Oral history interview with Terry Allen, 1998 Apr. 22

Allen, Terry, b. 1943
Video artist, Singer
Santa Fe, N.M.

Size: Sound recording: 3 sound cassettes (3 hrs.) : analog.
Transcript: 64 p.

Collection Summary: An interview of Terry Allen conducted by Paul Karlstrom, 1998 Apr. 22, in Allen's home/studio, Sante Fe, N.M., for the Archives of American Art.

Allen discusses his experiences at Chouinard Art Institute, Los Angeles, as opening up possibilities first glimpsed in high school in Lubbock, Tex.; cultural influences on him, such as rock 'n roll, Elvis, Chuck Berry, David Byrne's "Buck Naked," and the importance of cars; the influence of John Cage on his "Juarez" and the role of his wife, Jo Harvey Allen's experiences to "Juarez" and "Ring"; and his views on the meaning of art and his work.

Biographical/Historical Note: Terry Allen, 1943 May 7-, was a Conceptual artist and musician of Santa Fe, N.M. and Lubbock, Tex.

This interview is part of the Archives of American Art Oral History Program, started in 1958 to document the history of the visual arts in the United States, primarily through interviews with artists, historians, dealers, critics and administrators. Funding for the transcription of this interview provided by Pasadena Art Alliance.

Funding for transcription provided by Pasadena Art Alliance.

How to Use this Interview

• A transcript of this interview appears below.
• The transcript of this interview is in the public domain and may be used without permission. Quotes and excerpts must be cited as follows: Oral history interview with Terry Allen, 1998 Apr. 22, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution
• For more information on using the Archives’ resources, see the FAQ or Ask Us.

Also in the Archives

• Contemporary Arts Museum exhibition catalog, "Juarez Series: Terry Allen", 1975

Interview Transcript

This transcript is in the public domain and may be used without permission. Quotes and excerpts must be cited as follows: Oral history interview with Terry Allen, 1998 Apr. 22, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

Interview with Terry Allen
Conducted by Paul Karlstrom
In Santa Fe, New Mexico
April 22, 1998

Preface

The following oral history transcript is the result of a tape-recorded interview with Terry Allen on April 22, 1998. The interview was conducted in Santa Fe, New Mexico by Paul Karlstrom for the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

Interview

TA: TERRY ALLEN
PK: PAUL KARLSTROM

[BEGIN TAPE 1, SIDE A]

PK: So, Terry, we’ve been looking forward to this, at least I have been for quite awhile. This is our first chance to get together and by way of introduction, and I’m not going to try to tell your story, you’ll be telling your story in the general view. I’ll let you do that. I’ll give you your chance to talk. But you are here in Santa Fe. You’ve been here, I think, for ten years. You started out about 55 years ago, I guess. Are you 55?

TA: I’m 54.

PK: Sorry about that.

TA: I’m going to be 55 May 7th so it’s close.

PK: Alright. And that was in Lubbock, Texas and so I'd like to think of your story and this interview as a kind of journey. As I said earlier, as I’ve been reading some of the catalogs about you, there are actually books that are in a way works of art themselves, as far as I can tell. Little bit unusual in that respect. But at any rate, I’ve been listening to some of your music, some of the CD's, different pieces, and I’m familiar with some of them, not all, but there is a history of a very, I think, very complex, creative progress and it’s one, as I said earlier, that I wouldn’t even want to hit head on right now. I'd like to kind of back into it as we talk. But here you are in Santa Fe, in some ways removed from some of the issues that, at least physically, in terms of your environment for some of the issues that seem to be very important to you as themes within your artwork.

TA: Uh huh.

PK: And I’ll say this up front, I think of you as a conceptual artist, I see you involved with ideas and issues, not primarily what we used to call and maybe still do, art world issues.

TA: Uh huh.

PK: For their own sake. In other words, you're not a formalist in that sense.

TA: No.

PK: You're versed in ideas, and I think passionately so, and very sophisticated. So by way of introduction, I’m real interested in seeing how you came to this from starting out in Lubbock, you know, how this journey progressed. But I would like to go back by way of starting to that conversation we had before we turned the tape recorder on. I was talking about interviewing your wife and partner, collaborator, for many years, Jo Harvey Allen. That was yesterday, and she was talking about your collaboration, she was talking about writing, which is very important to you. Not all artists are like that. In fact, some of them can't write.

TA: Uh huh.

PK: I’ll mention no names, but at any rate, she was talking about what she saw as the difference between your writing, your ability with your words, your use of words, but I won't tell you what she said, but I did say that she feels that her writing, to a degree, is determined by certain limitations, experience, or education and so forth, and that this makes for an interesting dynamic between the two of you. Is that right, is that the way you see it?

TA: Well, I’ve always written kind of as a means of surviving. I’ve always had, pretty much since junior high school, I’ve kept notebooks and journals, whatever, but I think early on, there was a need to put those things that were inside of you outside of you so you can look at them, if for no other reason. Or just to empty them out of you. I’mn ot sure where that came from, that initial feeling. I think Jo Harvey and I write different in the sense that we get information different.

PK: What do you mean by that?

TA: My way of getting information, for example, would be sitting on an airplane and listening to the conversation behind me or sitting in a booth in a café and listening and noting what was of interest in that. Jo Harvey’s manner of getting information is to hear something going on in a seat or behind her and to get up and walk over there and sit down with the people and start talking with them. So she is, in a sense, an interviewer like you.

PK: Uh huh, yep.

TA: And her information is nearly always direct contact with the thing that she does, whereas I believe I’m much more introverted about that and much more voyeuristic out of fear, I suppose. I know when she performs, she performs right in people's face. She loves that, she feeds off of that. Whereas, when I perform, I’m pretty much disengaged from the audience because I’m basically frightened of them and totally focused on the thing that I’m doing, and when I perform, it’s just plain music. I mean, really, I don’t act or, you know, like she does. But I think there's a more introverted nature about the way I get information and probably the way I feel about the world than she does. And I believe the way her methods of writing and just direct outpouring kind of indicates that.

PK: She said that she feels she has a limited vocabulary. She used that term. She said, “My vocabulary is limited so my writing is limited in that way, more simple.” And then again, she compared that to you, basically saying you had more resources available in a verbal way. It struck me as interesting because she’s an extremely verbal woman.

TA: Yeah. I mean, I think that’ssome kind of self-consciousness in terms of like some kind of formal education. I don’t believe either one of us are formally educated. I believe both of us are pretty much self-educated and, you know, with all the pluses and minuses that self-education can bring about. But I think the thing we have in common is that we're educated by our focus. When we get excited by an idea and start working on an idea, then everything begins to line itself up with that particular idea, and information that you would never expect to be privy to suddenly starts coming along, and I think that’sone of the amazing things about making work of any kind, is that you have this passage way into these different worlds that are very uniquely different, and your focus kind of opens up these doors and lets this information come in. And you do the piece based on whatever choice that you make.

PK: The difference in your education, again, this gets us back to the earlier times and back even to Lubbock, but I’m thinking in terms of post-high school, post-secondary. You, of course, went to Chouinard in L.A., and that’san important part of your story.

TA: Right.

PK: Which you will be able to tell. But seems to me that otherwise, your experiences in terms of education background were similar.

TA: Very similar. And in art school, Jo Harvey was much easier with her high school, her school days. She was like the queen of high school.

PK: Yeah, that’s right. And I think you said you were the "scum".

TA: I was the "scum" of high school.

PK: Oh, I’m going to want to hear something about that. But, of course, Chouinard, if we could just sort of leap a little bit ahead to where I want to be, just for a moment, I know a little bit about the program at Chouinard but basically, it wasn’t an academic program, it was much more straight art school. Isn’t that right?

TA: Yeah, we had academic classes two hours in the morning, like from 8:00 until 10:00, we had English. The school had just been accredited so they had to bring in different academic teachers. But it was really geared to artists. We had literature classes much more than any kind of English comp. There was no English composition class that I know of.

PK: So you didn’t get to practice your writing at that point?

TA: No, we read. We had science, also science that was in some way connected, science classes connected with whatever our studies were in art school, so it was kind of I who did terrible in high school in those kind of structured situations. In retrospect, it was a huge door for me to walk in because it was the first time I ever got really excited about those kind of ideas, literature, expanded from the part. I was a secret reader and kind of a closet reader in West Texas because I think anybody that didn’t -- any male especially, you just didn’t read. You played ball or you did, you know, overtly physical things. And reading was always sissy or it had some kind of connotation that was negative usually. And this was --this was pretty common I think during the 50's in kind of isolated rural areas. But it was like Chouinard was the first place also that I encountered kind of like-minded, like-situated people, people that, for whatever reason or pretense, felt like kind of outcasts from their own culture came together. And so it was --even though it was still school, to say art school is about education in any kind of higher sense, accepted higher sense, is absurd because it was on every kind of human sense that I hadn’t experienced before, and wasn’t aware existed, except inside of myself, and I was very self-conscious about that because I thought there was something wrong with it, you know.

PK: Well, it sounds like this was a very important experience for you then, going to Chouinard and perhaps recognizing expanded possibilities, how you might fit in or sort of an avenue you might pursue.

TA: Yeah, it was the first time I'd ever encountered people that made pictures or made objects or whatever that were cold blooded serious about it, that it was a real -- and it was something that you could do. The idea -- I mean, I always drew and always wrote, and I did things, but the idea of being able to do that, there was no reenforcement where I grew up. I had --the only encouragement I can remember in high school having was from an English teacher, her name was Ms. Murphy, and we were -- it was, I think, my sophomore year, we were studying Julius Caesar because every English class, we did one of the Shakespeare’s plays. And I was writing beatnik poetry because the whole beatnik thing had kind of snuck into Lubbock. You know, they had little coffee houses and people wore leotards and berets and sunglasses.

PK: Late 50's, I suppose?

TA: Yeah, this was like, you know, ‘59, ‘58.

PK: Uh huh.

TA: And I was writing a “beatnik poem” and she was reading Julius Caesar to the class and so she stopped the class and said, stand up and read what you’re writing, because she knew I wasn’t paying attention to what she was doing, and so I thought, oh shit, you know. Here we go again. And I stood up and I read this blabbering gibberish beatnik poem, and she just looked at me and her comment was, keep doing that. And it was like being slapped. I was stunned because it was the first time that I can remember -- like what were we talking about the other night, being given permission to do those things you felt like doing. And Chouinard really kind of reinforced that. It became rather than such a unique thing, it was almost the norm at that school. And this is in retrospect. At the time, I was so baffled and confused and stumbling around. Al Ruppersberg, a friend of mine who I met in line . . .

PK: At Chouinard?

TA: At Chouinard, the first day, who came from Cleveland, and we have been very close friends since those times. But we were talking about really the same thing, about what, you know, the permission that kind of across the board that school gave you. And also the coming up against the various walls that is inevitable with that kind of permission, you know, the responsibility that goes with it and so forth. So it was the -- I guess after the first atomic bomb hit of rock and roll, it was the next huge kind of change that -- as far as influencing about the way you thought about yourself that happened to me.

PK: So this process already, what you’re describing, is a process of really self-discovery?

TA: Yeah.

PK: What do you do with these things, these interests you have with these desires that maybe you don’t even see. Well, you don’t necessarily see models for them in the early days in Lubbock, other than that good English teacher and then maybe little information about the beats.

TA: Well, I have to talk about my parents.

PK: Let's do that.

TA: As far as that goes. You know, I’m just saying that kind of real cataclysmic experiences were like rock and roll and the next one was leaving Lubbock and finding myself in L.A., you know, which might as well be on Mars at that particular time. But I was blessed in retrospect with two extremely interesting parents. My father was nearly 60 when I was born. He had been a professional ballplayer, he had a Third Grade education, was born in 1886, ran away from the farm in -- his family come from Tennessee and settled in Missouri. He ran away from the farm to play baseball and was basically too old to go to World War I.

PK: Uh huh.

TA: So he played for the St. Louis Browns in 1918 to about ‘22 and then went into the Texas League as a manager and player and played throughout Texas and Colorado, Oklahoma and whatever. And, of course, he was also married to a Catholic woman. He wasn’t Catholic, and had a son who went to World War II, who’s a half brother of mine, but who is -- he’s dead now. He was 40 years older than me and was never -- the only conflict -- he met my mother after his wife died, died of cancer in the ‘40's and then he met my mother who was -- she was born in 1904 in Oklahoma and came to Texas in a covered wagon with her family and settled in a little place called Brice Flats outside of Clamden, Texas and she was a piano player, had learned, hooked up, you know, with the church and whatever, was -- as the story goes, the first woman expelled from Southern Methodist University in Dallas, where she went to college. She was expelled for being caught in an area of Dallas called Deep Elam for playing jazz and she was playing jazz with black guys which was like even, you know, the ultimate horror. And this is in the ‘20's, early ‘20's. She went to beauty school, went to Fort Worth when she was like 19-years-old, went to beauty school to have a day job and formed a band and rehearsed a band at night. And after she kind of finished beauty school, hit the road, went to California and was a professional musician right up until after shortly after she met my dad, which was in ‘41, I guess, or ‘42. And she was married at least four times I know of before she married my dad. All the stories were always different, you know. But when my dad met her, there was like a 20 years difference in their age, and this caused a lot of problems from the Catholic side of the family because my mother was divorced, she was a wild musician, and so consequently, I was kind of isolated from that side of my dad's family just because basically, they considered that I was a bastard, you know.

