Name: TERRY ALLEN — Songs & Stories from Juarez, MemWars, & the White Whale
Uploaded: 2023-12-10T21:55:15Z
Description: Enjoy a night of songs and stories with the iconic and iconoclastic artist and country music legend.

TERRY ALLEN — Songs & Stories from Juarez, MemWars, & the White Whale

Key West Literary Seminar's mission is to promote discussion of important literary works and their authors; recognize and support new voices in American literature; and preserve  Key West’s literary heritage while providing resources that strengthen literary culture.

Key West Literary Seminar

Enjoy a night of songs and stories with the iconic and iconoclastic artist and country music legend.

The Key West Amphitheater

<h3>TERRY ALLEN — Saturday January 13, 2024</h3><h4>with Jo Harvey Allen, Bukka Allen, and Richard Bowden</h4><h4>"Songs and Stories from Juarez, MemWars &amp; the White Whale"</h4> Doors open at 5 pm, show starts at 6pm****Terry Allen is an internationally recognized visual artist and songwriter who occupies an utterly unique position straddling the disparate, and usually distant, worlds of conceptual art and country music. As Ken Johnson has observed in The New York Times, “There is just one person whose art has been seen in highbrow museums around the country and is an inductee of the Buddy Holly Walk of Fame in Lubbock. He is Terry Allen.” For over fifty years Allen has dedicated himself to confounding popular perceptions of contemporary art and country, and the traditional mutual alienation of their respective core audiences. His wide-ranging, border-crossing career reveals important insights about interdisciplinarity and collaboration, bridging and belying the widening divisions that define and distort American culture and politics, now more than ever. As Allen sometimes quips, “People tell me it’s country music, and I ask, ‘Which country?’”****No veteran country songwriter sounds more attuned to the national mood. His songs still feel like little guidebooks for staring down a harsh universe.– The Washington Post Mr. Allen’s magic strength is that he can keep two or more big ideas in the air at once, juxtaposing them without explicitly merging them until they kind of belong together: sex and real estate, love and colonization, greed or guilt… He’s pretty close to a master lyricist.– The New York Times A reigning deity of a certain kind of country music since the mid-70s.– The New York Times It has always been a fool’s errand to frame Allen in terms of other artists—there was nobody like him before he showed up, and the subsequent 40 years have been equally light on plausible peers.– Uncut The kind of singular American artist who expresses the fundamental weirdness of his country.– The Wire Allen’s songs extract strangeness from the known world and use it as a means of acquiring greater knowledge. This is an old man’s confirmation of a young man’s speculation, which is as good definition of wisdom as any. [Juarez is] a series of beguilingly off-kilter songs about Texas, California, and Mexico, held together by spoken interludes that gave it the feel of a movie.– The New Yorker His catalog, reaching back to 1975’s Juarez, has been uniformly eccentric and uncompromising, savage and beautiful, literate and guttural.– Rolling Stone Nobody else does country music like Terry Allen… There’s not a wasted word or extraneous musical lick.– Los Angeles Times He’s one of the last wild geniuses left who hasn’t been commercialized by the media. For 50 years, he’s sung neo-honky-tonk art songs in a thick-tongued Lubbockian drawl that makes Waylon Jennings sound as patrician as William F. Buckley Jr.– Observer.com A true modern day Renaissance man… renowned for his effortless command and outrageous combination of disparate genres and media, according to the task at hand.– Dave Hickey There may be no greater maverick than Terry Allen in all of country music from the mid-’70s onward.– AllMusic There is just one person whose art has been seen in highbrow museums around the country and is an inductee of the Buddy Holly Walk of Fame in Lubbock, Tex. He is Terry Allen, [and] he favors a style you might call Old West Psychedelic.– Ken Johnson, New York Times From football heroes gone wrong to noble floozies to farmers fiddling while Washington burns, he’s a tale-spinning poet of the Panhandle.–Robert Christgau Little official country music is this good. The music cranks and lopes along, stops and starts again; there are a lot of holes in it, a high-plains silence that always waits behind the music, as if to tempt Allen into shutting up again.– Artforum I love Terry. He’s a funny son of a bitch.– Guy Clark *****Allen was born in 1943 and raised in Lubbock, Texas, the only child of a professional baseball player turned wrestling and music promoter father and a barrelhouse piano player mother. Over the course of a celebrated career that dates back to his graduation from Chouinard in 1966—spent living and working largely in California, New Mexico, and Texas—Allen has unflinchingly dissected the contested histories and cultural collisions of the American West. His ductile, and often darkly humorous, storytelling, refracted through a multiplicity of media—drawings, prints, sculptures, installations, theater, videos, radio plays, songs, and poetry—both typifies and transcends the limits of traditional narrative structures, demonstrating the mirages and ravages of memory, and the mutability of his American, often