Truckload of Art

The definitive, authorized, and first-ever biography of Terry Allen, the internationally acclaimed visual artist and iconoclastic songwriter who occupies an utterly unique position straddling the disparate, and usually distant, worlds of conceptual art and country music.   

• “The Allen family's life has been as much an inspiration for me as Terry’s wonderful art and music. I wondered to myself, ‘How does a creative person navigate family life, and life with friends, with their creative life?’ This book is the instruction manual.”
  David Byrne, author of How Music Works
• “Brendan Greaves is an unusually deft and perceptive historian of music and art, but he writes with so much heart and verve that after a few chapters, his prose starts to feel like its own song: wild, intelligent, rhythmic, true. His subject here—the inimitable Terry Allen, one of the deepest and most wonderful American artists I can think of—is so well-served by Greaves’s adventurousness and smarts. What a gorgeous, necessary book.”
  Amanda Petrusich, The New Yorker; author of Do Not Sell at Any Price: The Wild, Obsessive Hunt for the World's Rarest 78rpm Records
• “Blending West Texas fiction, hearsay, memoir, anthropological dig, and journalistic fact, Brendan Greaves has fashioned a biographical narrative that skillfully frames the life and times of the visual artist, singer-songwriter, playwright, raconteur, and beautiful dreamer known as Terry Allen. Only a Truckload of Art could do him justice. I couldn’t put it down.”
  Rodney Crowell
• “Terry Allen is my hero, and Brendan changed my life when he introduced us. It’s about time they change your life too.”
  Kurt Vile
• “When I was asked to write a few sentences about this new book on Terry Allen’s life and art, I immediately felt that it was an impossible task. Then I thought about Terry and all the times I have asked him impossible questions and received the most profound responses from him in one or two words. He has been, hands down, one of the most influential characters in my life, and I’m looking forward to having this book to reference and share with friends, family, and future generations who may look to find their way through life in art and music. Because today’s rainbow really is tomorrow’s tamale.”
  Ryan Bingham
• “Terry Allen is our modern Michelangelo—a painter, sculptor, and conceptualist informed by honky-tonk sensibilities and a singer-songwriter of incisive, vividly-depicted songs who knows his way around galleries and museums. His Florence is Lubbock, Texas, where a local boast was ‘Lubbock has more sky.’ This biography tells precisely how Terry Allen filled up all that empty space. It is the most detailed history of the making of a life in art that I’ve ever read.”
  Joe Nick Patoski, author of Willie Nelson: An Epic Life; director of Sir Doug and the Genuine Texas Cosmic Groove
• “Written with the narrative verve of a great novel and a poet’s eye for enchanting detail, Truckload of Art is an inspired, definitive illumination of the life and genius of a vital American artist.”
  Wells Tower, screenwriter and journalist; author of Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned
• “Truckload of Art is a monumental work that captures the passionate, complex life of an artist whose career blends visual art and country music with unique power. Brendan Greaves unveils the supercharged art and music worlds created by Terry Allen, from his formative years in Lubbock, Texas, to California and Santa Fe, New Mexico. Truckload of Art brilliantly captures the soul of a truly great American artist who embraces his Texas roots and energizes them with his genius at every step of his career.”
  William Ferris, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; author of Give My Poor Heart Ease: Voices of the Mississippi Blues; former chair of the National Endowment for the Humanities
• “Terry Allen's creative depth has guided his life, leading him to become the great artist, writer, and musician he is. Like a tornado, he has swirled a community around himself, drawn together by his generosity and inclusivity. It is wonderful that Brendan Greaves has written a book that is as complex and compassionate as Terry and as moving and raw as his art and music.”
  Kiki Smith
• “Once upon a time when I lived in Pasadena and Terry and Jo Harvey were in Fresno, I was there with my wife working at a stone quarry and had dinner and stayed the night with them. We cleaned squid, and Jo Harvey made a lovely dinner.
  "The next morning all of us had violent diarrhea and we quickly ran out of toilet paper and then every possible useable paper-like material. 
  "When we returned home, I bought and shipped a large box of toilet paper from a restaurant supply store. Terry sent one back painted black, which still sits on my dining table, used as a candlestick holder. 
  "Terry and Jo Harvey—friends as long as we last.”
  Bruce Nauman