PK: Really?

TA: And so that was kind of presented to me early on as a kid, you know, that I was the bastard son.

PK: Well, they were married, weren’tthey?

TA: Oh, they were married, but because, you know, I guess just that older man meeting a younger woman.

PK: Uh huh. And divorced.

TA: And that his wife had died and they -- I think they kind of expected my dad to just kind of cruise on out and check out, you know, for the rest of his life and be no problem, but he immediately engaged in life again. And that was kind of the family issue during that time. My mother was basically an outcast and then all -- here comes this son that was never expected, this -- another Martian landing. I’m sure that both of my folks even thought because my mother had never had a child before and my dad was 60 so, you know, right there, you kind of get presented with some kind of medal of oddity in terms of what your peers, these other kids that I grew up in grade school with, you know, I used to get in fist fights because people would accuse me of being with my grandfather, you know. And for some reason, I was very touchy about his age and I think it was because he was -- by the time I could play catch or we could do stuff like that, he couldn’t really do it. He couldn’t-- physically just wasn’t able.

PK: Because he must have been, well, about 70?

TA: Yeah, yeah, and he died when I was 15.

PK: Uh huh.

TA: So it was an odd -- and then, you know, to top it off kind of, he -- well, I was born in Wichita, Kansas because my dad went up to work at Cessna Aircraft in World War II. As soon as I was born, they moved me to Amarillo, where I lived the first two years of my life, and then, to give you another odd anecdote, they bought this house that they really loved in Amarillo, which we lived in for two years. Then they moved to Lubbock because my dad had found an old Gospel church that had gone broke and started throwing dances in it.

PK: Is that the country club that Jo Harvey mentioned?

TA: No. This was an old Four Square Gospel temple. It was like kind of right downtown. It was his first place, but he started throwing dances, wrestling matches, boxing matches, any kind of entertainment.

PK: He was an entrepreneur.

TA: Yeah, he was. He became one of the heavy entrepreneurs in Lubbock, but when he first started -- anyway, so he moved to Lubbock to kind of start up this new business and over a period of time as he began to make some money at it and moved locations, got a bigger building and whatever, until he finally ended up out at the airport, an old aircraft tanker, which was called the Jamboree Hall. Jo Harvey might have talked about the Jamboree Hall.

PK: Yes, she did.

TA: So when they got enough money, they wanted to build a new house. And they had the plans of this Amarillo house and built an exact duplicate of this Amarillo house in Lubbock, which is 113 miles away. I grew up in that house in grade school through high school. After my dad died and then I went to California, my mother sold the house and she kind of bounced around a little bit and then ended up going back to Amarillo, going to that original house and waiting until the woman that owned it died and then bought it and moved in it. So it was very bizarre because I grew up in this house in Lubbock, we go to Amarillo and visit my mother in the exact same house with the same furniture, the same thing.

PK: Twilight zone.

TA: So it’s like ultimate displacement. Yeah,twilight zone. So that gives you kind of an idea of my mother's kind of sensibility, you know.

PK: So when your dad died, you were 15?

TA: Yeah.

PK: And then your mom took you to California then?

TA: No, no, no. I was basically -- my mother was a huge drinker and she basically -- I was pretty much on my own.

PK: You were on your own?

TA: After my dad died. So I went to California right after high school.

PK: I just wanted to . . .

TA: I went to one semester at Texas Tech and failed everything.

PK: Everything? How did you manage that?

TA: Everything except an art class and an English class. I did find out about Chouinard in this art class because I was so desperate by that point to get out of Lubbock and get out of Texas and get out of my life period, I think. And I asked this teacher that I had if there was any place that you could go to school that the whole school experience would be like this drawing class, you know. And he said, yeah, I went two years to this place out in Los Angeles called Chouinard Art Institute, and so I wrote them, got an application, which was hilarious. The application was like, draw your hand, draw your pet, draw your room, you know, make up a drawing out of your own imagination. And then you had a number of questions like, who do you think is, you know, is the most important artist of the 20th century, and I put Norman Rockwell because I had never heard of any other artist, you know.

PK: That’s exactly what I was going to ask you.

TA: Yeah.

PK: I mean, what did that question mean to you?

TA: Well, that’s all it meant. It just meant, that’s the only -- because we took the [Saturday Evening] Post. That was the only visual artist, except, I mean, thinking back, the artists that were really -- had impacts on me were tatoo artists who I didn’t know, and comic book artists.

PK: Uh huh.

TA: But I certainly didn’t think of that in connection with art because it had such, you know, you’re presented with such lowly esteem in the climate of the times. Comic books because, you know, before rock and roll came along, it was comic books that caused juvenile delinquency and all those kind of problems. And the tatoo thing came from -- all of my mother’s brothers were in the Navy and Merchant Marines, so they were very heavily tattooed, and I can remember as a child sitting in the yard when they’d be drinking beer and tracing the different tatoos that they had on, you know, and loving it, you know, just loving looking at those drawings.

PK: Do you think that that represented for you also evidence of a lot of travel and really getting away, of going elsewhere and seeing things that were not available to you in Lubbock?

TA: Sure.

PK: In other words, the world.

TA: The thing you’ve got to remember that all these people, relatively speaking, were older. I only met one of my dad's brothers, I never met any of my grandparents, except my mother's father, because they were all dead, you know. They had all lived their lives. My father is interesting. He had four brothers, he came -- his father came from a family of -- there were five boys. His father fought in the Civil War. My grandfather fought in the Civil War, not great grandfather or whatever, you know. And there were five brothers and only one of them survived. Two of them fought for the south, three of them fought for the north. It was that classic . . .

PK: Brother against brother.

TA: Yeah, because Missouri was a “red lake” state because the border state, so half the people went off in different directions in the war, and he was the only survivor and he never talked about -- my dad said he never talked about the war. And I actually did a radio show called Dugout, which is funny how -- maybe it’s the end of this century, but I started thinking about, and I’m doing a whole piece in here, called Sea of Amarillo and I’m kind of dealing with all of that stuff again, you know.

PK: Isn’t that something?

TA: You want to change that or something?

PK: Yeah, let's turn it over.

[BEGIN TAPE 1, SIDE B]

PK: . . . [continuing] this interview with Terry Allen. This is Tape 1, Side B, and I do believe you were telling further about your family. One of the features -- that most of them were older. I thought that was interesting.

TA: Uh huh.

PK: And it seemed to me that -- were associated a lot during the early years. Obviously, you had your school friends and all of that, but with older people and sometimes that affects children. You know, they become in some ways more comfortable with adults or at least have a special relationship with them. Did you feel that was at all the case with you? I mean, did you like being with these older folks?

TA: I think it was kind of double edged. A part of me longed to be just like everybody else, have, you know -- and I think too just that I was young, I wasn’t aware of the kind of the richness I was being exposed to that I later became aware of, kind of after it was over, which -- I can remember these evenings happened a lot when old ball players would show up in the middle of the night or old musicians that my mother had crossed tracks with would show up in the middle of the night. And all the sudden, at midnight, a party would break out, you know, or this epic bullshitting, storytelling sessions that would happen, and I can't remember that many of the stories or anything, except kind of being echoed maybe through the things my dad would talk about. He was pretty stoic. He didn’t really -- I always say my family were both great story tellers and I say it kind of by rote, but I’m not sure they really were. I’m not sure it wasn’t the climate that was always a great story that was going on in that house.

PK: And those conversations.

TA: Yeah. And just the fact that what they did was so alien to any of the other people, any of my peers, what their folks did. The fact that my dad was the local wrestling promoter and brought in the first rock and roll shows into Lubbock immediately isolated me and separated me again from -- because the climate in those days like regarding music, especially rock and roll, was that it was a direct, you know, ascending to earth by Satan, you know.

PK: The devil’s work.

TA: Exactly. They had huge record burnings, you know.

PK: Really?

TA: Enticing all the teenagers to bring their 45's to the fairgrounds and make [funeral] pyres and burn these. I don’t think anybody that’s alive now, kids the equivalent age now, teenagers, have any idea the impact that that music had, especially in isolated kind of rural communities, what a huge door it opened to possibility in terms of your life that none of the culture around you did. I can remember like a physical experience the first time that I heard “Blue Suede Shoes.”

PK: I was going to ask you, was it Elvis?

TA: Well, it was really Carl Perkins who wrote it, but it was the Elvis version that I heard.

PK: Right.

TA: And it was, I mean, this is kind of classic cliche about rock and roll, or Elvis really, or during that period of time, but it was really the first thing that was not about an institution. It was not about your family, it was not about the school, the church, the community. It was about you, you know, and that’s what rock and roll did. It was the first time there was something ever that you could remember that was really yours, you know. So it was huge in that sense. And also, it made everybody want to go -- that was the least bit kind of fragmented in terms of their own feelings about themselves -- grab an instrument to save themselves, you know, and consequently, guitars, you know, people start selling like crazy. The only instrument I had access to is a piano, which my mother played and her style of playing was just kind of an old barrel house honky tonk up into the 40's she started playing, you know, the Glenn Miller stuff. But she taught me one song. She taught me to play the “St. Louis Blues” and then basically said, you’re on your own, you know. So anyway, that’s. . .

PK: So you didn’t have any lessons other than that, but you . . .

TA: Well, I had six months of piano lessons when I was, I guess, like in the Third Grade, and it was a very sweet old woman that taught me -- her name was Ruth Jordan, I remember. But she had horrendous breath, you know.

PK: How did you last six months?

TA: She would sit on my right and instruct me, you know, while I was playing, and I always think -- because when I play the piano, I nearly always play to the low end. I always play to the, you know, down below middle C or whatever, and I really attribute it to that woman.

PK: “Stay away from me.”

TA: If I go to the high end, some big whiff is going to hit me.

PK: Dragon breath.

TA: So anyway, yeah, I’m pretty much totally self-taught. I can’t read music. I can read very basic child music, you know.

PK: So how do you write then?

TA: I can remember tunes.

PK: I see.

TA: You know.

PK: But, I mean, they do get set down.

TA: I write . . .

PK: Somebody else put the notations?

TA: Yeah, if that’s necessary. I mean, you go in and record it, you know. In fact, most of the musicians that I’ve ever played with don’t read music, you know.

PK: Yeah.

TA: But we notate things, you know. We notate off, you know, go from to the 1 to the 4 or to the 5 or whatever, but there’s no charting per se. And that’s really across the board. I don’t think I know -- I know one sax player in Lubbock who was totally self-taught and then went and learned music and it ruined his playing because he became reliant on sheet music rather than his own ideas.

PK: Do you think that this is more typical of country music and maybe rock. What about somebody like David Byrne?

TA: David doesn’t -- David has his own notation system but he can’t read music.

PK: Is that right?

TA: He’s taught himself to a certain degree but he’s totally self-trained.

PK: See, Isn’t that interesting because without getting off into another fascinating subject, it seems interesting that with rock and roll -- well, I don’t know, maybe popular music in general. You think of jazz, you go back further, rag time, I don’t know. It seemed like a parallel development of music whereas, you know, the typical traditional had been somewhere [inaudible] do you think?

TA: Well, I think, like from perspective of where I grew up like music was really the only entertainment. It was usually connected with church or it was connected with -- maybe they'd have a brass band in the town which might mean they lucked out and got one horn player from somewhere. But I think it was more in those places than just entertainment per se. It was like a real human outlet and that was kind of the history of the thing. Like a good fiddle player was important in a community. A good piano player. I mean, they were people that gave something or provided something that communities . . .

PK: Especially community dances.

TA: Yeah, and when there’s really no prefabricated entertainment at all, which was pretty much true even when I grew up. You made up your own entertainment. I mean, there were movies, which were huge but there wasn’t near the kind of glut of possibility entertaining yourself that there is now. [Inaudible] it neutralizes itself. There weren’t video games. There were juke boxes, which were giant icons in a drugstore or at lunch when you were a kid or whatever clubs you went to. And then they had the little table podiums that were in cafes, and it was always a big decision like what you played on those things.

PK: That’s interesting because, of course, this is our shared experience because we're about the same age. I am a couple of years older. I grew up in -- don’t worry, this Isn’t going to be “my story.”

TA: No, that’s alright.

PK: But I grew up during this very, very important time, which was the explosion of rock and roll. I was in Southern California, in Burbank, as a matter of fact. And one of the questions that I was going to ask you --I’m trying to identify with your situation, which would have been just about the same time -- I’m wondering if there was a bit of a lag from the urban centers in terms of popular music. I remember, for instance, I guess my first real paying attention to this new music -- because I’d listen to Jo Stafford on the radio and so forth and all that, but something happened, and it seemed to me it was in the early ‘50's, but the icon I remember, Bill Haley and the Comets, “Rock Around the Clock,” and then I started paying attention to . . .

