastard, but I never thought I was a syphilitic bastard.” [laughs] Which is not true, but it’s shocking to find out that syphilis is part of your family history, even if not by blood. His dad’s first wife apparently died of it. So, things like that were absolutely shocking for him to hear and other revelations as well. So, I think it was initially slightly disturbing and then bemusing. And then fascinating, perhaps at some point, and then maybe he ended up back at ambivalence. 

I don’t think he’s changed his fundamental feeling that — as he puts it — the truth is multiple. He’s really pleased with the biography and delighted that it exists. And we have a very close personal relationship. But I don’t know if it’s changed his idea of biography in general. A lot of his views have softened over the years and with age as happens often. But that particular quote that I opened with an introduction from Bleeder was written almost 40 years ago now. So, this idea that truth is experiential and parallactic in some way, when we look at things from different angles, they mean different things. I think that that continues. And that view fundamentally made a lot of sense to me as someone who’s worked in the field of folklore, where the narrative and the act of remembering and telling the story, the value and power of that isn’t necessarily tied to factual truth. Not that I wasn’t looking for factual truth! That is part of the job of being a biographer. I was as interested in dealing with how memory functions and fails in our work and our lives and how we tell the story of a life and biography and interior artwork in general as I was in telling a straight chronological story based on a linear timeline and checking off research boxes.

Recliner Notes: Your book reminds me of Jimmy McDonough’s book, Shakey: Neil Young’s Biography in which he is writing the life story of Neil Young while Neil is right there being interviewed and commenting on quotes that McDonough got from other interview subjects. Did you have any models that you used for your biographical approach?

Brendan Greaves: Jimmy McDonough was one. As far as music biographies go, I think that’s one of the more interesting. It also shares with mine an extreme length, for better or worse [laughs]. I should have thanked Jimmy in my acknowledgments. He’s one of the people I forgot, because we have been in touch about this book and other things. He’s working on a Gary Stewart biography, and he’s an artist I’m very interested in personally. So, we’ve corresponded about that. Otherwise, there’s a book called The Quest for Corvo. And this was written in the early 20th century, and it was an attempt by the author to recreate this mysterious life of someone who was a con artist, a visual artist, but also a con artist. So, it kind of reads as a mystery novel despite being a biography. It’s a very unusual kind of postmodern biography, despite being written before anything that we would call postmodern. So that was interesting to me too, as a way of thinking about constructing truth or truths through conflicting narratives and treating biography as a kind of investigation and a story in which the author is present. I’m a big fan of the writer Harry Mathews, who didn’t write any biographies, but his novel The Journalist is interesting. The protagonist is a journaler; keeps journals and diaries and becomes obsessive. He begins writing everything, to a degree in which it takes over his life. It’s sort of like a Borges conceit, but in novel form, rather than short story. That was interesting to me from the perspective of examining Terry’s own journals with which I spent a lot of intense time. This idea of what it means to write things down and where we find truth and how much documentation is too much documentation. 

Recliner Notes: Terry Allen is so damn quotable! Throughout your book, I laughed at gem after gem of his quotes. That’s why the endnotes are essential to reading the book. I’ve heard jazz biographer John Szwed say that the hardest thing about writing a biography is determining what to leave out. What was your approach in terms of deciding what to leave out?

Brendan Greaves: Well, that was painful [laughs]. Not entirely my own doing. I love [Szwed’s] Sun Ra biography and have had some encounters with John Szwed over the years through folklore and art contexts and he’s an amazing, amazing writer. He’s another person who I should have mentioned as a model.

My original manuscript for this book was about twice the length as it currently is, about 1300 pages, which obviously is obscene. And, you know, unprintable [laughs] in the current state of publishing. So, I worked with an editor friend of mine, Sal Borriello, to tame it. [We] essentially cut half of it out, some of those stories and anecdotes did end up in the endnotes. I found them too humorous to get rid of and I actually expected a lot of those to be cut by my editor at the publisher and they weren’t, which I’m happy about. Some of Terry’s favorite bits are in the endnotes. Mine too.

Recliner Notes: Mine too!

Brendan Greaves: I didn’t think it was going to fly. Originally, it was kind of a dumping ground. You know, Sal, and I said, “Well, we’ll put this bit in the endnotes, just because I’m not ready to get rid of it. Yeah, but it’s really not critical to the text or it feels like a diversion or distraction.” But luckily a lot of those stayed. So, yes, shaping it, I do give a lot of credit to Sal for assisting with that and providing a more objective eye towards the story and what a more casual reader would be interested in. 