specifically Southwestern, mythologies. All of Allen’s most ambitious works—among them JUAREZ (since 1968), RING (1976–80), Anterabbit/Bleeder (1982–90), YOUTH IN ASIA (1982-92), DUGOUT (1993–2004), Ghost Ship Rodez (2007–10), and MemWars (ongoing since 2016)—incorporate visuals, performance, and music in various permutations.As a musician Allen has released more than a dozen albums, including the cinematic masterpiece <a href="https://paradiseofbachelors.com/pob-26/" title="https://paradiseofbachelors.com/pob-26/" target="_blank" data-msys-clicktrack="0" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer">Juarez</a> (1975) and <a href="https://paradiseofbachelors.com/pob-27/" title="https://paradiseofbachelors.com/pob-27/" target="_blank" data-msys-clicktrack="0" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer">Lubbock (on everything)</a> (1979), often cited as one of the most influential country albums ever. He has collaborated with David Byrne, Guy Clark, Steve Earle, Joe Ely, Don Everly, Butch Hancock, Jerry Jeff Walker, and Lucinda Williams, and his haunting and hilarious songs have been covered and championed by the likes of Bobby Bare, Ryan Bingham, Richard Buckner, Jason Isbell, Little Feat, Sturgill Simpson, and Kurt Vile.Widely celebrated as a masterpiece—arguably the greatest concept albums of all time—his spare, haunting 1975 debut LP <a href="https://paradiseofbachelors.com/pob-26" title="https://paradiseofbachelors.com/pob-26" target="_blank" data-msys-clicktrack="0" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer">Juarez</a> is a violent, fractured tale of the chthonic American Southwest and borderlands.Allen’s deeply moving (and hilarious) critically acclaimed satirical second album <a href="https://paradiseofbachelors.com/pob-27" title="https://paradiseofbachelors.com/pob-27" target="_blank" data-msys-clicktrack="0" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer">Lubbock (on everything)</a> (1979), a complex memory palace to his West Texas hometown, is often cited as the urtext of alt-country, one of the most important and influential country records of all time.<a href="https://paradiseofbachelors.com/pob-045" title="https://paradiseofbachelors.com/pob-045" target="_blank" data-msys-clicktrack="0" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer">Pedal Steal + Four Corners</a> collects Allen’s radio plays and long-form narrative audio works—two and a half hours of cinematic songs, stories, and country-concrète sound collage. Fans of Allen’s violent masterpiece Juarez will find much to love in these haunting Southwestern desert dramas, which feature Jo Harvey Allen, Lloyd Maines, Butch Hancock, Stones saxophonist Bobby Keys, and many others.Allen’s heartbreaking, hilarious new album <a href="https://paradiseofbachelors.com/pob-055" title="https://paradiseofbachelors.com/pob-055" target="_blank" data-msys-clicktrack="0" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer">Just Like Moby Dick</a>, his first set of new songs since 2013’s Bottom of the World, features the full Panhandle Mystery Band, including co-producer Charlie Sexton (Dylan, Bowie, Blaze), Shannon McNally, and Jo Harvey Allen; mainstays Bukka Allen, Richard Bowden, and Lloyd Maines; and co-writes with Joe Ely and Dave Alvin. The connections to Melville’s masterpiece are metaphorical and allusive, as elusive as the White Whale. The masterly spiritual successor to <a href="https://paradiseofbachelors.com/pob-027/" title="https://paradiseofbachelors.com/pob-027/" target="_blank" data-msys-clicktrack="0" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer">Lubbock (on everything)</a>, <a href="https://paradiseofbachelors.com/pob-055" title="https://paradiseofbachelors.com/pob-055" target="_blank" data-msys-clicktrack="0" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer">Just Like Moby Dick </a>casts its net wide for wild stories, depicting, among other monstrous things, Houdini in existential crisis, the death of the last stripper in town, bloodthirsty pirates (in a pseudo-sequel to Brecht and Weill’s “Pirate Jenny”), the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (in the “American Childhood” suite), a vampire-infested circus, mudslides and burning mobile homes, and all manner of tragicomic disasters, abandonments, betrayals, bad memories, failures, and fare-thee-wells.

Agenda

Doors Open @ Coffee Butler Amphitheater

Opening set by Miami singer-songwriter Daniel Milewski. Listen on Spotify at https://open.spotify.com/artist/6C8PW0ngsQWToD7bE4nnU5?si=dXiDRhYJTtijI0BQGSQvmA

Opening Act: DANIEL MILEWSKI

Brendan Greaves is author of the forthcoming biography "Truckload of Art:
The Life and Work of Terry Allen" and founding owner of record label Paradise of Bachelors, home to Terry Allen, Nap Eyes, Jake Xerxes Fussell, and other artists.

Book Talk & Intro: BRENDAN GREAVES

"Songs and Stories from Juarez, MemWars, and the White Whale” — Live musical and storytelling performance by iconic and iconoclastic artist and country music legend Terry Allen, appearing with his wife Jo Harvey Allen, son Bukka Allen, and longtime collaborator Richard Bowden.

Main Event: TERRY ALLEN presents "Songs & Stories"

Artist Terry Allen and author Brendan Greaves will be available after the show to talk with fans and sign records, CDs, and bookplates for the forthcoming Allen biography.

Record & Book Signings with Terry Allen

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