TA: Well, you saw that movie Blackboard Jungle, that’s probably where you heard “Rock Around the Clock.”

PK: Yeah.

TA: Because it was the first rock and roll song ever used as a theme song in a movie.

PK: Yeah. Well, maybe that’s why it stuck that way, but I thought that was thrilling.

TA: Yeah. Well, my situation was, even though I was much more isolated, like they played rock and roll from 11:00 to 12:00. That was all you got it locally. Then later, the big booming stations like, well, there was a station in Oklahoma City called KOMA, that we started getting in high school.

PK: You could get that all around the place.

TA: But the huge influence radio wise was Wolfman Jack.

PK: Del Rio, Texas.

TA: Del Rio. And a lot of times when I’m performing, I have this song called the “Wolfman of Del Rio”, and I introduce the song by saying, in west Texas, your first memory starts when you get your first car because there is no reason to have a memory until you get your first car. And the first thing you do is get that car and find a dead, endless straight farm road, drive the car as fast as it will go, turn up the radio as loud as it will go, and inevitably in those days, what was on that radio after midnight was Wolfman Jack, and he was an odd character in those days because nobody knew what he was. They didn’t know if he was a Mexican, they didn’t know if he was a black, a white, they didn’t know if he was a man or a woman because there was a black woman comedian named Moms Mabley [phon. sp.], who was a huge influence on Wolfman Jack, which he later said. But he had that kind of gravely, growly voice and so you had that mystery of him plus he was playing these songs, the first rhythm and blues songs that we really ever heard in that part of the country, and in the middle of a song, right always at the perfect point -- and this is why you’re hauling ass down a highway in dead middle of the night -- he would play these wolves howling. And, of course, up on the high plains, the horizon is so endless, it’s so flat that there was some indelible thing that happened to you when you heard that wolf howling. Still, to this day, I get shivers thinking about it. But my situation as a kid, because my dad had this arena, was -- I worked out there from the time I was 6-years-old, so in the late ‘40's up until really he sold it in ‘58, I sold set ups and popcorn and cokes and all of that stuff. And in those days, in the late ‘40's, early ‘50's, it was the touring bands that came through and on Friday night, it was all black night because Lubbock was very segregated, so all black night was great bands like T-Bone Walker and some of the -- oh, Count Basie would come through, some of those orchestras. Blues Boy King, who’s now B.B. King, Jimmy Reed, all of these incredible people that were touring really literally with their big base strapped to the top of the station wagon and everybody would move to the next town.

And then the next night, which was Saturday night, was the Saturday night jamboree, which was all country and people like Hank Williams and Elvis, when he was first starting to do some things, Carl Perkins, Little Jimmy Dickens, Minnie Pearl, all of the kind of -- Earnest Tubb, Bob Wells, all of these people came through on Saturday night and then stayed over Sunday and there was a radio show that happened every afternoon at a drugstore and would just kind of do live open mike situations on Sunday afternoon after church. So I grew up with that being a living presence. It was just that when rock and roll came along, there was some kind of lightning bolt that happened that was not like any kind of music or anything I’d ever experienced. Of course, it hit right at the time that I was becoming an adolescent too, right at the time that all of that stuff starts happening with your childhood slamming up against being an adult. And so it was an incredibly volatile period. Then the complete adverse reaction from the community at large, especially adults, toward it. But again, I was in a unique situation because my dad brought those shows in.

PK: Yeah, you were cool.

TA: And my mother loved music.

PK: You must have been, in fact, Jo Harvey mentioned this, that in terms of your -- or your first meeting and all that, but that you were -- despite the fact that you felt, in some ways, isolated from the community because of circumstances you just described, you must have been viewed as pretty cool.

TA: No.

PK: If your dad was bringing in bands and so forth connected with the jamboree place, did you get some of the points for that, image points?

TA: You know, it’s funny. I think what I was trying to do then was play baseball. My dad was very prominent in the community. He was in a funny situation too because one side of the mouth of the community was saying he was bringing evil into the city and the other side of the same mouth was saying this was a huge hero in the Texas league and he started the Lubbock Hubbers, which was the local -- started a country club there. He did all of these kind of civic things, so he was a very prominent kind of, but very isolated person, I think. And there was a part of me that really wanted to please him even though he never, never put any overt pressure on me to do it, but to play baseball, so I -- that’s what I had in the back of my mind, is kind of how I would please my father would be to play baseball. And I just wasn’t that good at it. I played every summer but just wasn’t that good at it.

PK: Let me ask you this.

TA: A lot of times I’ve wondered what he would think about what I do.

PK: What you’ve turned into?

TA: Yeah. I really . . .

PK: I would think he would be proud.

TA: I don’t know. I really -- that’s just one of those big unanswerables that you have because he was, like I said, he was incredibly conservative on a lot of levels, politically conservative.

PK: Well, he wouldn’t have liked that part then of your . . .

TA: His concept of what it would be to what the arts would be -- even though my real foundation in theater and music and probably even visual [art] to a degree came from working out there. It’s like there’s nothing like -- the last public theater is professional wrestling. It’s just pure theater, good against evil, versus evil. That’s what it is every night. Every Wednesday night, it was the battle of good against evil, and then you had this music. And then I can remember epic graffiti in the bathrooms of drawings that were always like these lewd sex drawings and stuff, but it was kind of all right there happening all of the time.

PK: Well, it seems to me that, in terms of your background and your interests, which that, of course, is incorporated so importantly in your work. Music, it was all there. You were well set up. You were well prepared in terms of that aspect, that interest. What you had to go elsewhere to get, of course, was then to flush that out with a whole introduction to a broader art world and the possibilities of an art world. But I want to -- before we leave the music . . .

TA: Okay.

PK: Well, we won’t be able to leave it actually, and we don’t want to leave it, but I’m very interested to know, in trying to trace your interests and your choices about musical form of expression, the country [music] is there and that’s part of your life, your growing up. You grew up in a part of the world where, indeed, was very important. I have to say if I’m not a music critic, but I wouldn’t actually describe you only as a country musician and composer, and we’ll get into that much more because there is a whole another . . .

TA: Yeah. A lot of times when people ask me or say, do you make country music, and my response is, which country?

PK: It’s other [different]. I mean, trust me, it is other and I’m eager to talk about that but it’s a little premature now. But what I’m trying to do is kind of sort this out in terms of influences and what you seemed to turn to then later in your own writing, those themes that you reach back, certainly “The Wolf Man of Del Rio”, which is a great -- what is the song called?

TA: That’s the title of it.

PK: That is? Okay.

TA: Yeah, “Wolf Man of Del Rio.”

PK: That’s a wonderful song and without -- I don’t want to be too rhapsodic about this but what you do -- the reason I’m a fan of yours and other friends [are], especially artists, is that you quite directly draw from experiences, of course, that we have. We’re the same age and this really works, but also what you’re doing is investigating the whole circumstances of growing up and young people being introduced to life very much through some of these shared experiences. Country music deals with some of these issues too. I’m not saying it doesn’t, but in terms of -- I’d really like to pin down some of the others. You covered Chuck Berry’s “Maybeline” in a terrific version, I think, and I don’t know which tape or CD that it’s on.

TA: It’s on “Smokin’ the Dummy,” yeah.

PK: And that’s. . .

TA: “Whatever Happened to Jesus and (Maybeline)” is the title.

PK: Yeah, and, of course, you then, you take . . .

TA: That was the first song I ever covered actually that someone else wrote.

PK: And, of course, you did that later with David Byrne and . . .

TA: “Buck Naked.”

PK: “Buck Naked” was the second.

TA: You think about the thread of all of those songs – “Wolf Man of Del Rio,” “Maybeline,” “Buck Naked” -- they’re all about mobility across geography. So they’re all about cars and they’re all about moving through space, which is something anybody that grows up in west Texas, unless you’re born without legs or you’re in prison or something, it’s mobility that is the most crucial thing and it’s that flat, endless horizon that you grow up looking at, wondering what’s on the other side. And a car is a huge invention for you, a huge thing to suddenly have access to. Probably every first thing that happened to me happened in an automobile, and a good part of the people in that part of the world can say that. So it’s like when you were saying -- talking about growing up and then as opposed to when you are grown up, I’m curious if there is -- where is the spot that you are grown up? I mean, your life moves, but you take stuff with you that changes all the way and to me, it’s like maybe when you just stop or die or whatever, that’s really when you grow up, because the rest of the time, you’re just hurdling through this question mark, I think, of who you are and what this is, and so forth. So I wrote the LUBBOCK (on everything) album over a period of -- about 1966 to when I recorded it in ‘77. During that period of time, after I went to Los Angeles, I had built this huge grudge against Lubbock, against Texas, against my whole -- once I kind of got into L.A. and I wanted to leave all of that stuff behind me. The only thing, this crucial thing that I kind of brought with me or came with me was Jo Harvey, which was nothing but a complete store house of my own history from another point of view. But I had this -- every time we went back there to visit folks or whatever, I hated it more. I expressed hating going back there, hating that state, hating that town, hating those people. And it wasn’t until 1977 when circumstances led me back to Lubbock to record this album of these songs that were pretty much west Texas oriented, even though there’s a lot of different other ideas that are going on in the record. It wasn’t until we were mixing the album and sitting and listening to it that I realized none of these songs were about hating that place, not one of them. So I was giving all this kind of verbal rage against where I came from but everything I was writing, had almost the antithist of it. I mean, certainly, there was a lot of sarcasm and stuff in it.

PK: What is the name of that? I forget. That album is Lubbock . . .

TA: LUBBOCK (on everything).

PK: On everything, yeah. Which is a great -- I mean, this is, I guess people would say, most people would agree that seeing that this is one of your best. I don’t know how you feel about it but . . .

TA: I don’t feel that way. I mean, I think it happened at a period that was really exciting and interesting for me, in terms of both songs. I feel the same way about each of my records. When people ask me, which record should I get, I say, well, don’t get any of them or get all of them because they’re such a different history, they’re such a different focus each time that you do things.

PK: Maybe part of the reason -- and this is the case that people often cite that one and what you just . . .

TA: Well, I mean, a lot of people cite Juarez.

PK: Well, yeah, that too.

TA: Other people cite, like in Ireland and the U.K., Bloodlines is the -- but LUBBOCK (on everything) is consistently sold the same amount since it first came it. It is . . .

PK: Well, what I would suggest, at least for further or for pursuing this line, you’ve been talking about some things that are very important to you and informative things out of Lubbock, out of that whole experience, which you denied.

TA: I’m thinking about all of these things because yeah, sure you think about them but it’s like, you really wonder how much of your own life you always invent, and I had -- there was such a richness, like in terms of what I do that I can go back and say, yeah, that had to be why I do this, or yeah, that had to be what happens with me. But I’m not thoroughly convinced that that’s the case. I know I’m-- I think I’m-- it’s like that question, what artist influenced you, or what musicians influenced you, and I always kind of bristle at that question because it’s one of those questions that somehow, your own creativity or your own imagination can’t exist alone, it has to have some kind of fortressing structure around it that’s based on what somebody else has done. Writers write that way, critics I’m talking about. Writers don’t, critics do. And so it’s always hackled me a little bit, but it’s also from the point of view of your own history. It’s really kind of mysterious and what blend of circumstance, fate, fear, all of those things played in making you kind of do what you do or need to do what you did. It’s like I’ve never been able to think of making art ever as a career. It's, to me, a choice somewhere down the line I made. I don’t know when I made it exactly. I mean, I can speculate on that too, but it was of how you’re going to live your life. And . . .

[BEGIN TAPE 2, SIDE A]

PK: Okay. We’re continuing the interview with Terry Allen on April 22nd. This is Tape 2, Side A and gee, we have, I don’t know how many subjects just sort of now hovering out there to pursue. But I wanted to . . .

TA: A lot of stuff in the air, Paul.

PK: There’s a lot of stuff in the air, it’s summer time.

TA: Spring time.

PK: A lot of pollen.

TA: Enough to make you sick ten times over.

PK: Some sickness ain’t that bad. I was talking about -- well, we were talking about LUBBOCK (on everything), and you were making the point that -- and I think this is what you meant, that people would ask, well, which album, which tape or CD should I get? In other words, which is the real Terry Allen, I think, is what they’re asking in a sense. What is the typical, or maybe best, but at any rate, which one do you recommend, and your answer was interesting, that -- get none or get all of them, get all of them or get none, which I think is one way of saying, it ain’t that simple, it’s not just this.

TA: Sure.

PK: Nonetheless, for me, in terms of the music of yours that I have listened to and enjoyed, there are some that seem more accessible and I would have to say, in some ways, less arty or artful, more direct in terms of our life experience. And I don’t want to force this issue but it does -- the Lubbock one which you yourself described as the result or no, it’s the process itself of coming to a point where you understood or saw more accurately what your own background meant to you. I think that maybe in some ways that comes through in that particular collection of songs.

