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Lubbock (on everything)

by Terry Allen

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  • Record/Vinyl + Digital Album

    The definitive, deluxe edition of the art-country classic: produced in collaboration with the artist; remastered from the original analog tapes; first U.S. vinyl reissue; first CD to restore the full track listing; first to correct the tape speed inconsistencies evident on all prior versions; and the first to contextualize the record within Allen’s 50-year career.

    Available on virgin vinyl as a 2xLP, with heavy-duty tip-on gatefold jacket, lyrics, printed inner sleeves, download code, and 28 pp. book with related artwork, an oral history by Allen, and new essays by David Byrne, Lloyd Maines, and Brendan Greaves.

    Includes unlimited streaming of Lubbock (on everything) via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.
    ships out within 5 days
    Purchasable with gift card

      $33 USD or more 

     

  • Compact Disc (CD) + Digital Album

    + 2xCD edition features scale replica gatefold jacket, inner sleeves, and tipped-in 52pp. book.

    Includes unlimited streaming of Lubbock (on everything) via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.
    ships out within 5 days
    Purchasable with gift card

      $18 USD or more 

     

  • Record/Vinyl + Digital Album

    + Bundle both physical formats for a discounted price.

    Includes unlimited streaming of Lubbock (on everything) via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.
    ships out within 5 days
    Purchasable with gift card

      $49 USD

     

  • Streaming + Download

    Includes unlimited streaming via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.

    All orders also include PDF liner note booklet and artwork photos.
    Purchasable with gift card

      $12 USD  or more

     

  • Button/Pin/Patch

    Smoke the dummy (that's Bob the Dummy to you) with Terry to commemorate our reissue of his 1980 album. Enhance any lapel with irreverent style and grace. This exquisite artifact measures 1.5" in diameter, with a durable steel pin-back. The text on the rim reads: TERRY ALLEN & THE PANHANDLE MYSTERY BAND / SMOKIN THE DUMMY.

    In a typewritten 1981 letter to his friend and mentor H.C. Westermann (reproduced in the reissue liner notes), Terry writes:

    MY KID BUKKA GOT A CHARLIE MCCARTHY DOLL FOR CHRISTMAS ONE YEAR WHEN HE MADE UP HIS MIND HE WAS GOING TO BE A VENTRILOQUIST. HE IMMEDIATELY PAINTED IT UP TO LOOK LIKE A VAMPIRE ... AND I JUST AS IMMEDIATELY PUT ON A PAIR OF JO HARVEY'S SUNGLASSES AND THE SLEAZIEST JACKET I COULD FIND (western slime) AND SAT FOR FAMILY PHOTOS ... ANYWAY, I BLEW RINGS OF SMOKE ON THE DUMMY AND BUKKA SAID I WAS SMOKIN THE DUMMY.

    I GUESS IT RANG SOME KIND OF DEMENTED BELL …

    The fabulous and brilliant Jo Harvey Allen took the photo, which appears as part of the album cover triptych.

    Perceptive fashionistas will recognize this as the third installment in our grand tradition of apparel featuring hirsute smoking men.

    Western slime!
    ... more
    ships out within 5 days
    Purchasable with gift card

      $3 USD or more 

     

  • Full Digital Discography

    Get all 8 Terry Allen releases available on Bandcamp and save 20%.

    Includes unlimited streaming via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality downloads of Cowboy and the Stranger, Gonna California, Bloodlines, Smokin the Dummy, Just Like Moby Dick, Pedal Steal + Four Corners, Lubbock (on everything), and Juarez. , and , .

    Purchasable with gift card

      $57.60 USD or more (20% OFF)

     

  • Terry Allen and the Panhandle Mystery Band: "There Oughta Be a Law Against Sunny Southern California" Bumper Sticker

    Put some illegal vibrations on that bumper, and show the open road how you truly feel about SoCal. A ferocious full-band reprise of "There Oughta Be a Law Against Sunny Southern California," originally released on Terry Allen's immortal 1975 debut album Juarez, appears on 1983's Bloodlines—you can buy our deluxe reissues of both records here.

