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Pedal Steal + Four Corners

by Terry Allen and the Panhandle Mystery Band

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  • Record/Vinyl + Digital Album

    + All audio has been meticulously remastered from the original master tapes for this first-ever vinyl edition of Pedal Steal (1985) and first-ever release of the Four Corners radio plays (1986–1993).
    + Deluxe LP+3CD+book set features 145g virgin vinyl LP; heavy-duty board gatefold jacket; printed inner LP sleeve; custom 3CD portfolio; high-res Bandcamp download code; and an exhaustive, Grammy-nominated 28pp. color booklet boasting the first in-depth essay to explore this singular body of work, dozens of images of Allen’s related visual art, and full scripts and credits for all five pieces (a total of 33k words).
    + Standard BLACK vinyl edition.

    Includes unlimited streaming of Pedal Steal + Four Corners via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.
    ships out within 5 days
    Purchasable with gift card

      $32 USD or more 

     

  • Streaming + Download

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

    Includes downloads of both chapter and full-track versions of all five works; all album artwork; and PDF of the exhaustive, Grammy-nominated 28pp. color booklet containing the first in-depth essay to explore this singular body of work; dozens of images of Allen’s related visual art; and full scripts and credits for all five pieces (a total of 33k words).
    Purchasable with gift card

      $14 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)

     

  • Blue LP+3CD+book-PoB-045
    Record/Vinyl + Digital Album

    + Limited DESERT-DUSK BLUE vinyl edition; identical to standard edition except for LP color.

    Includes unlimited streaming of Pedal Steal + Four Corners via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and 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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  • 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

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  • 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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about

Album page: www.paradiseofbachelors.com/shop/pob-045
Artist page: www.paradiseofbachelors.com/terry-allen
Terry Allen T-shirts: bit.ly/2Fq8gGM
LP+3CD+book unboxing video: youtu.be/DDEM8XBcIV0
Other online purchase options (physical/DL/stream/int'l): lnk.to/pob45

ALBUM ABSTRACT

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, and his artwork resides in museums worldwide. Pedal Steal + Four Corners collects, for the first time, Allen’s radio plays and long-form narrative audio works—two and a half hours of cinematic songs, stories, and country-concrète sound collage—in a deluxe gatefold edition, including one LP, three CDs, a DL code, and an exhaustive, Grammy-nominated 28pp. color booklet boasting the first in-depth essay to explore this singular body of work; dozens of images of Allen’s related visual art; and full scripts and credits for all five pieces (a total of 33k words). Pedal Steal (1985), originally composed as a soundtrack to a dance performance, appears on vinyl for the first time, as well as on CD. Torso Hell (1986), Bleeder (1990), Reunion (a return to Juarez) (1992), and Dugout (1993) comprise the Four Corners suite, radio plays broadcast on NPR and never before released, now spanning two CDs. All audio has been meticulously remastered from the original tapes. Fans of Allen’s violent masterpiece Juarez will find much to love in these haunting Southwestern desert dramas, which feature Jo Harvey Allen, Lloyd Maines, Butch Hancock, Stones saxophonist Bobby Keys, and many others. Roger Corman tried to option the film rights; Jesse Helms tried to ban them; now you can own them!

N.B.: PoB's own Brendan Greaves has been nominated for a 2020 Grammy Award for Best Album Notes for this release. The thing about a Grammy nomination for notes is that, unlike the audio, the notes are only accessible to those who have purchased the album. But we'd like everyone to discover this dimension of Terry's work, so for a limited time, you can download and read the album book in its entirety here (bit.ly/2OBLbD5), for free, including Brendan's essay "'The Radio ... and Real Life': Pedal Steal, Four Corners, and Other Panhandle Mysteries of the Wind."

ALBUM NARRATIVE

I think there are three great American inventions: one is duct tape, one is hot glue, and the other one is putting radios in cars.
– Terry Allen, “A Self-Interview,” 1994

The five works on Terry Allen’s Pedal Steal + Four Corners were all created during a period of intense, condensed creativity spanning eight years, are all closely related to his interdisciplinary bodies of visual art and performance, and are all set in the American Southwest and West. Like Allen’s songwriting, which only nominally fits within the realm of country music (“Which country?” Terry quips), his work for radio, and his long-form narrative audio recordings more broadly, appropriate the general form and format of the genre, or medium, of popular radio dramas—monologue, dialogue, songs, interstitial instrumentals, and diegetic sound cues within a roughly thirty minute running time—but transform it into something much denser with meaning within a postmodern art context. They prefigure similar podcast experiments by decades.

Pedal Steal (1985), originally composed as the Bessie Award-winning soundtrack to a dance performance by Margaret Jenkins Dance Co.—and the only one of these works that has been previously released—actually premiered not on air, but rather onstage at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. However, its Four Corners companion pieces would not have been possible without the earlier and more structurally complex, blueprint of Pedal Steal, the first long-form narrative recording Allen undertook with the support of the Panhandle Mystery Band, actor and writer (and Terry’s wife) Jo Harvey Allen, and other collaborators including fellow Lubbockites Butch Hancock and Rolling Stones saxophonist Bobby Keys. The story elides the New Mexican pedal steel guitarist Wayne Gailey and legendary outlaw Billy the Kid into a spectral composite character called Billy the Boy, resurrected by a postmortem chorus in English, Spanish, and Navajo.