TA: Well, it’s like I said, I think each -- like any body of work, whether it’s music or sculpture or whatever, I think it comes from the questions and the needs that you have at a given time that are unique to that time and this work becomes a part of that -- like in your memory, a part of that time. And like Juarez, my concerns with Juarez as a record and as a body of work were so totally different really that LUBBOCK, and that was the first album that I did. It’s like each record, just like each body of visual work, is dealing with the thing that I’m most interested in and curious about at a particular time, and then to look back and say one of those is lesser, I mean, sure, there’s always things that because of time, you think, I could’ve done this maybe a little different or I could’ve maybe included this or I beat that one a little bit to death or whatever, but that’s just kind of, I think, hindsight criticism that when you’re in a thing, I think you’re always operating in the unknown. I think that’s where work happens, it happens in that darkness that your curiosity has led you to and then the work happens in there, whether it’s music or whatever it is. So in a funny way, it’s like asking somebody to pick their favorite child. I mean, do you like your youngest or your middle or your oldest the best, and they’re just totally different creatures in different times and different parts of you that I can’t acknowledge one more really than the other in my mind, and I’m not interested in doing it. If other people do that, and I know there’s always that thing of which is best. Our culture's built on like which is the best, which is the most, which is the whatever, and even though I go along with some of that to a degree when it comes to putting my own work in that kind of perspective, I think it’s pretty much bullshit. So I’m just not interested in doing that. There’s people that making a living writing about stuff like that and even though it is a constant kind of question that you get, I think it’s more than a musician really than an artist.

PK: Yeah, this is, of course, one of the fascinating but also a little bit confusing, if not exactly frustrating, things about approaching your, dare I say, career.

TA: Say what you want to, Paul.

PK: Thank you. But anyway, this journey that you’ve embarked upon, and it’s because, I think, to an unusual degree, you have lived up to one of the post modernist's ideas, at least that’s how we look at it now. And that is erasing the distinctions, these categories -- distinctions between high art and low art. Something that actually your generation as much as any, I think, our generation. In your case, you’re active and successful in the music field, you’re surely a visual artist, no question about that. You’re a writer, you’re a sculptor, a painter, and you mix these together in a way that seems to be a refusal to acknowledge that these are separate entities.

TA: I think it’s because I don’t really think of them as separate. I think there’s certain things that you get interested in that pull you toward a certain way of doing it that requires a certain kind of thing. And that to me is more the way I think that I function. I also think that part of this is just -- I mean, there’s a number of artists that -- actually, I know very few visual artists that don’t play musical instruments. I know very few musicians that aren’t photographers, don’t paint. I think part of it is the ‘60's. I think part of it comes from the fact that I -- the time I went to Los Angeles and lived from ‘62 to ‘70. It was a huge upheaval socially and culturally. Obviously, Vietnam War, but more importantly, like when I was in art school, it was the first time that materials became available. You could make art -- you didn’t just go to the art store, you could go to the hardware store, you could go to the stationery store, you could go to the dump, you could go to -- all of the sudden, accessibility became unlimited for things for an artist to make. Also, for the first time, there was a lot of overlapping between different kind of medias. Raushenberg was working with Trisha Brown, Warhol was working with the Velvet Underground, so there was all of this cross-fertilization, I think, that was going on, and I don’t think they were hybrids, I think they were like really legitimate works that were changing and being made. And, of course, then you have to deal with definitions. What do we call that? So it’s a hybrid or it’s a this or it’s a that or whatever, but it was really kind of irrelevant. I think it was a climate that got opened up during that period that was so influencing on a lot of my generation. Also, music was one of the most volatile forms of expression in the 60's. People wonder about the connection, well, making music, making art, half of the bands I knew that were both popular, being played on the radio, came out of art schools. Art schools were like . . .

PK: Well, like the Talking Heads.

TA: Well, Talking Heads, but like the Beatles, like Rolling Stones. All those people were coming -- at least one or two of them coming out of a visual kind of situation as far as school goes. So it’s not that odd actually when you think of it. It was pretty much going on during that period of time, and so I know when I was in school, there was a group of us that -- we lucked out and got this little theater for free and we had it for about a year, and we took turns. None of us had any kind of theatrical training or dramatic training, but we took turns writing pieces once a week. We charged enough money at the door for beer.

PK: This was at Chouinard?

TA: This was at Chouinard, it was a house actually that somebody had set up a theater in. They had kind of abandoned it and we just took it over. We called it the Lucille Street Theater because it was on Lucille. But totally took turns writing and producing a play, we'd take turns doing sets for each other, take turns doing music for each other, acting in one another's piece, and it was something we did just for the hell of it, but it was a huge training ground for ideas for me just being with these people. So all of that was kind of going on.

PK: Who were some of your colleagues in that endeavor? Who were some of the others? Al?

TA: No, Al wasn’t involved in that. We were involved in a gallery, a co-op gallery. Al and I -- and then I was in a band also, in a band called Black Wall Blues Quintet, which was kind of the school rock and roll band.

PK: Black Wall?

TA: Black Wall, like tires. Black Wall Blues Quintet. And we played all of the dances and house parties and all of that stuff.

PK: Who else was in that band?

TA: A guy named Gary Wong who is a Korean guy raised in Watts, whose incredible harmonica and singer, blues singer. A guy named Mike Murray was -- I don’t know if any of these people are making work or playing music. I know Gary is still playing music. Then a drummer who, as far as I know, is still in prison in Morocco, got busted for some kind of dope deal there. And a guitar player named Wes, God, I can’t even remember Wes's last name, but he worked in a shoe store and then just kind of -- he wasn’t involved in Chouinard but we kind of pulled this band together and played for about a year.

PK: Was Llyn Foulkes around yet? He was, wasn’t he?

TA: Llyn was older than me and I knew Llyn -- I’d seen his band but I never really crossed tracks much with Llyn. It’s funny. That was one interesting thing about L.A. is that there were so many different communities. It wasn’t like the art community in, say New York or San Francisco even. I think -- I remember when Al did a piece called Al’s Café, it was -- he set up this café where he sold art work, plates of art rather than food. And he’d have stuff like BLT, which would be a plate full of branches, leaves, and twigs, stuff like that. But it was the first time that I can remember in L.A. -- this was like 1967, I guess at the café he did. It was the first time I met artists from Venice, from the [San Fernando] Valley, from Pasadena. I was living in Silverlake and Hollywood and kind of around -- in there is where Jo Harvey and I were living, but it was the first time -- you had heard about these guys, you'd see work periodically, but it was the first time I’d ever really met them, and I think it was one of the first times, as a group, those people met each other.

PK: What was the name of the gallery? It was called . . .

TA: It was called Al’s Café.

PK: Al’s Café.

TA: It was a piece, it was a working café, but it served art instead of any -- it was opened five days a week. You go in and buy a little plate of art and a beer. Jo Harvey was one of the waitresses and . . .

PK: That sounds great. Tell me more about that. Now, I don’t know anything about that.

TA: It was off of Alvarado Street, very close to Chouinard. It was next to a halfway house for guys just coming out of the pen, and he rented this place for a month and he did a huge kind of installation down in the basement area, then upstairs was a café. L.A. County has the whole collection of his plates and a lot of people bought that stuff, but it was like the first kind of real active environmental work that I can remember. I had done a 45, the first record I ever did, which was called “Going to California,” which I kind of reprieved actually for “Chippy.”

PK: Oh, yeah, yeah.

TA: And the flip side of this 45 was called Color Book, which was kind of a zaney idiot song that I had written, and this friend of mine paid for like a 1,000 copies of my record to be -- and I put it on -- I even made a gold record -- you can see it up there in the corner -- that was kind of a tribute to it because Bale, it’s on Bale Creek Label because Bale was born that year and it’s Bukka Cain Publishing because Bukka was born 13 months before that, and I called it Sonshine. So that gold record kind of -- but also, there was a guy floating around L.A. at that time called the Hollywood arsonist and he was lighting different fires all over Sunset Boulevard, and he literally lit one of his fires on my stack of freshly pressed records.

PK: Oh, no.

TA: And only about 300 of them were left, so I instantly said well, it’s a collector’s item now and I put them in a little package and we sold them at Al’s Café as kind of a side dish. So anyway, Al got busted because he never got a liquor license, and that was a pretty hilarious day when Al, whose hair was at least to the back of his knees, I think, had to go to court and explain his café to this woman judge and present his whole deal to her. It was funny because she never said one word. He just stood there spouting all of his stuff about how the café came about and about all these artists and all this stuff, and finally the judge just stopped him and said, get out of here, just get out of here.

PK: When was that? What year?

TA: ‘67. Then, he did a piece called Al's Grand Hotel, which was in conjunction with the art and technology show at L.A. County, and it was a house on Sunset Boulevard that each room was an environment.

PK: Yeah, I’ve heard about that.

TA: And I played the opening of that. There was a sound truck that came in and I recorded all of that stuff. Al actually just did kind of a retrospective in France, and we dug up those old tapes and he played it during the exhibition and it was a part of Al’s Grand Hotel portion of the exhibition.

PK: That’s fascinating. I was around then.

TA: He’s a guy you should talk to.

PK: Where does he live?

TA: Well, he lives where he gets mail pretty much.

PK: Oh, really?

TA: He just got back from Switzerland from a year on a grant, and he’s got a studio in New York, but has an apartment that he keeps in L.A.

PK: Oh, good.

TA: Down Santa Monica.

PK: Maybe you can, before I leave, give me a . . .

TA: I’ll be glad to.

PK: Because that’s something I should do.

TA: He’s an extraordinary person as far as talking about the history of that period of time.

PK: Which is my job.

TA: And a wonderful artist.

PK: It’s a history -- that my editorial comment -- is much richer than has actually been given credit for. It’s still being brought together. Art technology, again, not to fire off in too many tangents but, of course, Maurice Tuchman was the main one on that. I’m just curious. You were, as an artist, in a really good position then to observe the art scene there and the sort of emergence of the museums as a little more involved. What’s your view of that?

TA: Well, it’s funny because I mentioned that we had a co-op gallery we called Gallery 66, which -- and at the time, Walter Hopps was The Old Pasadena Museum, he was the director. And we would visit Walter because he liked to shoot the breeze with art students and stuff and whenever we’d have a show, we’d call Walter and tell him to come down and look at it, and he would always do it. He would call about midnight and say, I’ll meet you there at 3:00 a.m. and it was literally like some kind of spy scene, some kind of clan. Walter would come in his overcoat with a collar up through the back door so nobody would see him, kind of whisk through the show and then leave. And then kind of -- next time we saw him, he would kind of deliver his comments about it, but I became good friends with Walter during that period of time. And then he moved on to wherever he went to after that and I believe it was Jim Demetrion [who] was acting director after that. I was going -- I had decided -- I had done a body of work, the first body of work after I got out of school, and I decided to take it to galleries, which were nearly all along La Cienega during that time. And I went to Nick Wilder’s gallery. I kind of decided that I should go to the galleries and show people that I like. So I went to Nick’s, laid all my drawings out on the floor, and he took about three hours with me, just telling me about different galleries, his ideas about them, what was going on, where I should take my work, and where I shouldn’t. He said, I really like these drawings, but I’m not interested in showing them, I’m not interested in this kind of work for my gallery, but I do like them and think you should go so and so, whatever. He said the one person you should avoid is Irving Blum, totally -- who’s right across the street from Nick. So I picked up my drawings and just on a fluke, walked right across the street to Irving's Gallery and said, I would like -- told the receptionist I would like to speak to Irving. I was ushered in, he was on the telephone, he kind of motioned for me to spread my drawings out on the floor like I had done at Nick’s, and he got up, put the phone down, never said a word, looked at all of the drawings very carefully, went back to the phone, called Demetrion, said there’s a guy here you’ve gotta show, give a show at the museum. So my first show was at the Pasadena Art Museum.

PK: Thanks to Irving Blum.

TA: To Irving.

PK: And Nick . . .

TA: Who had some clout, I guess, with Demetrion.

PK: But so Nick told you . . .

TA: Nick told me . . .

PK: “Don’t go there.”

TA: He said, he will not like these at all, he will not be the least bit -- and he wasn’t interested in showing them in his gallery, but he liked the work enough to call Demetrion and get me a show. And that’s-- it always baffles me because everybody has such a different story about how things happen to them and what happens with work and so forth, and I ended up showing with Mazuno Gallery, with Rico when she had her gallery there, but . . .

PK: Now that, talk about fate. Again, I don’t want to change this train of thought but . . .

TA: I got curious when Nick was talking about -- because he had been so generous to me. And, of course, I don’t know if anybody would be that generous anymore. I mean, that was such a different time in the ‘60's and people were such more -- kind of learning the rules about how a gallery worked, even the museums too were trying to figure out what they were. But I was so curious at how Irving would be negative to my work. After all the stuff that Nick said, that was the first place I went.