    Printed on thick, durable vinyl this 3" x 11.5" bumper sticker is resistant to scratches, sun, and water. (It's probably not resistant to switchblades, however; the fabulous Jo Harvey Allen brought the one pictured back from Tijuana; you can also find it on the back cover of Bloodlines.)

    The song itself recounts a larcenous and murderous episode of Allen's multidisciplinary JUAREZ body of work, starring its antiheros, the Juarez-born pachuco Jabo and the bruja Chic Blundie. Don't get it twisted.

    THERE OUGHTA BE A LAW AGAINST SUNNY SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA

    chorus: WELL I’M GOIN BACK
    GOIN HOME AGAIN
    YEAH I’M GOIN BACK
    TO MY OWN AGAIN
    YEAH I’M GOIN BACK
    AHHH TO MY HOME TOWN
    THE ONE THAT PUT ME OUT
    THE ONE THAT LAID ME DOWN

    WELL I WIRED UP A CAR IN EAST FONTANA
    I WAS A’HEADED FOR SAN BERDU
    AHHH MY MIDNIGHT OIL
    IT WAS ON THE BOIL
    AN BOY I WAS A’BARREL’N THROUGH
    THEN I TOOK A TURN
    BUT I HIT THE CURB
    AN SPUN OFF THE CENTER LANE
    AN WHEN I HEARD THE CRASH
    WELL I STOMPED THE GAS
    AND I WAS BARREL’N THROUGH AGAIN

    I LEAVE A FEW PEOPLE DEAD
    BUT I GOT OPEN ROAD AHEAD
    YEAH
    I LEAVE A FEW PEOPLE DEAD
    BUT I GOT OPEN ROAD AHEAD

    AN I REMEMBER THE COP
    WITH HIS SLICKED-BACK HAIR
    WHEN HE TOLD ME
    TO GET OUT A’HERE
    AN I REMEMBER THE JUDGE
    WITH HIS GOLD PLATED MOUTH
    HE SAID “GO LIVE IN THE NORTH
    YOU GOTTA DIE DOWN SOUTH”

    YOU GONNA DIE DOWN SOUTH

    chorus

    I WENT FLYIN THROUGH SOUTH SAN BERDU
    WITH MY MIND ON EAST L.A.
    WHERE MY PACHUCO QUEEN
    SHE’S COOKIN RE-FRIED BEANS
    AN SHE’S WAITIN FOR ME TODAY
    YEAH STOPPED ON OFF AT THE LIQUOR STORE
    MADE EVERY BODY LAY DOWN ON THE FLOOR
    TOOK ALL THEIR WHISKEY
    TOOK ALL THEIR BREAD
    THEN SHOT OUT THEIR LIGHTS
    JUST BEFORE I FLED

    YEAH
    I LEAVE A FEW PEOPLE DEAD
    BUT I GOT OPEN ROAD AHEAD
    YEAH
    I LEAVE A FEW PEOPLE DEAD
    BUT I GOT OPEN ROAD AHEAD

    AN I REMEMBER THE BITCH
    WHOSE BLACK TONGUE LIED
    WHEN SHE TOLD ME
    SHE’S DIS-SATISFIED
    AN I REMEMBER HER DADDY
    BIG AS A TRUCK
    HE SAID “FUCK WITH ME BOY
    IF YOU WANT TO FUCK”

    YEAH, FUCK WITH ME BOY
    IF YOU WANT TO FUCK

    chorus

    SO THERE OUGHTA BE A LAW
    AGAINST SUNNY SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
    YEAH THERE OUGHTA BE A LAW
    AGAINST PUTTIN THE DEVIL
    BEHIND THE WHEEL …
    CAUSE AS LONG AS YOU PEOPLE ARE GONNA SANCTION SUCH AN EVIL
    WELL I’M GONNA TURN YOUR ASPHALT
    BACK INTO BRIMSTONE
    YEAH YOU GOD DAMNED BET
    I WILL
    ... more

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  • Terry Allen T-shirt: "Today's Rainbow is Tomorrow's Tamale."
    T-Shirt/Apparel

    N.B. THESE SHIRTS ARE NOW AVAILABLE ONLY VIA OUR WEBSITE: paradiseofbachelors.com/shop/pobmerch-004/

    We print these shirts in small, limited batches, so reserve yours today.

