Tag Archives: The Great Joe Bob (A Regional Tragedy)
Amarillo Highway – Terry Allen
Terry Allen is a conceptual artist and country singer. This isn't an unheard-of combination of pursuits. One thinks of Dolly Parton.
Allen has flown under the mainstream radar for pretty much all his musical career and remains little known to this day, but he is beloved of many rock critics and Lubbock (On Everything) is frequently cited by those few who have heard it as one of the finest country albums ever made, and a forerunner of the last two decades' alt.country. He is patently not a tough guy, like Waylon Jennings. He's no mystic hippie like Willie Nelson. There is a kinship with Jimmie Dale Gilmore and Joe Ely (who played harmonica on Lubbock) – they all come from Lubbock and have all tapped into the strange vibes of a seemingly singular place. But still, Allen's hard to pin down.
If Glen Campbell's reading of Allen Toussaint's Southern Nights found country music coming to a kind of rhythmic accommodation with disco, Amarillo Highway's ramshackle swagger puts a hi-hat figure straight out of New York, played with a woozy looseness you would never get in Lower Manhattan, to work on a hard-ass down-home road song that skewers the genre of hard-ass down-home road songs. It's the album's signature groove, recurring on several songs. It's topped by the wonderful pedal-steel playing of Lloyd Maines, another local legend (and father of Natalie Maines from the Dixie Chicks) and benefits from the engineering of Don Caldwell, at whose studio Lubbock (On Everything) was recorded. The album's production is credited to 'Everyone on this record', and that's the way Don Caldwell tells it in Fire in the Water, Earth in the Air ('everybody on the album put in their two cents, a very co-operative effort), but he's probably being a little generous: he knew more about making a record than anyone else in the room (Maines was his protégé) and that the sessions held together at all must have been in large part because of his steadying influence.
But the great playing, arrangements and engineering wouldn't mean much if they weren't backed up by quality songs from Allen. And yes, the shufflin' drums and sun-baked pedal steel are just adornments to the lyric and Allen's canny performance: the singer's inability to quite hit the low notes at the end of the verses undercuts his protestations of unreconstructed Texan masculinity, which in any case veer between banality and near-nonsensicality. In its affectionate parody of a certain kind of southern manhood, it's reminiscent of Randy Newman's Good Old Boys (The Great Joe Bob – fallen high-school football icon – is a character Newman is still probably kicking himself for not coming up with first), and Amarillo Highway, in common with so many of Newman's songs, contains a lyric and a vocal that only the author could deliver properly.
Yeah, that's a better comparison than any other country singer: Terry Allen, a Panhandling, manhandling Randy Newman.
Terry Allen (seated right). Jo Harvey Allen (actress and artist) is seated to his left. Al Ruppersberg is standing back row, left.
This entry was posted in Uncategorized and tagged Allen Toussaint, artist, conceptual art, conceptual artist, country music, Disco, Don Caldwell, Drums, Earth in the Air, Fire in the Water, Glen Campbell, Good Old Boys, Jimmi Dale Gilmore, Jo Harvey, Jo Harvey Allen, Joe Ely, Lloyd Maines, Lubbock (On Everything), painter, pedal steel, Randy Newman, records that sound great!, sculptor, singer-songwriter, Southern Nights, Terry Allen, The Great Joe Bob (A Regional Tragedy), Waylon Jennings, Willie Nelson on March 30, 2014 by rossjpalmer.