PK: Well, also, you’re a little bit perverse.

TA: Could be. I was just curious. I don’t know if it was perverse, I was just very curious.

PK: I thought you would like that anyway. What were the drawings like at that stage? This was just after art school, or were you still at Chouinard?

TA: Well, after I went out of school, I went through that dead zone I think a lot of people do of just not working. I taught -- I fell into a job through the U.S. Poverty Program and taught the third grade for a year in Watts.

PK: You did?

TA: ‘67, right after I got out of school, and I didn’t do any work during that period of time. It’s kind of odd, I had reached that point when I was in school that -- was very much in debt. I had student loans. I was on scholarship my last two years in school, but I still took out loans just to live and then the band, I had all of the equipment in my car and it was all ripped off, so I owed everybody in the band. This was like just several weeks before I would graduate, and I can remember walking out with this sheet of paper, Jo Harvey and I walking out after this hilarious graduation ceremony at Chouinard into the street and looking at this and realizing it -- this wasn’t even toilet paper. What am I going to do now? I’m out of school, so that’s over with, now what? And I think that’s the killing for a lot of people in art school. There’s a lot of art students but it’s that first year when you come into the reality that you’ve got to make a living and stepping into the world.

PK: It’s not easy.

TA: Yeah. But anyway, I think it was that withdrawal from the sanctity or the womb, of mama, of school, that -- and there was a friend of mine that had a studio above a movie theater and they let him have the studio for free for changing the marquee twice a week, this movie theater. But I remember going up and he had these drawings that he had been working on, and I just thought, I’ve got to start working. I don’t even really remember that much about what those drawings looked like, his drawings, but so I decided for nothing better to do, well, I’m going to illustrate the Bible, I’ll just start there. And I did maybe up through Deuteronomy before they started changing and becoming something else, and they were very comic book kind of oriented. They were small 24 x 30 at the most paper, and I also started thinking about music, how I could somehow -- because I was always writing songs and constantly playing music. How I could incorporate music into these drawings. So I started doing drawings with tapes on the back. I would record a tape and so if you bought the drawing, you got this tape, kind of the sound track to it, and then I actually started incorporating kind of made up notations and words that went into the drawings that related -- the songs didn’t, in any way, illustrate the drawing or vice versa. They were like two parts of the same thing. But it was a struggle to kind of put music into the visual thing and vice versa. That was a need that I felt very early on, not in school. In school, I was desperately trying to be an abstract expressionist, which is what they were teaching.

PK: Yeah, sure.

TA: I did have a great teacher, though, Emerson Woelffer.

PK: Yeah, Emerson's great. Now, tell me what it was like to have him.

TA: He was great because he said nothing. That’s why he was so great. He would walk up to something that you had done and just start rabidly gesturing and kind of grunting it and then walk off. He was a wonderful person.

PK: He’s a really terrific artist, I think, but did the students, or did you have any interaction with him besides when he would appear and gesture or grunt?

TA: Not a lot. I mean, a lot of times, there was another guy named Mike Kanemitsu who was a painter there and Mike, I liked a whole lot. He was a really interesting guy. And a lot of times, Woelffer and Mike, it was pretty much just the two of them and then Ruscha would come around once in awhile, Joe Goode would come around once in awhile. Irwin taught there off an on, so you had -- but they were older and they were just starting to kind of do their stuff.

PK: Would they come and teach or just hang out?

TA: They would come and talk, just talk, but a lot of times, they’d just come and hang out. That’s what was pretty unique about Chouinard. I had a -- the first term that I was there, I had an art history class with a wonderful woman named Ms. Watson. I don’tknow her first name, and she had been a nun in France . She was an American but had been cloistered in France and somehow, while she was over there, had met André Breton, who had kind of hooked her up with all of these surrealist guys over there to the point, I think, that she dropped the cloth and ended up in L.A. and she worked for the old L.A. Examiner as an art critic. And like most of the people that taught academic classes in Chouinard, they did it to pick up some extra money in the mornings, so she came and taught art history. And I’ll never forget the day she just said, well, today, We’re going to talk about a French artist, Mr. Marcel Duchamp and We’re fortunate enough to have Mr. Duchamp with us today that you can quiz and talk to after, and so Duchamp was there in the class, he was doing his first exhibition out with Walter at Pasadena, invited the entire class because we had been so nice to him to go to . . .

[Begin Tape 2, Side B]

PK: . . . interviewing Terry Allen. This is Tape 2, Side B and lucky, lucky you. As an art student, you just met Marcel Duchamp.

TA: Well, but having no clue whatsoever who Marcel Duchamp or what he was and just thinking he was this kind of quirky old French cat that -- but he did invite us out to the museum to observe this interview he did, and we were sitting in the french windows and then walked around and looked at all of this extremely bizarre work to each of us at that time, I think. But this is what Ms., this Watson woman, did. It’s like Harry Callahan, a photographer was a good friend of hers. Whenever he came through, he hung out. Man Ray had his L.A. County show. Man Ray would come just about every day to lunch and sit out with the students at the picnic tables and talk.

PK: That’s great.

TA: So that was kind of like a perk that happened at Chouinard, just by the nature of the people that were in and out of there, that I’m not sure happens anymore. I mean, if it is -- if it does happen, I’m not aware of it. Well, it’s always formal. It’s not something that just kind of -- because of the nature of the times and the nature of the place, it just generated this stuff. And again, I don’t think anybody that was there at that time registered at all how interesting that was and it was something that happens in your memory. It was like I’ve always thought that you know how you think you’re learning something at a particular time, you’re focused on something and you think you’re learning, and it’s not until maybe six months or a week or a year later that you realize you were learning something totally different. And I kind of think that’s really the way making art works in lots of ways. That you’re so predicated on failure, and I think also that’s one of the reasons I -- the way I work seems to kind of balloon into a larger project always. I’ll start with kind of maybe an idea of working, like the Ring piece, I wrote a story and then I did an installation kind of that was of tableaus that kind of worked with that story and then I took the same story and it became a script for a theater piece, which was performed. Then we videoed that performance. The video became a part of another installation and then all the time, I was working on pieces that were kind of dealing with between the lines of this story, so I did another installation where that the story was stripped of all words and only punctuation was left of the story.

PK: That’s sort of like concrete poetry almost.

TA: Yeah, but it was also one of the first pieces I incorporated sound in, early sound piece. It was called Messages from Wrestlers in Hell, but it was taking all of the sounds out of the video, all of the dialogue in there and just putting like a little glass breaking, a car passing, a bird, a cricket so that the sounds became kind of punctuations themselves for these objects with the text, which was only periods, commas, and so forth.

PK: Did you know John Cage at all at that point? Were you aware of him?

TA: I didn’t know John -- I never met John Cage.

PK: Well, I mean . . .

TA: But I knew the books and I knew Silence and Year From Monday, which was later. But Silence was -- I loved Silence because it’s stories, the fact that he told anecdotes about just something that he would see, at the same time of something that he was listening to. How everything was about being alive, not just making music, but music and being alive were the same kind of thing. And I know when I was working on Juarez, which was kind of the first big long range project that -- music and visual pieces that I started working on, I got very concerned with again, mobility, like the idea of being in a car, hurdling through space, looking through a windshield, listening to music and the same thing that you’re looking at and the stuff flying by, as opposed to being on a motorcycle, which is -- in a car, you’re kind of like in a movie. On a motorcycle, you’re in the landscape itself, so there’s two couples that are -- one couple’s on a motorcycle, one couple's in a car and everything that kind of happens in the context of those couples has to do, I think, with that idea of the different kinds of motion and space, but also those were the first kind of character struggles I had to make a character, and I never thought of them as people as much as I thought of them as real separate climates that were like incompatible with one another and colliding into one another as they were always hurdling through space to these little dots where things happened.

PK: Yeah, well, that’s very explicit in the lyrics.

TA: Yeah.

PK: Getting to Mexico by way of Colorado.

TA: Going north to get south.

PK: Yeah, yeah, and . . .

TA: I think that’s kind of what making art is about too, it’s that same thing. You go in one direction and you end up somewhere else. But I’ll tell you another interesting thing that when I was doing the Ring piece, it was performed with American narrative and story art show that Paul Schimmel put together at the contemporary art museum in Houston. And we rented a warehouse and because the piece took place in a wrestling ring and we had two couples, he and she, who are the main characters in the piece and then there were two alter ego characters who were male and female professional wrestlers, so the event took place inside this wrestling ring. The audience was all the way around. There were numerous secret readers in the audience that would stand up and deliver parts of the dialogue. There were slides projected by full movie screen size slides. Sound effects, sounds, whatever. So it was kind of a full theatrical environment, but what happened, what was interesting is I, I went to Houston and I contacted the local wrestling promoter to try to find out where I could get a ring and get some wrestlers that would participate in this piece. And I walked into this office and encountered this elderly man with all of this stuff in his office that was exactly like the stuff that was in my dad’s office. When my dad was on his death bed -- well, he had just been diagnosed as having terminal cancer, and he called me into the room. This was like when I was 14 and asked me if I would like his business. He said that he needed to tie up all of his affairs and everything, and he said, I’m obligated to ask you. I’ll put it in a trust and you can have it when you turn 21, or I’ll sell it and put some money away for you. So at 14 years old, I had no desires or designs on being a wrestling promoter. This was the last thing that I was really wanting to do, and it wasn’t any kind of -- it was just very straight ahead conversation, very practical on his part. When he was asking me, there wasn’t any guilt or anything else. So anyway, I end up in Houston 20 years later, looking -- meeting this old wrestling promoter and he helped me get a ring, get wrestlers, and it wasn’t until literally -- it’s kind of like LUBBOCK (on everything), I was in the middle of watching this performance and participating that it dawned on me that I am doing exactly what my dad did. I got this wrestling ring, these wrestlers, I’m putting on a public performance, and that had a big impact on me, just in terms of like what an incredible thing to be able to go into these other worlds but always end up kind of right back where you started but all different. It’s like making some incredible circle where you come up behind yourself, and I relate that a lot to making art. I think that’s what it does. It takes you into these places that you would have never imagined, but all different.

PK: Fate. We touched on that a little bit earlier, and you actually used the term, and I’m grateful because it’s an issue that I think maybe is important, certainly in talking with Jo Harvey yesterday. This became an important thing throughout our talk. We were talking about her life, about events in her life, your life, and then her making choices and being -- I don’t want to sort of speak for her, but it just strikes me that maybe in slightly different ways, you both are aware of this kind of process where fate, where something seems to be intervening to make these things happen. Like you being brought around to doing exactly what your father was doing, but not initially choosing to do that, as a matter of fact, not wanting, to do the opposite. And in her case, she is, it seems to me, has come to have a fairly strong belief in the power of events that you can’t-- you heard what some people would say as coincidence to point a direction or move you on to another level of appreciation or even making choices.

TA: I think there are little things that happen every time you work that because you’re working in an area that’s mysterious. I mean, it’s a mystery, and the only kind of guides that you have, the only kind of clue that you have that you might be on the right track is when certain weird circumstances or coincidences or whatever you want to call them start happening. And to me, it’s like when something -- I remember doing these drawings when I was working on the Juarez series of these figures that were wrapped up and totally connected with the piece I was working on and then going through, just on a fluke, an old book of Aztec, not petrogyphs, but what do you call them?

PK: Well, hieroglyphs?

TA: Yeah, there’s another word.

PK: Pictographs?

TA: Pictographs, yeah. Whatever. And I found these figures. And I was dealing with like Cortez, I was dealing with Cortez the Conqueror versus Cortez the County and up in Colorado, a town in Montezuma County, so all of these things started kind of paralleling just from opening this book up, and all I really got from it, and it wasn’t any heebie-jeebies stuff. All I really got from it was just kind of a relief that something's on the right track because when I’m working on it, I don’t know where it’s going or what it’s going to be. I have this vague idea of these people or characters I’m dealing with, these songs and whatever, but it’s like there’s nothing land marked for me out there, and so this becomes your kind of a guide, and I think it happens in different ways kind of on just about everything you do. It’s like when you learn a word and all the sudden, you read and you see that word a billion times.

PK: Yeah, that’s right. That’s right.

TA: And you’d never saw it until . . .

PK: You hadn’t noticed it before.

TA: And it’s kind of the same thing.

PK: I was very interested in how Jo Harvey, through various anecdotes, got into this whole territory, this realm because obviously, for her and her life and her art, there is -- there seems to be some kind of a force, whatever you want to call it, that intervenes and she describes herself as paying pretty good attention to that. And at some points in her describing it, it sounds supernatural, mysterious, spiritual even . . .

TA: Well, Jo Harvey’s a very -- she’s a very spiritual person in a classic kind of Christian sense. And it’s a huge source of her inspiration with her work. It’s also a huge crucible because she’s constantly morally judging herself, wondering if she has the right to like investigate some of the things that she does. And that’s where I think a common denominator between the two of us, as far as literature wise, is Flannery O’Conner -- because Flannery O’Conner, who we both admire immensely, the work that she did, but for different reasons, I think. Not really entirely different reasons, but here was a person who was incredibly religious and bound and determined that to tell the truth, no matter how irreverent, was an extremely important part of that religion, of her faith. And I think Jo Harvey’s “Hally Lou” -- she did it because it’s about a crisis in faith. It’s about a woman who, kind of out her own vanity, you service her husband’s preaching floor kind of of a last . . .

