Terry Allen Quotes

I grew up in kind of a musical environment in that sense. I don't think that ANYBODY grew up in Lubbock in a visual environment because there was barely one tree in town and it was especially flat in every direction. In retrospect, I think that was a huge influence because there was something about the absence of everything that made story-telling, music and any kind of imagery have a double impact. Plus, just the seduction of a horizon in a conservative, straight-laced place that Lubbock was and pretty much still is.
Terry Allen

My father was an old baseball player and when he got too old to play, he rented a gospel church that had gone belly up and started putting on wrestling matches and boxing matches and on the weekends, they had big dances with live music. He became the local entrepreneur/promoter in the town. He brought in some of the very first rock and roll shows. On Friday nights, because it was segregated in that part of the country, they had all-black dances. T-Bone Walker, B.B. King (he was called 'Blues Boy' then), Jimmy Reed would all play. Saturday night was the country jamboree where they had the white equivalent- Hank Williams, Ernest Tubb, Little Jimmy Dickens, Minnie Pearl, people like that.
Terry Allen

Juarez was both a body of visual works and an album. Most of those songs were written from '67 to '75 when it was recorded. It was just one of those things that happened to you where you start a work or start a song and it propels itself. The story just took off and these characters began to appear and these incidents started to happen. It all took place in the part of the country that I know the most. It's still hard for me to talk about. It was one of those weird things that just made itself and I felt like some kind of weird vehicle. I'm still involved with it. I wrote a radio show (Return To Juarez) which David Byrne and I developed into a full-scale staged musical.
Terry Allen