    Today's rainbow is tomorrow's tamale.

    Is there any more potent and perfect koan? Not for our money here at PoB. In celebration of our deluxe, definitive reissues of Terry Allen's "Juarez" (1975, PoB-26) and "Lubbock (on everything)" (1979, PoB-27), we are proud to present the Terry Allen Tamale T-shirt—as far as we know, the first such item to exist in the wold, and long overdue—featuring the immortal line from Juarez and the cover of that abiding masterpiece of music and visual art on the front, with the PoB logo tastefully deployed on the back.

    Available in White or Slate, sizes XS through XL, these 100% cotton, fine jersey short-sleeved t-shirts (Los Angeles Apparel or BELLA+CANVAS) are screenprinted by hand by the eco-friendly Philadelphia outfit Print Natural, in a limited edition. Perceptive fashionistas will recognize this as the second installment in our grand tradition of apparel featuring hirsute smoking men.

    www.paradiseofbachelors.com/terry-allen
    terryallen.bandcamp.com
    ... more

    Sold Out

  • Terry Allen and the Panhandle Mystery Band: Smokin the Dummy Shirt
    T-Shirt/Shirt

    N.B. FOR NOW, THESE SHIRTS ARE AVAILABLE ONLY VIA OUR WEBSITE: paradiseofbachelors.com/shop/pobmerch-004/

    “Pink and Black is comin’ back” … in the glorious form of a SMOKIN-hot Terry Allen shirt, the newest addition to our collection of Terry couture and our fourth smoke-themed apparel design. Light it up!

    Designed by Terry himself with Noel Waggener, the shirts, featuring Bob the Dummy, commemorate our reissue of Smokin the Dummy (PoB-065) as well as the occasion of Panhandle Mystery Band’s annual performance at the Paramount Theatre in Austin on January 28, 2023.

    Available in both breezy short-sleeved and cozy long-sleeved styles, in sizes XS through 2XL, these 100% cotton BELLA+CANVAS shirts are screen-printed by hand by eco-friendly Philadelphia shop Print Natural, in, appropriately, the color Natural, for a subtle but accurate nicotine-stain tint.

    Quantities, as always, are limited, so get your SMOKIN shirt today. Don’t be a dummy.

    Sportin’ these new shirts, as the song goes, “Yeah … we’ll both be cool.”
    ... more

    Sold Out

  • Terry Allen T-shirt: "Just Like Moby Dick"
    T-Shirt/Apparel

    Just Like Moby Dick.

    Our second Terry Allen t-shirt, the cetacean sequel to "Today's Rainbow Is Tomorrow's Tamale," features—for the first time ever, as far as anyone remembers—an original drawing by Terry himself, of a sperm whale triumvirate, scarred and freshly harpooned "Just Like Moby Dick," to commemorate the masterly 2020 Panhandle Mystery Band album of the same title.

    Screenprinted by hand, in two oceanic blues, by our eco-friendly focused friends at Print Natural in Philadelphia, these 100% cotton, pre-shrunk, fine jersey short-sleeved t-shirts (BELLA+CANVAS) are available in Vintage White—slightly off-white, the true Mellvillian Whiteness of the Whale hue—sizes XS through XL, in a very limited edition.

    Wear while listening to the Panhandle Mystery Band, partying in any port of call with Queequeg and Tashtego, and keep sailin' on through.

    www.paradiseofbachelors.com/terry-allen
    www.paradiseofbachelors.com/pob-055
    terryallen.bandcamp.com/album/just-like-moby-dick
    ... more

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about

Album page: paradiseofbachelors.com/shop/pob-027/
Artist page: paradiseofbachelors.com/terry-allen/
Other options: lnk.to/PoB27

Watch the unboxing video: youtu.be/t3zf15UVths
Watch a short documentary on the album: youtu.be/Uc4s6Q6XGVs

Legendary Texan artist Terry Allen occupies a unique position straddling the frontiers of country music and visual art; he has worked with everyone from Guy Clark to David Byrne to Lucinda Williams, and his artwork resides in museums worldwide. Widely acclaimed as a masterpiece, his deeply moving (and hilarious) satirical second album, a complex memory palace to his West Texas hometown Lubbock, is often cited as the urtext of alt-country. Produced in collaboration with the artist and meticulously remastered from the original analog tapes, this is the definitive edition: the first to correct the tape speed inconsistencies evident on all prior versions; the first U.S. vinyl reissue; the first CD to restore the full track listing; and the first to contextualize the record within Allen’s 50-year career.