Torso Hell (1986), Bleeder (1990), Reunion (a return to Juarez) (1992), and Dugout (1993) together comprise the Four Corners suite, a reference both to a song from Allen’s first album Juarez (1975), and to the site where the state lines of Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona, and Utah crash in a cartographic crucifix. Allen designed these radio plays specifically for listening in a car, always a favorite space to audition his audio work. All Four Corners works were broadcast on NPR affiliates nationwide. The latter three were commissioned by New American Radio, an organization which, from 1987 to 1998, commissioned more than 300 experimental works for radio by artists such as Pura Fé, Pauline Oliveros, and Christian Marclay.

Even moreso than Pedal Steal, with which it shares a creative genealogy, Torso Hell is a direct and visceral articulation of Allen’s YOUTH IN ASIA body of work (1982–92) and its examinations of the psychological residues and betrayals of the Vietnam War. This “radio movie” about a quadriplegic Vietnam veteran’s torments and revenge shares the extreme violence and sexuality of its pulp inspirations, but presses into the realm of absurdity and metafiction, serving simultaneously as a parody of trashy B horror flicks and ponderous Hollywood Vietnam movies and as a vicious commentary on war and its endless rhetorical wake, the ways we abuse, exploit, and ignore our veterans while spouting inane pieties about honor, service, and patriotism.

Allen’s Anterabbit/Bleeder (a biography) cycle (1982–90) deploys fact and fiction, drawn partly from the life a hemophiliac childhood friend, to explore the very nature of biography and history, the ways our language and memories fail and fool us with their feeble reenactments and fractured transmissions of the past filtered through our myopic present. Memories are hemorrhages, Bleeder suggests, that stain our speech, our stories, and our mark-making with Rorschach bruises of untruths, exaggerations, and fantasies.

Ostensibly the “simple story” of the fateful but arbitrary murder, in a “small, rundown mountain trailer” in Cortez, Colorado, of Navy boy Sailor and his new bride, the Tijuana prostitute Spanish Alice at the hands of Juarez-born pachuco Jabo and his LA girlfriend, the “rock writer” and bruja Chic Blundie, the narrative of Allen’s iterative JUAREZ cycle (1968–present) spirals outward, and inward, recursively through a palimpsest of possibilities, a constellation of connections. Reunion (a return to Juarez) offers a retelling of the tale, deployed both as a radio play and as the soundtrack for the sculptural installation a simple story (Juarez) (1992), exhibited at the Wexner Center but originally conceived as stage set studies for a Juarez musical, co-written with David Byrne but never produced.

His most personal and autobiographical work, DUGOUT is based loosely on the lives on Allen’s father, a retired professional baseball player turned promoter of concerts and wrestling, and his mother, a barrelhouse-style piano player and “the first woman ever to be thrown out of SMU [Southern Methodist University], for playing jazz with black musicians in Deep Ellum in Dallas.” Allen himself describes the DUGOUT cycle, which includes Dugout the radio play, as “a love story, an investigation into how memory is invented, a kind of supernatural-jazz-sport-history-ghost-blood-fiction that rolls across the late nineteenth century into the mid-twentieth century.”

Pedal Steal + Four Corners serves as a ligament between Terry’s music, writing, visual art, and theatrical work, and as a bridge to Jo Harvey’s writing, theatrical work, film work, and acting. And yet they function as standalone documents, stripped of the accretion of visual cues, the shell of objecthood, while retaining the density and transport of dreaming. In the absence of the visual, what is left resembles spells, rituals, enactments of story and spirits, air and angels—in other words, memories.

KEY POINTS

+ All audio has been meticulously remastered from the original master tapes for this first-ever vinyl edition of Pedal Steal (1985) and first-ever release of the Four Corners radio plays (1986–1993).
+ Deluxe LP+3CD+book set features 145g virgin vinyl LP; heavy-duty board gatefold jacket; printed inner LP sleeve; custom 3CD portfolio; high-res Bandcamp download code; and an exhaustive 28pp. color booklet boasting the first in-depth essay to explore this singular body of work, dozens of images of Allen’s related visual art, and full scripts and credits for all five pieces (a total of 33k words).
+ Available in a limited desert-dusk blue color vinyl edition, as well as on standard black vinyl.
+ For more information: www.paradiseofbachelors.com/pob-045
+ Artist page/tour dates/back catalog: www.paradiseofbachelors.com/terry-allen

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Navajo chants blend into fuzzed-up steel guitar; dirty-realist narratives succumb to skeletal ballads; B-movie dialogue blossoms over a plaintive violin. Pedal Steal represents roots rock’s rarely encountered experimental fringe. – The Times

Think Sam Shepard with steel guitar, and you'll get the idea. – The Independent

Allen takes no prisoners, pulls no punches. – Rolling Stone

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 NY Times

Riveting. – NPR

Stunning poetry. The lines themselves quiver with a raw vision rarely heard. – Pitchfork

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

credits

released March 22, 2019

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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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