PK: Is that photo where she stands up by the cross in her studio?

TA: Yeah, and she had hell writing that because she always kept thinking she was touching on some kind of ground that she shouldn’t touch on, that she was questioning the idea of faith, which is so unnatural coming to her. And so she was in a dilemma and I think, like when she read Flannery O’Conner and some of the things that she said about just tell the truth, it helped her a whole lot. But I don’t have that problem. I don’t think religion or your beliefs, which I believe are extremely private, should ever inhibit like if you’re given the gift of curiosity, the gift of courage or nerve or whatever that it takes to survive and make things, I don’t think there’s any subject that Isn’t game to take apart in any possible way, especially religion. And so We’re very different that way.

PK: So you didn’t, I gather, have at all the kind of traditional religious . . .

TA: Well, I had this aversion early on with being considered a bastard by the great Hispanic faith, which it was pretty much in Lubbock, with the exception of a few. But no, I went to church -- my folks were Presbyterians and my dad probably didn’t give a hang about religion at all until he started getting older, but I went regularly to the Presbyterian church, every Sunday and, of course, Presbyterians lay that line about predestination, that it’s already laid out. And there’s a little of that, I think, in me. There’s a little -- I think Juarez kind of came from tackling the idea of predestination.

PK: Really?

TA: Yeah. I don’t think I knew that until I was well into the middle of it and I knew what was happening with it. Not from a Presbyterian point of view, just from the idea of mapping, that there is a map and in a way, that’s the same thing Jo Harvey=s talking about, that things or circumstances are there to guide you to the next thing that’s going to happen to the next thing that’s going to happen.

PK: Do you remember this incident? It was -- again, I’m not trying to make these things -- I’m not checking on her with you, but these are shared experiences. Do you remember when she was doing that radio show?

TA: I very much remember it and I have no explanation for what I did that night. That was one of the most bizarre things that I . . .

PK: Coffee shop or diner, or whatever it was?

TA: Yeah, and it was in Oakland.

PK: Yeah.

TA: It was very late at night and my memory of the story is it was -- she was very depressed because we had done this radio show and then the guy was just zonked out of his mind by the time we got through and she could get no clarification on this thing that was going to be syndicated and all of this. So we go to this -- it’s like after midnight and We’re looking for just a place to get some coffee and we stopped at this little café. I don’t have – we’ve looked for it since and never been able to find it. And went in and Jo Harvey had looked for this one song, “Peace in the Valley,” and we sat down at the counter and this waitress just -- from the minute we walked in, just stared at Jo Harvey. We sat down at the counter -- I mean, it’s like I didn’t exist. So I was watching all of this. She sets the coffee down, which we never ordered, looks at Jo Harvey, walks over to the jukebox, this jukebox in the café, puts a quarter in, and plays the version we could not find anywhere of “Peace in the Valley.”

PK: Exact version.

TA: Exact version, and just comes back while it’s playing and looks at Jo Harvey, and it was like chilling. And then she went back and played another song that -- after that, I can’t even remember what it was, but totally themed into her childhood.

PK: What a “Friend I have in Jesus?”

TA: Yeah, “What a Friend I Have in Jesus,” which was probably the flip side.

PK: What are the chances of those being on a jukebox anyway?

TA: Well, it was so odd, but what it was -- and I don’t think -- I can’t remember Jo Harvey and I saying one word to each other in there until we got out in the car. And I can vaguely remember saying, something was happening in there, there’s something really going on in there. And she said, it means whatever happens is okay with this deal. That’s all it really means, is whatever -- I have myself in this tizzy over this whole deal and it just means whatever happens is okay.

PK: She said another thing that she remembers saying was that to you, she felt out of control or she was not in control, and this is a . . .

TA: Well, she thought it was an angel. She totally -- I mean, I could think of it as being -- it’s almost -- it could be every bit as much evil as it was good, as far as I’m concerned. It was so spooky.

PK: Well, it sounds spooky.

TA: It was very spooky, and it’s even spookier that we’ve never been able to find the place or whatever. And it’s even spookier to me that I was there and it happened because . . .

PK: She says you’re a little more skeptical.

TA: I’m very skeptical of things like that, but that was like walking right into your own skepticism face-to-face.

PK: Well, that certainly fits, though, with the idea of mapping that -- and maybe if not predestination, at least a kind of scenario, a bigger sense that we each have.

TA: But also, I think it’s-- to me, not to take it in some kind of realm other than just the way structure works with your work, I mean, I don’t know anybody that writes or works in some kind of project focus that doesn’t map. They map what happens, or what’s going to happen, or who’s going to be there. So that’s-- it’s not that odd particularly to make things to map it -- kind of map it out in your mind how it might work. But that’s a different kind of mapping too. So it takes both, I guess.

PK: Well, tell me how Juarez then fits at least in some ways with the notion of predestination? You mentioned mapping again and traveling over . . .

TA: Well, because it started with a couple of drawings that had elements in it that I had no idea. It had a trailer in it, it had a motorcycle in it, it had a mountain range, it said Juarez, it had Tijuana and San Diego in it, and it was just this drawing and the next drawing had some other kind of elements that had to do with the ocean, the idea of a sailor off of water. But the idea of displacement again, it’s like this sailor is never anywhere but off the water. It’s about a whore, a young girl who is a Mexican prostitute who’s never in Mexico again, and always longs to be in the United States. Then it has this Pachuco gangster character who is born in one place, Juarez, lives in L.A., and has this desire to go home, to go back. And this kind of mystery woman figure, this Chic [Blundie] character who is his girlfriend who . . .

PK: Is a punk rocker.

TA: Writes on rocks. I mean, she’s a graffiti. She writes -- she’s not an artist, she just writes on rocks. And how he entices her on this trip, if she’ll go home to Juarez with him, he’ll take her up into Colorado and show her the country basically first. So again, to go north to get south, and then Cortez, Colorado, which is an actual town in Colorado that my grandfather, he was a cobbler I used to go visit in the summer time in Cortez and help him in his shoe shop and never thought anymore about that. But then all of the sudden, this drawing started making this story, and then they start doing these kind of historical parallels. We have a town that’s also a person. Cortez the Conqueror who conquered the Aztecs. I drew a line from Seville, Spain, to Mexico City to L.A., and it made a angle on the map, and then I drew the same line from San Diego to Los Angeles to Cortez, which made kind of -- and then down to Juarez, which made a pyramid. It was the same angle, exact same angle. And so a lot of this, a lot of historical parallels started happening, like in a sense Jabo, the idea of him being the revenge of the Aztecs, and that whole, and Cortez was the sailor, so all of those kind of overlappings just started happening and it was almost like each time I would do something, it would tell me the next thing to do. The same happened with the songs, which were running concurrently with the pictures, and so this kind of epic story that haunted me to the point when I was making it that I’m still making it. I wrote a screen play about it, I’ve worked on, David Byrne and I wrote a musical play that hadn’t been produced but that Wexner [Wexner Center for the Arts, Ohio State University] catalog that you have was a complete study toward this same story, but a set study really using objects and environments. And then I did a radio show, which is a whole retelling, which is called Reunion, Return to Juarez, which is the same story, but it’s kind of loops and twirls, and so there’s something about that experience of the five years basically it took to make that piece that has never resolved itself, never ended, and I’m not sure it will. It’s like, sometimes I think of it as just like this bullshit curse that I’ve put on myself, but I can’t help that if whenever I’mtraveling in that part . . .

[Begin Tape 3, Side A]

PK: But why don’t you -- gee, I don’t know exactly where we left on that, but it was with -- you were talking about the characters, I believe.

TA: Yeah, well, one thing that -- a lot of kind of first encounters happened to me with Juarez, like I really began to write music as every bit as much an element of this thing that was going on that was becoming Juarez. I was making these pictures, but I was also -- songs were being generated and were happening, and like I was saying before, when I was putting these little tapes in the back of a drawing, there was that desire to make the two work somehow, to make them one thing. And so this entire suite of songs was going right along with this suite of drawings and kind of constructions, and I never, and this might have something to do with, when I say they’re the same to me, Juarez was what this was all about, this one thing. And the fact that it was a song or a little object or a drawing or whatever, it was all important, equally important element in the thing that was happening, so I couldn’t differentiate, this is music, this isn’t. It was one thing, and it happened to be music, it happened to be pictures, it happened to be objects and whatever. But it was really one thing that was going on, and when I had the opportunity to show this, I used to show it, like I’d get invited to go do guest gigs and stuff, and I would show it, and I had it lined out, my slides with the songs, kind of how they went, and I would, never said a word, I just put on the tape and click the slides at the appropriate spot. And I never quite knew how to present it. At one point, when I was going to show, when I had a chance to do my show in Houston, I even went to the point of designing the jukebox where that you put money in, the picture would pop up, and part of the song or appropriate sound would play at the same time. And I realized real fast that it would be much more about the jukebox than it would be about the song or the picture so that didn’t work. But I ended up showing it because of this kind of diamond shaped actually very similar to this drawing I was telling you about from [Saville] Spain to Mexico to L.A. to Cortez to Juarez. I’d divide it in half and I’d put a slide show on one side where the slides were projected and the music played, and then you walked into the room and the works were hung on the wall in the order that they were to be sung, and then the sound recycled itself and you could hear the music and walk around and look at it.

So that was kind of the, and then I was -- Jack Lemon at Landfall Press in Chicago, wanted me to come and do a suite of prints and he had seen a presentation I gave and really liked the music and wanted to do an album, and so we came up with this -- actually, that was how Fate Records began, was Jack and my partnership. But I figured out a way of doing an album, LP size, and making the prints the exact same size as an LP, which is about a foot square, and so I did kind of a compilation of images. I did six prints that told kind of a generalized version of the whole story. Then, we had the entire text of the story, which is a simple story that’s told at the front of the album, and made a box and you bought these six prints with a story and had an LP inside of it. And that’s how the first -- and then we pressed 1,000 more and just sold them. So that’s how initially I got into doing records, and it did well enough that Jack wanted -- and I had all these other songs -- wanted to do another album and so we both came up with enough money to do LUBBOCK (on everything). So we were full partners through LUBBOCK (on everything), then we dissolved our partnership.

PK: What was it called, the . . .

TA: It’s Fate Records, it’s still my record company. I basically bought Jack out and have kept the record company.

PK: See, how interesting, the choice of name? Fate?

TA: Yeah. Well, at the time, it was made just simply because what is the fate of this record company gonna really be?

PK: Well . . .

TA: We started to call it Fatal.

PK: It does seem, of course, I guess hindsight gives us -- this is with benefit of hindsight, but it seems that there’s these really interesting connections with -- well, I gather from what you say, Juarez really started a kind of pattern that you followed to, at least to some degree, in your parade of life.

TA: Yeah, I think so. I think that’s why it’s never gone away, I think that’s why it’s such a compelling mystery to me, just because it opens so many ways of thinking about things for me that came from doing the work. It didn’t come from school or art or any of the kind of, it came from the process of making the thing. And I think I became aware of so many things that played into making a work, so many options and possibilities and things that you needed to do that I felt like I needed to do that it did become kind of this bedrock for processes and procedures and the way to think and whatever. Even though now, I’m doing bronzes, which is a whole other deal.

PK: Not connected to music at all, I guess, or at least obviously so.

TA: Yeah. Not really true. I’m just getting ready to put up a piece in St. Louis called Symphony Lounge, where it’s a bronze figure of a conductor who’s upside down leaning against this giant tree with surrounding smaller trees that are gonna have sound systems inside of them as if this guy's kind of conducting and they’re gonna commission different musicians in St. Louis once a year to do pieces for these trees, so music is there. It’s very much a part of this piece, the Symphony Lounge piece.

PK: So that’s likely your installation . . .

TA: It’s an element.

PK: At UC San Diego, the, what is the name of that?

TA: “The Trees.”

PK: What’s the name of that collection, though?

TA: Stuart Collection.

PK: Yeah, Stuart Collection. Mary Beebe and Julia Kindy is now assisting. Anyway, I got a nice tour of that and saw those tricksters, those eucalyptus, I think, that play... How is that programmed?

TA: They’re programmed 24-hour programs, but they’re programmed not to be like musak. Maybe one song will play, then you’ll have 10 minutes, 20 minutes of silence, and maybe three or four songs will play or whatever, so it’s quite possible to walk through there and never hear it, or see it, because they blend, the way the light works with that lead, sheet lead on the surface and the actual eucalyptus trees, they look like just another tree kind of out there. Then the story tree is the same way, it’s programmed the same way. And I think we have about, I think there’s12.

PK: Of these kinds of pieces?