As we touched on before, my goal wasn’t necessarily objectivity. It’s not real [laughs]. It’s a fictional idea, first of all, in writing about anyone or anything, and, secondly, I’m too close to Terry and recognize that. I wanted to foreground that in the sense of the folkloristic idea of collaborative ethnography, writing myself into the story, treating Terry not as a subject, but as a consultant and a collaborator. Not as something to study but as a teacher, and a friend and to write from real affection and a personal relationship and love, rather than from a journalistic approach. So yeah, it was pretty painful and difficult deciding what to cut. I needed some distance from it in order to do that. Ultimately, it could have been cut more, I’m sure. I hope something about the book’s access and willingness to go down rabbit holes of discovery and tangents and diversions is appropriate to Terry’s own work, which is also voluminous.

Recliner Notes: As in Allen’s career, I think Juarez is the heart of the book. You contend with that work throughout the book as Allen does throughout his life. What is it about Juarez that Allen and the rest of us remain fascinated and compelled by?

Brendan Greaves: It’s the first piece of Terry’s that I was introduced to that had a profound effect on me. As far as my personal history, it was where things began for me, in terms of — not understanding Terry’s work, because I think Juarez is ultimately beyond understanding in some intentional and fundamental way — but in recognizing the enormity of his work, its scope, and its resonance and importance, I think, to American storytelling and mythmaking in general. 

For Terry, Juarez has never had any resolution. He still feels unresolved by it and even troubled by it; I think. He’s described it as a haunting in his life. So, I’m glad it feels that present in the book to you because I wanted it to feel like a haunting in the book, too. It’s something that keeps coming up. He keeps trying to get at this “simple story,” but as Dave Hickey wrote about it, in Juarez, there’s no happy ending. There’s no ending at all. It’s this cyclical, eternal conflict between climates or energies that aren’t even people. 

I think Juarez gets to the heart of Terry’s preoccupation with the U.S.-Mexico border and relationships between those cultures, with his interest in the history of the Southwest, with his interest in iterative approaches to a story, which he also does in Ring and in Bleeder and in Ghost Ship Rodez, and throughout his work. Taking a kernel of a story and kind of inverting it and scrambling it and collapsing it and attenuating it in various ways, I think Juarez does that, more vigorously than any of his other projects. It’s rare that an artist sticks with one subject like that for so long [laughs], especially somebody as mercurial as Terry, as far as his different projects across various media. He started it in the late 60s and it’s still going on. And that was fascinating to me. And I think it’s fascinating to Terry, too. He doesn’t pretend to understand it, either.

Recliner Notes: Earlier, you mentioned his notebooks that he used over his life and career, and you quote extensively from in writing Truckload of Art. You even quote him saying, “Maybe these notebooks are my art.” You comment that they are housed at the archive at Texas Tech and describe the visual components of the notebooks, the narrative stuff, puns, wordplay, and lyrics that come from that wordplay. I’d love to see them. Is there any way to publish selections from notebooks, or do you have to travel to Lubbock to see them?

Brendan Greaves: I think there’s potentially a possibility there and, in selecting images for the book, [the publisher] Hachette was very generous with allowing a lot of illustrations, for which, I’m very grateful. I considered reprinting pages from some of his notebooks and had a bunch of selections picked out. It did seem important because I discussed them so much, and they’re so present in the book, but, ultimately, I felt that with 16 color pages, we really needed to be foregrounding the finished visual artwork. And also, [the notebooks] don’t mean much by themselves. They don’t mean much at that scale. They need to be seen larger; his writing is often small. Without a whole lot of context, I think they can be confusing to see on a page-by-page basis. But, as you suggest, in bulk, I think that they do accrue more meaning and they’re easier to follow as a standalone entity. I think it’d be an interesting project to pursue thinking about, publishing selections from a notebook or even selections from various Juarez notebooks, of which there are many over the years to trace how things evolve; a couple pages from one year, a couple pages from another year. I do like that idea. 

There’s a lot that Terry probably is not comfortable being published from those as well. Obviously, a lot of it is deeply personal; he never expected it to be in an archive, he never expected it to be in the pages of a book, and he certainly never expected it to be published on its own. So, I think we’d have to make some judicious selections. When I mentioned publishing notebook pages, he was a little resistant. His feeling was, “I’d rather highlight these finished works of art,” of which there are also so many, rather than the unfinished things and the things in process. 

Recliner Notes: The full-color plates showing his artwork that you chose to feature in the book was fascinating. I was Googling throughout while reading it, trying to find visual depictions, but the first color plate is a Cowboy and the Stranger piece. There’s none of the early art school stuff. I know you had to be selective about what you included, but I was wondering if you thought that this is the point where you think that the best of his visual work starts?

Brendan Greaves: Yeah, and it’s the first time he was showing his work publicly in any real meaningful way, outside of the exhibitions during school. So, it’s the beginning of his professional career, for lack of a better way to put it. There is earlier stuff and some of it is fascinating. There’s not a ton that survives from art school, but there is a fair amount. A lot of it is kind of classroom exercises, studies, nudes, and there’s a series of drawings from the zoo of animals. Earlier from high school, there are cartoons and doodles of characters: Santa Claus, Julius Caesar from the Roman orgy days. They’re kind of grotesque and goofy, cartoonish images. 