Deluxe 2×LP package includes tip-on gatefold jacket with lyrics, printed inner sleeves, download code, and 28 pp. book with related artwork and photos, an oral history by Allen, and essays by David Byrne, Lloyd Maines, and PoB. 2×CD edition features replica jacket, sleeves, and tipped-in 52pp. book.

*

Lubbock’s got a hard bark, with little or no self-pity; its music has an edge that can be smelled, like Lewter’s feed lot. No one from Lubbock ever apologized for what they were or where they lived.

– Terry Allen (2016)

Three hundred forty-four miles of “blue asphaltum line” separate Ciudad Juárez, Mexico from Lubbock, Texas. Just four years separate Terry Allen’s first and second albums and consecutive masterpieces, Juarez (1975) and Lubbock (on everything) (1979), but the two records inhabit completely different systems of worldbuilding, wildly divergent in terms of sonics, scope, and circumstance.

Arguably Allen’s most widely beloved and most easily approachable album—it contains his two best-known and most oft-covered songs, “Amarillo Highway (for Dave Hickey)” and “New Delhi Freight Train” (famously first recorded by Little Feat)—Lubbock is his complex memory palace to his West Texas hometown. Rather than frantically covering ground like Juarez, with its map-happy, burnt-rubber pursuits and escapes, it instead digs down and burrows inward, to the heart of one rather plain High Plains city in the heart of the Llano Estacado, or “Palisaded Plains,” an interminably flat mesa larger than the state of Indiana that spans eastern New Mexico and northwestern Texas. Compared to its sparsely produced predecessor, it represents a much more collaborative, even collective, effort with a local Lubbock studio band, complete with rhythm section, pedal steel, fiddle, and horns, and helmed by master guitarist Lloyd Maines, who became Terry’s frequent musical partner, producer, and the de facto bandleader of the Panhandle Mystery Band.

With these twenty-one songs, written largely in self-imposed exile in California (all the while “cussing Lubbock”), Allen shifted modes from the sordid, violent mythology of Juarez to piquant prodigal-son satire. Instead of the corrido conjure of Jaurez, its eviscerations, elisions, and repossessions of roving identity and cartography, Lubbock incarnates an accidental capitulation to love, to home, to rootedness. Yes, it’s satire—at least until the final few songs, which take a turn towards the nakedly personal—but it’s also deeply affectionate, compassionate, and empathetic towards its subjects, even when they are ridiculous or pathetic. Especially when they are ridiculous or pathetic—and at their most vulnerable—these all too human characters come alive. The way the songs wield cutting humor like a scalpel—managing a high-wire balance between literate and guttural, acerbic and affectionate, cynical and sanguine—is more reminiscent of the surgical satire of Mark Twain or Kurt Weill or Randy Newman than the cris de cœur of fellow “outlaw” artists like Waylon or Willie or Terry’s close friend and collaborator Guy Clark. As Terry told me, revealingly, about songwriting, “If it’s not a lie, it’s probably satire.”

They are love songs, one and all, but obliquely so. The songs that describe romantic or erotic love or chart the narrative arc of such relationships—“High Plains Jamboree,” “The Wolfman of Del Rio,” “The Girl Who Danced Oklahoma,” “The Beautiful Waitress,” “Cocktails for Three,” “Blue Asian Reds”—appropriate love song tropes and functions towards other metaphorical ends, grasping at ways of meaning far beyond the basic bilateral syntax and sentimental idiom of love songs. The songs are nominally about Lubbock and its denizens, but they angle for universality—the album could just as well have been called Lubbock (on everywhere). True to its title’s winking, extravagant ambition, the record not only summons a city, but likewise attempts to encompass everything, sublime and banal alike, in a great, untidy embrace: love and heartbreak; marriage and its (dis)contents; family and childhood; driving and travel; the art world and its classist contortions; booze and pills; sports and play; agriculture and foodways; the ambitions, failures, frustrations, and satisfactions of labor and art; crime and war and violence and peace; the mirages of memory; the passing of time; and finally, poignantly, the dissolution and disappearance of the self (the devastating “I Just Left Myself.”)