TA: Complete programs for each tree now.

PK: And you mean, though, this is you mean at the Stuart?

TA: Uh huh. And then the third tree is silent because it’s in front of the library, and it’s kind of the table of contents because all of the people that are on the tapes on the other two trees, the music tree and the story telling tree or poetry tree, their names are all stamped into the library tree. Everybody that worked on the project's name is here so it’s just this kind of sheet of names on the back.

PK: You know, Terry, it seems to me that in your work -- I don’t know if you’re incapable of doing this and I don’t see any reason why you wouldn’t even try -- but the music, the object, the drawing, the text, it seems they’re so interdependent that at some point, if you pursue it, if you go forward in that direction, they’ll all be there. And I think that that’s a little bit . . .

TA: Well, that’s theater, I mean, theater does that.

PK: Well, that’s true.

TA: That’s why I think . . .

PK: I was thinking of it, I guess I’m coming very much from a visual art standpoint where . . .

TA: Where you utilize all of the senses in theater. The thing I really love about theater is that the only object at the end of it is memory. It’s all discarded basically and it’s kind of souvenirs. I’vealways thought kind of, I think, of objects that you make as an artist as being souvenirs anyway after the fact, just kind of the souvenirs that are left over from some kind of experiment or investigation that you’ve moved on. That’s why I’ve had a, Juarez is unique for me in that it’s about the only piece that I’ve done that I care about that’s over. I have a tendency to like as soon as I finish a piece, I’m moving on, I don’t care much about the preservation of the piece after it’s over. It’s like, I don’t think I’ve seen, I haven’t seen one bronze except the first from corporate head, I’ve seen it a couple of times since then.

PK: Where’s that?

TA: It’s in L.A., it’s downtown L.A. But I don’t have a big connection with work after I’m done, and I don’t have any real connection with these objects.

PK: You mean like this catalog here?

TA: Yeah.

PK: The first catalog for Juarez?

TA: Yeah.

PK: The unique [inaudible]?

TA: I don’t have a connection with those pieces though. I have a connection very strong with the idea of Juarez, but not the actual objects. And the music, when I recorded the music, it was done, my cousin [Jimmy Howell], who was a road manager for the Jefferson Airplane at the time, he was working at Wally Heider’s studio in San Francisco, which it Isn’t there anymore. But I had a very limited amount of money, I think we did it for $1,000 and then I traded prints and drawings to the engineers and there was one other musician on it, so a lot of that music, I had this nagging feeling that I wanted more instrumentation, so it’s funny, just about like on Bloodlines, we have “Cantina Carlotta”, on Bloodlines “Oughta Be a Law [Against Sunny Southern California]” also, [inaudible] on my last record, so I’ve instrumented those same songs, and it’s kind of just because I wanted to. For years, wanted to hear horns with some of those songs, wanted to hear other kind of instruments.

PK: So many questions. Do you think, in terms of music, or do you think in terms of images? Are the drawings -- now you’ve described your process where it seems to me, the drawings, you start out with the drawings, and I think in the [case of] Juarez, it’s true, where the drawings then led you to the thinking that finally constituted the piece itself. You did say that and maybe in several other cases, where does the music come in? What is the mix? Are these things happening all at the same time?

TA: I think I think in terms of like collisions of images and I think even the songs are about images. They’re all coming, even though probably the first stages I do of anything are written down in a notebook or whatever.

PK: So those notebooks in there are full of ideas, concepts?

TA: Yeah, I mean, it’s like our grocery list, I mean, it’s like, they’re just a total, they’re like a wallet for me. They just hold the stuff that you need to haul around with you kind of or get out or whatever, pull out every once in awhile. But they’re kind of focal points of my first act of giving images out and thinking about them and how they could work. Like I have just specific notebooks in there for nothing but kind of sculpture pieces, but then I keep just kind of a daily notebook that’s beside me all the time that I just put stuff in. But I think if I have to figure out a way I think and come up with some kind of an answer, it’s always images, it’s pictures. And pictures immediately elicit a story of some sort, if it’s a fragment of a story. And when I mean story, I don’t necessarily mean beginning, middle, and end. In fact, I probably mean the opposite.

PK: You were talking about -- I found this very interesting. I think your characters are very much characters in Juarez. I mean, I really can imagine you don’t even have to say that much, but through the music and through the travels and all of this, I have a very definite idea of these, mainly the four characters. And yet, you said just now, that for you, they’re not so much characters as climates.

TA: They’re not people to me as much as they are kind of climatic energies that . . .

PK: Yeah, I wanted to know what you mean by the climate?

TA: I think that the need to go home versus the need to escape, the need for a lark, the inherit need for violence or aversion to violence, the need for God, the aversion to God, all of those opposites. The need for a burning, scorching hot day and a day that pours down rain. All of those collisions are in those characters to me. They’re like climates, they’re like our directions, north, south, east, and west, so I didn’t build them in terms of physicality, in terms of the humans. And I think they’re climates, each of them are kind of a climate that is in all of us, so in a sense, they’re internal collisions that are going on in one person, or one event, which is a journey, a word you use, which is Juarez. And so that’s how they were constructed, that’s where the images came from, from those kind of collisions, not in terms of thinking Chic walks across the street or paints on a rock or Jabo kicks his motorcycle, even though that stuff’s in there. Like there’s a scene where, there’s a crucial scene where that they change identities, or that after the murder, the murder which is just a blank, it’s just sound of a bunch of glass breaking in the record. The next time you see Jabo and Chic after they’ve killed Sailor and [Spanish] Alice, they’re dressed as Sailor as Alice, so they’ve made this complete switch. So they’ve adopted, appropriated the . . .

PK: Yeah.

TA: Which is very Aztec thing too, skinning, killing something skinning and wearing the skin. And then there’s this scene that’s[at] Ship Rock, which is another kind of geographical focal point in this piece because obvious connotations to Sailor, it’s a ship but it’s a rock in the middle of the desert.

PK: Is that where they found them? If forgot.

TA: No. The cops are, they’re held up by the cops.

PK: That’ sright.

TA: But that’s when they, the tatoos start changing, their actual skin. Jabo’s tatoo begins to get Sailor’s tatoos and they start reappearing. And so it’s like in the act of murdering, they have kind of recreated this couple.

PK: This is really mystical, it’ salso very, well, for one thing, native American would be one source for that. Or let=s put it this way, there are a number of cultures that have these kinds of ideas . . .

TA: I just think it’s the way we operate. I mean, I don’t think it’s, I mean, to me, it’s not mystical in the sense anymore native American than it is some guy in the Bronx or some guy from Lubbock or some guy from San Fernando Valley. I think those are the forces that are exerted upon us from the outside and versus the forces that are exerted, going on in the inside and it’s inevitable that those collisions are gonna occur, and that’s what our lives are. So Jabo ends up anyway back, Chic splits as soon as they get down, Jabo ends up standing on a bridge in his sailor suit wishing he was back in L.A. so . . .

PK: And the Cantina, is that right? It seems to me that towards the end of it anyway is, not that we have to reprise the whole saying, but there’sthe . . .

TA: Well, there’s a whole subtext in Juarez dealing with Chic and Alice. There’s always illusion that Chic is potentially Alice’s mother. So this is constantly kind of there. Chic, you never know what she is or if she’s a witch, is she a bitch, is she Hispanic, is she a blonde?

PK: Is she male? I even thought from what was said there on occasion, she’s not even a woman. Now, did I read that in or . . .

TA: No, there’s a lot of -- and because they’re climates, I think there’s a lot of androgyny that pops back and forth between the two, you never quite know who’s being part of who or what’s happening.

PK: You know what, Terry? I don’t mean to interrupt you but this is a remarkably pantheistic in philosophically speaking -- that is to say, I don’t know -- about God being in everything, but each of us being potentially in everything and in one another. Is that a fair reading on my part of what you think?

TA: Well, yeah, I think a lot of times, we’ll isolate parts for our self to be, and I really think it’s kind of the way the whole culture bullshits itself, and we do as individuals, because I think all of that stuff is in all of us and it’s just a matter of circumstance or fate or whatever the intensity of our desires or lack of intensity that makes us kind of do what we are, but all that stuff is there exerting itself and colliding in itself, I think. And I don’t mean it in a mystical way. I just think it’s one of the great curiosities of the human animal.

PK: Well, one of the, all of what you’re saying reinforces a certain suspicion I had about you. I think of you as a humanist, somebody who is most of all interested in the human condition and ideas about the circumstances in which we all operate and how we collide and so forth, as you said yourself. And I haven’t heard anything that you’ve said that dissuades me so far from this ideal. Excuse me. I just don’t wanna, at this point, We’re looking at the -- for the sake of the tape -- this catalog for Juarez, the first one, unique or almost unique with your notations inside and so what. On the cover, there is, it looks like a young girl on one side, the cover is divided in half, black and white and photographs and then it’sabout a 3/4 shot. On the right, this dude with those European type shades that looks like [inaudible].

TA: They’re just old wire glasses.

PK: Well, okay. A straw hat, a mustache, and a cigarette, and you just told me . . .

TA: That’s the cover of the album, the first original cover of the Juarez album.

PK: Of the album itself?

TA: That photograph which Jo Harvey took.

PK: Okay. So you just told me something interesting. Who is the little young woman on the left?

TA: That’s a picture of me dressed as a woman when I was in the sixth grade at a Halloween carnival in which all of the boys that were on the football team did a fashion show dressed as girls, and I was always amazed at that photograph. Looking at that photograph, to me, is like looking at Wichita, Kansas, place of birth on my bio, [to] which I have no connection. I have no, it’s a totally mysterious place to me, and I don’t remember, it’s funny, I don’t remember the occasion other than, I don’t remember the actual photograph being taken or anything. I remember the event, but it’s odd because I’m wearing my mother’s clothes and I was having, well, because my mother was an alcoholic, I was having difficulty dealing with that as a child and seeing myself in her clothes was a very bizarre, especially in retrospect. Not then, not at all, but like when I got into Juarez and started dealing with it and dealing with all of these kind of collisions I’m talking about, that picture took on this extraordinary mysterious significance for me. I wrote several pieces when I did the print about it. Let me look in here, there’s a, let me see if I can find this one particular little piece. That’s a big one. Well, I can’t read it, but it was called Yellow Man.

PK: Oh yeah, I see that, uh huh.

TA: And then I did a piece called Yellow Man’s Revenge and it’s funny, it’s like that picture became some kind of an icon in a way for Chic. There’s a piece called Melody Land which has been destroyed, but there are three sections, “The Radio,” “Gonorrhea Madonna,” and “Piano,” and it was just one of those images that ended up in there. I don’t. . .

PK: Well, I can’t help but look at that as an emblem really of your presence in the whole Juarez project. That may be simplistic, but here you chose apparently the images of yourself in drag.

TA: Yeah. And which is the only actual person in the entire series because it’s all objects and kind of the backs of people or there’s no faces in Juarez, there’s no real physicality. The only time Sailor is really shown is he’s basically in the lap of a skeleton having intercourse with a skeleton and he’s made out of water.

PK: And that’s Alicia?

TA: Fish are jumping out of his back.

PK: I think I saw that.

TA: Yeah, that’s one of the early, early on in the piece and I’ve even gone to the point of thinking about redoing some of these, filming some of these images.

PK: I think you should, I think you should. But don’t you think that maybe more than you realized . . .

[BEGIN TAPE 3, SIDE B]

PK: What grade were you in?

TA: Sixth.

PK: Sixth grade dressed up in . . .

TA: So I was 11, 12.

PK: Which, I suppose, most people don’t know and they will if they read this that that was your mom’s dress and . . .

TA: Yeah, and her wig even.

PK: And her wig?

TA: And her high heels and the jewelry.

PK: That image for you . . .

TA: So I was my mother.

PK: [That] is laden with all kinds of meaning that goes beyond, but the whole issue of shifting of gender --indeterminacy . . .

TA: Shape shifting.

PK: Well, yeah, exactly. It could very well be part of that image and you did disagree when I . . .

TA: No, I mean, I have always thought without absolutely the least homosexual connotation that I’m aware of that We’re both, We’re born with double baggage, the baggage of the male and the baggage of the female, whether we are male or female. And I don’t mean that in terms of genitalia as much as I mean just in terms of our psychology, our make up as humans are both masculine and feminine, and I think those two are less and less compatible in terms of our culture now. It’s either got to be . . .

PK: Less and less you think?

TA: Yeah, yeah, I do. I think, it’s like everything else, we have to isolate it and make everything one thing because the entrance of anything else, like if suddenly you realize that you had the, which you do, psychology of a dog or a rat or a worm, which is equally in there. But I think the collision between male and female is epic since the first piece of crud crawled out of the slime and that’s always been very interesting to me, in terms of like why people are the way they are, what they do, what we make, what we build, what we destroy? I think that’s a very basic instinct, dual instinct, that both of us have inside of us. But like the cliche of like women bearing children, which men, there’s a void of being able to create on that kind of amazing level, so you compensate by making up stories, making objects, making things.