Recliner Notes: You hint in the book that some are pornographic.

Brendan Greaves: Yeah, some of it is! Not so much of the early stuff survives that was pornographic. He was certainly doing that and selling those drawings. A lot of those, I think, were sold. They were too valuable to keep as a kid in middle school and high school [laughs]. Sold to friends and peers. Certainly, the notebooks and letters later on do become pornographic at moments because he was writing, not every day, but nearly every day, and touching on every kind of subject. So, one of the things that is not on view at Texas Tech are certain letters between Terry and Joe Harvey, which Joe Harvey says are just too dirty for the public to see [laughs]. We all need our private correspondences and musings. Without those, the world would be a chaotic and much more grotesque place.

Recliner Notes: You mentioned Dave Hickey earlier, and I’ve loved his writing even longer than I’ve known about Terry Allen. In one of the endnotes, you write about Hickey calling you up out of the blue to say that his favorite Allen song is the unreleased “Off Malibu.” Hickey was a famous talker and an avid late-night phone caller. How many of those calls did you get from him? 

Brendan Greaves: He butt-dialed me a lot! Like, I don’t know, maybe a dozen times over the course of a few weeks. That was really at the end of his life. And only on a couple of those occasions did he actually realize what he had done and pick up the phone. Or I would call him back and he’d realize what he had done and would offer some hilarious one-liner or a non sequitur and, on one occasion, it was talking about the song “Off Malibu.” 

But, yeah, I first encountered Hickey also before I encountered Terry Allen in college. I studied with Hickey’s wife, Libby Lumpkin. I took a class with her in college. And then my writing teacher in college was the great art critic Peter Schjeldahl, who was close with Dave, and they were sort of rivals. Very different in style and they loved each other and admired each other, but there was, I think, a friendly rivalry there. So I learned about Dave through those two and was always attracted to his work and was excited finally to be able to talk to him.

Recliner Notes: What was it like interacting with him? He’s such a larger than life personality.

Brendan Greaves: He’s a force of nature. Something he told me about Terry’s life versus his own. He said, “You know, when I think about it, I lead a very messy life in order to write about and think about very square things.” Specifically, abstract paintings, which have always been his primary interest as a critic. And he said, “Terry, on the other hand, lives a very square life to create very messy, chaotic things in his art and his music.” Which I thought was an interesting way of framing that dichotomy and their relationship. They were incredibly different people, but, for a long time, spoke, if not every day, then once a week on the phone and also maintained a kind of friendly and curmudgeonly rivalry. 

Dave wasn’t easy to talk to because he was so forceful and so opinionated, and I think would say things just for the sake of being perverse. Like “Off Malibu” being Terry’s greatest song, which is like, “Come on, Dave, you don’t actually believe that. You’re just saying that because no one else has heard of that song and because you love surfing.” I loved talking to him and getting to know him a little bit, and I’m sad he’s gone. 

In the fall, I’m working on scheduling some events in New York in conjunction with a forthcoming collection of Dave’s uncollected essays; things that appeared in catalogs and elsewhere and that weren’t in any of his other volumes. That’s being edited by a great writer and critic named Jarrett Earnest for Zwirner Books. So, we’re going to try to do some dual events together in the fall. I’m excited about the possibility of some talks or performances that put Dave’s work and Terry’s work in conversation. 

Recliner Notes: Obviously, you’re in the Terry Allen business with this book and his records on your record label. Do you want to write about another subject, or will you continue on contending with Allen’s work in other ways? What’s next for you?

Brendan Greaves: I have been approached about some other potential biographical subjects, but I haven’t agreed to anything. I’m not sure how I would approach another biography, particularly one of a living artist. What makes this book singular, I think, is my relationship to Terry. It was what was of interest to me. And I hope makes the book somewhat different than a standard artist biography. So, I’m open to pursuing more biographical writing, but it’s not a particular interest or aim of mine. I don’t suddenly think of myself as a biographer. I just think of myself more as a writer. So, I’m playing around with some fiction ideas and some nonfiction ideas. Whatever I do next, I’d love for it to be a little shorter and not so grueling a marathon. 

As far as Terry, more work remains there. We still talk a couple times a week. We’re seeing a lot of each other, especially lately, and our families are spending a lot of time together. There’s work of his that still needs to be reissued. He’s working on new songs with The Panhandle Mystery Band and also with his family in a family band called Blood Sucking Maniacs. So, there’s new material and further things to discuss and get out there in the world. We haven’t really made a call as to which one of those things might be next. I think we’re both, at this moment, just trying to savor what we’ve done [laughs] and what we’ve endured together before we make a plan to do anything else, other than just hang out and travel together and eat and talk.

Image: “Precious objects are scattered / All over the ground”: In Lubbock with the Cadillac Fleetwood he traded for his drawing Cadillac Heaven, 1980. Courtesy of Terry and Jo Harvey Allen.