Lubbock movingly reflects one of the weirdly wrenching and reassuring processes of adulthood, the realization that you have been irrevocably shaped by your past, your hometown, and your family, whether you like or it not. The tension between masking and unmasking evident throughout Lubbock and its cast of conflicted characters suggests this ingrained ambivalence about escaping our pasts, the impossibility of permanently leaving home behind. Despite our best efforts to molt and forge independent, separate identities, we carry the stale freight of home, of our childhoods, with us everywhere on our backs, for the remainder of our lives, whether we see it or not, like deluded turtles. The question is how to crawl along with some measure of grace.

Lubbock’s intellectually tough transmutation—through Allen’s detailed and idiosyncratic songwriting—of honky-tonk’s flinty foundations into something altogether stranger and subtler took a pickaxe to the notion that country music as a form is fossilized, fixed, or inherently conservative, influencing generations of artists. Songwriters from well beyond West Texas and the increasingly insular and constrictive confines of country continue to discuss the album with breathless reverence, citing how it changed everything for those who were listening. It forces you to rethink the possibilities of the form, to consider the subversive potential of operating within a loose country genre context without feeling hidebound by its traditions. Even if Allen’s music is more accurately described as art-country, Lubbock (on everything) sowed the seeds of alt-country’s emergence a decade later. It’s no accident that Lloyd Maines went on to play on classic albums like Uncle Tupelo’s Anodyne (1993) and Wilco’s A.M. (1995), and to produce Richard Buckner, nor that Sturgill Simpson and Jason Isbell perform “Amarillo Highway” in concert. This is the urtext, the template for everything that followed.

+ The definitive, deluxe edition of the art-country classic: produced in collaboration with the artist; remastered from the original analog tapes; first U.S. vinyl reissue; first CD to restore the full track listing; first to correct the tape speed inconsistencies evident on all prior versions; and the first to contextualize the record within Allen’s 50-year career.

+ Available on virgin vinyl as a 2xLP, with heavy-duty tip-on gatefold jacket, lyrics, printed inner sleeves, download code, and 28 pp. book with related artwork, an oral history by Allen, and new essays by David Byrne, Lloyd Maines, and Brendan Greaves.

+ 2xCD edition features scale replica gatefold jacket, inner sleeves, and tipped-in 52pp. book.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Allen’s songs extract strangeness from the known world and use it as a means of acquiring greater knowledge.

– The New Yorker

He’s pretty close to a master lyricist.

– The New York Times

5 stars; ‘50 Essential Albums of the 1970s.’ Eccentric and uncompromising, savage and beautiful, literate and guttural.

– Rolling Stone

Raunchy, pithy, and deeply redolent … lines quiver with a raw vision rarely heard in folk or country.

– Pitchfork

A masterpiece. One of the finest country albums of all time, a progenitor of what would eventually be called alt-country.

– AllMusic

Genuwine laugh-a-minute highbrow-lowbrow. From football heroes gone wrong to noble floozies to farmers fiddling while Washington burns, he’s a tale-spinning poet of the Panhandle.

– Robert Christgau

The most succinct commentary on the West Texas condition ever captured.

– Texas Monthly

Riveting.

– NPR

Nobody else does country music like Terry Allen … There’s not a wasted word or extraneous musical lick. ­

– L.A. Times

I love Terry. He’s a funny son of a bitch.

– Guy Clark

People tell me it’s country music, and I ask, “Which country?”

– Terry Allen

www.paradiseofbachelors.com/shop/pob-027

credits

released October 14, 2016

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Terry Allen Santa Fe, New Mexico

Legendary Texan artist Terry Allen occupies a unique position straddling the frontiers of country music and conceptual art; he has worked with everyone from Guy Clark to David Byrne to Lucinda Williams to Bruce Nauman, and his artwork resides in museums worldwide.
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