PK: Being an artist.

TA: Being an artist. But I don’t think people that don’t make art are any less containers of these things, and it comes out in other ways in their lives, it has to. So it seems to me like it’s kind of a fairly obvious internal possession each person has, this kind of dual male and female encounter that makes us who we are. And Juarez, I guess, was the first time I became specifically aware of dealing with it. And then the next piece I did, long range piece, was called Ring, which it’s really about, I wrote this story about the dissolution of a marriage and the characters are He and She. They have no names other than that and it completely, at the time, I was trying to come at that story and dismantle it and put it back together and open it up in every, from every angle I could think of at that time. And make this thing that happened, and one of the ironies that obviously go with it, like Jo Harvey and I have been married 35 years and we’ve had the same hell that everybody else has had during those kind of periods of time, I would imagine. But I also used wrestling and that kind of choreographed violence that [is] wrestling as the parallel between marriage and life, between man and woman. So it’s kind of an extension of Juarez in that sense, except getting much more physical because now rather than these climates, they are actually genders. They are He and She, they are physical people, even though they’re anonymous, he and she. And the piece kind of builds off of that duality. The Ring being the tie that binds, but also the place of conflict.

PK: Battle.

TA: Yeah, where the battle takes [place], and also that deafening sound in your ear.

PK: The Ring. Yeah. You mean the assault of presence of another person, perhaps?

TA: And what happens, I think, there. Also deals with the idea of writing very much because the He in the piece is a writer who is also a drunk, and She becomes a writer and gains ascendency over him, but as a television writer. So you have those kind of art forms, the popular art form kind of in collision with the literature or whatever, embodied in these two people.

PK: I’m looking through the catalog now and the raven or crow -- is that a raven?

TA: Yeah, it’s a crow, a raven is just a big crow.

PK: Well, He, She appears over and over again so it’s like a . . .

TA: Well, they’re classic messengers of foreboding, a crow. But they’re also incredibly mischievous, they’re tricksters, and they’re incredibly smart, incredibly curious, and they’re also scavengers.

PK: So you got almost everything covered there.

TA: They got us covered.

PK: Now, did Jo Harvey appear in this?

TA: This was the first piece she ever performed, she played She.

PK: And so she was all the She’s.

TA: And He and She were masked in the theater. In the performances, they wear masks, kind of those anonymous masks that I sprayed gray and then there are two other presences, which are a male and female wrestler who were kind of alter egos, are attendants to He and She. The female is the attendant of the male and the male is the attendant of the female, of She. So again, We’re talking about that duality that kind of overtly takes place in Ring.

PK: Well, I haven’t seen Ring.

TA: I’ve got a video of it.

PK: I would love to see that.

TA: Yeah, I think I might have a half inch in there I’ll loan you.

PK: Great.

TA: You can make a copy of it.

PK: Yeah, I can do that pretty easy, have them run it off at BVAC [pronounced Bay Vac] in San Francisco.

TA: Okay. Wherever. BVAC, sounds like Bay Watch.

PK: No, it’s Bay Area Video Coalition, it’s really quite a wonderful organization.

TA: That’s where we shot the video, at University Museum in Berkeley where we performed it -- and then edited it over about a three year period because of money in San Francisco.

PK: What seems to be emerging, at least from this conversation is, I would have to say the emergence or development of a kind of philosophy of Terry Allen's world view and I know that sounds fancy, but you know we all have our world views, of how we see life and reality, and the world of art.

TA: Well, one thing you gotta remember is like while I was in the heart of making Ring, which was ‘76 to ‘80, I cut LUBBOCK (on everything), I did about three other, well, I did an installation in 1976, the very first installation piece I ever did, in conjunction with the Great American Rodeo Show, called Paradise, was a piece that I did.

PK: Oh, yeah, I saw that listed.

TA: And so it’s like Ring, like I said, started with this little story I wrote that I thought was hilariously funny and read it to Jo Harvey, she thought it was hilariously funny, and then I made this first piece called The Evening Gorgeous George Died, which was a tableau with this text on the wall, showed it at Claire Copley's in Los Angeles. I had no intention of it going any further than that, except all the sudden it started going further. Well, God, what if this was a film or what if this was a play? And then I started revamping the thing and thinking about it, that I had the opportunity, which a lot of times, I think, motivates moving on with the piece sometimes. It’s just that the certain circumstance, I was asked to be in this narrative show, and ironically, I had been toying with the idea of performing this piece or having it performed, so it immediately gave me incentive to pursue that and see if I could do it, and it worked. And then by the time we performed it, I was also doing kind of other pieces along with it, so it built that way, but that opportunity to do it in Houston was a factor for sure in pursuing it.

PK: What more . . .

TA: The night of the opening of Ring, after my opening at Claire Copley’s Gallery, I played a concert at the Improv in L.A. and I performed almost exclusively nothing but Juarez songs, because that was the record I had out and that’s kind of what I was playing at that time, so even, I mean, the connections at the time were so removed. I mean, Juarez was a very specific piece, Ring was a very, or The Evening Gorgeous George Died was a very specific piece. I didn’t even know it was going to be Ring, I didn’t know it was going to be in four parts so . . .

PK: Well, you do describe themes which, and I want to be careful how I say this because I don’t want to be offensive, but I think, because of the nature of how they’re presented, and the constituent parts, they can -- it’s not necessarily all inaccessible -- [but] it’s not that easy to see right through to a core idea, at least for me. I may be a little bit dense and I think with, obviously with conversation and reflection, that will [become more clear] -- but it takes work. Obviously, these aren’t simple statements of, it seems to me, issues. I understand Juarez now in a I won’t say entirely -- different way, but a much richer, more complete way after talking with you. It does seem -- or I gather -- in each work there may be a lot of other things around it but there is a core idea, something that, may be evolved in the creation of the work, but then you eventually come to see as its meaning. We’re talking about meaning, and the same thing with LUBBOCK (on everything), that it’s meaning became a clear meaning.

TA: I’ll tell you how I feel about that. I’m skeptical about the word meaning when it comes to this kind of behavior, because it comes from such a non-meaning place in a sense. Again, back to that word mystery, it comes from such a mysterious source that you throw yourself into, or finding out about, and it equally is mystified as you go through it, and I think over a period of time, you teach yourself a rhetoric of explanation or talking about or meaning and it probably takes you about a year to kind of get some kind of a line that you can discuss, but I’m not sure that that has anything to do with what you really experience when you make that thing or the mystery you still feel after it’s over. I think it’s because of language and because of the analytical way our minds work. We always want to kind of resolve things in a certain manner, and I really believe it’s the fact of things of these issues have never been resolved in history of humanity is the thing that compels you to throw yourself into thinking about them and dealing with them and making things out of it, so I’m not all caught up in caring what this means to people. I totally believe that another human being can walk in and take a look at this work and come up with ideas and thoughts about it based on their human life that’s totally private and separate and different than mine that’s just as enlightening and just as on the money. And I never thought of it once in my life, but I think that’s one of the wonders of making things and putting them out there, is that we can all be equally mystified. But I’m not big on wrapping things up.

PK: Well, of course, you just described yourself as a by now “classic” post-modernist.

TA: Possibly.

PK: In fact, in one of the essays, maybe, I can’t remember which one, there was [inaudible] on this very issue, that there is a text, of course, and the text stands alone and separate and what really -- its meaning is in this interaction between whoever happens to pick up the text and read it, and the poor author. Well, it’s almost like set in the most general way [like a] stage with some components, in that meaning is transformed and changed all the time. And maybe meaning Isn’t the word I’m meaning because . . .

TA: Well, I think it’s kind of a dissection of meaning because meaning really becomes something like a habit. It’s something --- and making art is about going through that wall of habits into some zone and I think it gets harder all of the time, but that’s why it’s different all of the time because you’re throwing yourself into things that you don’t know. And when you’re aware that it’s something you don’t know, you’re aware that you’re never gonna know about it, so it’s just goofy to kind of say it means something in that sense.

PK: Well, no . . .

TA: I mean, you can get specific and say, yeah, it means that men and women have a rough time with each other once in awhile, it means that, but it also means more than that. It means that certain violent anti-social individual spirits in collision that something bad is probably gonna happen. I mean, you can pinpoint certain things but when you start talking about the overall, I don’t think it’s any more privy to meaning than we are about existence, period.

PK: You know, you’re talking about -- I think that I agree, I think I understand this, and what you’re talking about is a single, a singular meaning contained in anything, and I, of course, would agree completely that that’s not the case.

TA: Well, I think that that’s common sense.

PK: Yeah.

TA: We’re talking about common sense.

PK: Yeah, and we know that, but I do believe that everything means something, but not just one thing, and I think that this, I gather that this is how you view it. It’s certainly about something because you choose . . .

TA: Absolutely.

PK: It’s about something and I guess maybe it’s about questions then or about raising issues for inspiration.

TA: I think it’s about looking, I mean, I really think it’s about looking from a vantage point that is not of habit. We all habitually look the same way and from a simplistic point of view, it’s like, well, what does it look like under there, what does it look like from the top, what does it look like from the back, what does it look like if you raise it 20 feet and drop it on the ground? I mean, it’s about the curiosity of wanting to kind of think about something that you’re not just thinking about all the time. In context with things that ring in some bell of importance inside of you to you, or that you sense, not just -- I don’t think it’s about you, the artist, as much as it’s about the thing you make, always. I mean -- and the thing you make doesn’t give a shit what you think it means, it’s just there, it’s gonna be there 20 years from year now or if it’s there, but it’s just there whatever it is, and that’s why it’s kind of a privately, an awesome responsibility in a way to leave all this stuff that’s just there. But I don’t believe that, I don’t think about it much beyond the making because the making kind of is everything, and then you go to the next making, and then they link up. Something like this is helpful in that sense because you think in terms of like maybe you’re just like that old thing -- you’re just doing one thing really over and over from a different angle.

PK: What you’ve been saying now seems very much in keeping with what many of us think art is all about, and it’s an aide to seeing and seeing in a different way, to look from a different angle. I mean, the impressionists, of course -- if you wanna look at art history the way we talk about it anyway and sort of value it, especially modernism, is very much this kind of thing, and you used the term earlier and I think you wanted to say something about it, about the first time, and I can’t remember exactly where that was leading, but you just said – let’s talk about the first time.

TA: Yeah, what I was thinking about when I said that is that every time you do it, it’s brand new. It’s like you think, okay, I’ve been involved in this for 30 years or so and I should have some kind of handle on how to begin or procedures or processes, whatever, but that blank page or blank space or blank whatever it is is every bit as difficult, and maybe more so, to encounter than it was when I first started making things. And I think because you do get a habit of making and then you have to break that habit of making, and you kind of want each time to not just echo something, but you want to encounter something new, and I think that’s one of the really wonderful things about making art is that it’s always new. That’s also the equivalent hell of doing it because it’s always new and in a funny way, you never have, I know Bruce Nauman says you have to reinvent the wheel every time. And I’m not sure you reinvent the wheel, but you sure reinvent the turning of the wheel or the direction that the wheel’s rolling. But it’s a new kind of experience and actually even relate that to Jo Harvey.

PK: And how do you mean?

TA: It’s new every day, man.

PK: So the, well, I think it’s important to understand that you’re. . .

TA: One thing . . .

PK: Go ahead.

TA: I was just gonna say that I was raised, well, my parents were Depression people, I was raised in the rural kind of environment where there was great distrust for intellect, for art, for extravagance, money, wealthy people, educated people, there was distrust. That was kind of the climate that I was raised in, and part of that rubbed out off on me. Part of me still has a problem with the kind of inherent pretenses of the art world or the music world, of whatever worlds you pick. So I’m leery of it, or cliques of people, I’m leery of. I’ve never been group oriented in that sense, and I think it comes from, it comes a little bit from that just plain leeriness of collective decisions, collective opinions, collective ideas, or how people should behave, whatever. So I’m always a little bit uncomfortable talking in terms of art in that kind of sense because there’s something so inhibiting and distrustworthy even in that word, even though it’s my life choice and some of my great friends are involved in that. But there’s always a self-consciousness about saying, well, I’m an artist, because I’ve never quite understood what that meant. I understand what being a musician means. It means you sit and play music and people listen to it, but the word artist in terms of playing music or artist in terms of making an object, or artist in terms of theater, it takes into a zone that I don’t have anything to do with when I’m making this stuff so . . .

PK: I don’t have anything to add to that. I mean, what can I say to that. It leaves it open, I mean, if you close off this session, but it also leaves it open for . . .

TA: The next session.

PK: For the next session.

TA: Just like going to the psychiatrist, Isn’t it?

PK: Well, not exactly. Which one of us is on the couch?

TA: Yeah, it’s hard to tell, Isn’t it?

PK: Well, thank you, Terry, very much.

TA: Thank you.

END OF INTERVIEW

---

This transcript is in the public domain and may be used without permission. Quotes and excerpts must be cited as follows: Oral history interview with Terry Allen, 1998 Apr. 22, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.