Pedal Steal + Four Corners, by Terry Allen and the Panhandle Mystery Band

LP+3CD+book unboxing video

Pedal Steal + Four Corners

by Terry Allen and the Panhandle Mystery Band

supported by

BenPujara If you came looking for quips, jokes, images that'll never leave you, and guitars that cry with the tears of New Mexico, you're in the right place. If you didn't come looking for that, you're still in the right place. Favorite track: Pedal Steal: Chapter 3.

more...

	/

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

$30 USD or more
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.

ships out within 5 days

2 remaining

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
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

ships out within 5 days

1 remaining

Purchasable with gift card

$24 USD or more
T-Shirt/Apparel
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

ships out within 5 days

6 remaining

Purchasable with gift card

$24 USD or more
Full Digital Discography

Get all 4 Terry Allen releases available on Bandcamp and save 25%.

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

Purchasable with gift card

$34.50 USD or more (25% OFF)

1.	Pedal Steal: Chapter 1 09:48	buy track
2.	Pedal Steal: Chapter 2 06:21 video	buy track
3.	Pedal Steal: Chapter 3 12:27	buy track
4.	Pedal Steal: Chapter 4 06:55	buy track
5.	Torso Hell: Chapter 1 08:06	buy track
6.	Torso Hell: Chapter 2 06:01	buy track
7.	Torso Hell: Chapter 3 05:30	buy track
8.	Torso Hell: Chapter 4 06:09	buy track
9.	Bleeder: Chapter 1 06:55	buy track
10.	Bleeder: Chapter 2 07:08	buy track
11.	Bleeder: Chapter 3 07:35	buy track
12.	Bleeder: Chapter 4 05:31	buy track
13.	Reunion (a return to Juarez): Chapter 1 06:45	buy track
14.	Reunion (a return to Juarez): Chapter 2 11:05	buy track
15.	Reunion (a return to Juarez): Chapter 3 05:52	buy track
16.	Reunion (a return to Juarez): Chapter 4 05:13	buy track
17.	Dugout: Chapter 1 07:45	buy track
18.	Dugout: Chapter 2 06:26	buy track
19.	Dugout: Chapter 3 08:04	buy track
20.	Dugout: Chapter 4 05:40	buy track

about

Album page: www.paradiseofbachelors.com/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): smarturl.it/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

license

total		USD

about

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

paradiseofbachelors.com

contact / help

Contact Terry Allen

Streaming and
Download help

Redeem code

Report this album or account

If you like Pedal Steal + Four Corners, you may also like:

Out of Sight
by Jake Xerxes Fussell

supported by 38 fans who also own “Pedal Steal + Four Corners”

"Exquisite" feels like An Understatement... Charlie
go to album
Soundkeeper
by Gunn-Truscinski Duo

supported by 34 fans who also own “Pedal Steal + Four Corners”

Perfect Sunday morning record Andrew Cayer
go to album
Bay Head
by Gunn-Truscinski Duo

supported by 33 fans who also own “Pedal Steal + Four Corners”

You can feel the synergy between these two artists. They feed off one another so smoothly. DaveRiley
go to album
Listening To The Music
by Zephaniah OHora

Irresistible classic country music abounds on “Listening To The Music,” full of lap steel, walking bass, and heartwarming melodies. Bandcamp New & Notable Sep 5, 2020
go to album
Natural Time
by Matney Cook

Big, gutsy country music from Matney Cook, with exuberant vocals and tasteful, stately arrangements. Bandcamp New & Notable Apr 17, 2021
go to album
When Carolina Comes Home Again
by Jim Lauderdale

The latest from Jim Lauderdale is exclusive to Bandcamp, its songs drawing on bluegrass, country, and classic American music. Bandcamp New & Notable Mar 28, 2020
go to album
Ghost Forests
by Meg Baird and Mary Lattimore

supported by 32 fans who also own “Pedal Steal + Four Corners”

Mary Lattimore is a longtime favorite of mine. Her harp playing is often tagged as 'ambient' because it's enhanced by subtle delay and looping experimental treatments and is almost always instrumental, but here it finely is garnished with Meg Baird's achingly wondrous voice, and it is a perfect pairing. There is magical fairy dust in this record I'm pretty certain. Enter the Ghost Forest and be prepared to be enchanted. Joe Borreson
go to album

Bandcamp Daily your guide to the world of Bandcamp

On Bandcamp Radio

UK jazz musician RosieTurton chats about her new record in the latest Bandcamp Weekly

listen now