by Steve Terrell on
THE SWEET TESTAMENT ABOVE is by Texas songwriter Sled Allen. The grandparents who inspired these poetic memories of blueberries and Bo Diddley are longtime Santa Fe residents Terry and Jo Harvey Allen. Terry is a multidisciplinary artist and musician; Jo Harvey is a playwright, poet, and actress. The couple, who have been married for 64 years, moved to Santa Fe in the mid-1980s and soon found their avant-garde groove in the city’s artistic community.
If you’re not familiar with his art or music, a glance around Terry’s studio on Santa Fe’s west side will give you an idea how his creative mind works. The place is filled with whimsical and artistic flotsam and jetsam from projects past, present, and future. It’s strewn with pieces of visual art projects in various stages of completion, including found objects such as a bird’s head, old loafers, and a Ouija board. A mounted fish head with a snake wrapped around it and a human hand coming out of its mouth hangs right above a photo-filled bulletin board.
Terry’s sense of humor—irreverent, surreal, sometimes outrageous, sometimes down-home—infuses just about everything. One of his current projects concerns the notion of Jesus Christ 2,000 years from now. “I’ve been writing some songs to kind of deal with that,” he says. Naturally, an electric piano is nearby. Sculptures and paintings inspire songs, and vice versa.
Terry’s one of the most respected songwriters in the country-music underground. His tunes have been covered by artists including Doug Sahm, Bobby Bare, Little Feat, Robert Earl Keen, Cracker, and the Hickoids. His name is synonymous with the music of the town of his childhood—Lubbock, Texas—which also gave the world his contemporaries: Joe Ely, Jimmie Dale Gilmore, and Butch Hancock. His visual art has been displayed in an impressive array of museums, including New York’s Museum of Modern Art; the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art; the Musée d’art contemporain de Lyon, France; and many others. Terry’s sculptures grace public spaces throughout the country, including in airports in Houston and Denver. At Denver International Airport, his Notre Denver—two cast-bronze gargoyles emerging from suitcases—has spawned conspiracy theories about demonic influences at the airport since the works were first installed in 1995.
While he’s reticent to discuss some of his art projects before they’re completed, Terry speaks with great pride about the recently released album Blood Sucking Maniacs. The self-titled work is a family affair headed by Terry and Jo Harvey that includes their sons, Bukka and Bale; grandsons Sled, Calder, and Kru; Sled’s wife, Sophie, and a handful of musical kinfolk whom Terry sardonically calls “blood brothers and bastard children.” It was recorded mostly at the elder Allens’ home, with touches done at Jono Manson’s Kitchen Sink studio, also in Santa Fe.
Terry says two other generations of the Allen clan are represented on the album. “It starts off, actually, with the heartbeat of our great-grandbaby,” he says. “That’s Sled’s son Lucky Marlow.” The album kicks off and ends with Lucky’s heartbeat from a sonogram last year.
Terry’s late mother, Pauline Roosevelt Pierce Allen, also appears on the record, playing short ragtime piano pieces Terry recorded at her home decades ago. But despite the cheap-horror-movie implications of the title, Blood Sucking Maniacs is not a novelty album. The album is about family. It’s about babies and children. It’s about ancestors. It’s about marriage. It’s about growing up. It’s about aging.
It’s about home.
TERRY’S MEMORIES OF SANTA FE GO back to his childhood in the late 1940s and early ’50s. His mother was a barrelhouse piano player, and one of her last professional gigs was at the lounge at La Fonda on the Plaza. “We would drive from Lubbock, and a lot of times I would sleep in the booth while she was playing her gigs,” he recalls, “and then drive back that night.”
Terry says both of his parents loved Santa Fe: “We’d come periodically on vacation or just on the way to somewhere else.” He recalls staying at El Rey Motel, now El Rey Court, “when it was on a dirt road” and visiting Maria’s New Mexican Kitchen, which stuck in his mind for its circular window.
In 1982, a few years before moving here, Terry and Jo Harvey came to Santa Fe to celebrate their 20th wedding anniversary. The weeklong celebration included concerts with Albuquerque band the Planets, plus a barbecue catered by famed Lubbock pitmaster C.B. “Stubb” Stubblefield at Sunrise Springs—the same Stubb who is the namesake of the barbecue sauce that can be found on supermarket shelves across the country.
On his drive from Texas, Stubb’s Cadillac broke down with all the smoked meat resting in the trunk. “We thought maybe that barbecue might have been sitting on Stubb’s pool table for a week before he put it in the trunk,” Terry says. “Stubb really had no concept of botulism or any kind of food poisoning.” His smile widens into a huge grin. “So Jo Harvey and I ate the first sandwiches, thinking, if everybody’s gonna go, we might as well go with them,” he chuckles. “But nobody got sick. Everybody loved the barbecue.”
Stubb’s barbecue also played an important role earlier in Allen’s musical career. Artist Paul Milosevich, who also has resided in Santa Fe for decades, was living in Lubbock while Terry was teaching art at California State University–Fresno. The two had become friends through the art world.
“I talked him into coming [back] to Lubbock to record his Lubbock (On Everything) album,” Milosevich says. “I told him about Joe Ely and the Lubbock music scene.” Shortly thereafter, the Allens came to Lubbock for a family visit. Milosevich introduced Terry to Ely (who died in Taos last year), along with Lloyd Maines and Lubbock’s Don Caldwell Recording Studios.
But the clincher, Milosevich says, was introducing him to Stubb and his barbecue. “That did it. He recorded the album at Caldwell’s in the summer of 1977.” The 1979 Lubbock (On Everything) is considered by many critics and longtime fans to be Terry’s best. Songs such as “Amarillo Highway,” “Truckload of Art,” “The Beautiful Waitress,” and “The Great Joe Bob” reflect Terry’s deep love-hate conflict about his hometown. Spoiler alert: Love wins.
By 1986, their sons having grown and left home, the Allens were ready to leave California, though they weren’t sure where they wanted to land. “I just booked gigs around so we could roam around and see if we saw places we liked,” Terry says.
Although they hadn’t really planned to move here, they stopped in Santa Fe. While having a drink at El Farol, on Canyon Road, they had a chance encounter with the owner of what they call an “ugly house,” which they’d seen earlier in the day when driving around a sparsely populated area of the city’s west side. The owner offered to show the adobe fixer-upper to the Allens at night, which turned out to be a winning sales tactic. The nighttime views of city lights and the stars from the patio won over the couple.
Nearly 40 years after arriving in Santa Fe, the Allens are still doing exactly what their grandson said in that album track: making art, cooking food, and making magical memories in that “ugly house.” Jo Harvey has a studio of her own in the main house. When Terry has to “go to work,” he walks across the patio to the detached building where his studio is.
“We lay pretty low when we’re here,” he says. “We’re homebodies.”
ALTHOUGH THE ALLENS HAD AN ALBUM release show for Blood Sucking Maniacs at the Paramount Theatre in Austin in late May, no real tour was planned, Terry says. These days, he’s down to four or five live performances a year. Listening to him talk about the talents of his sons and grandsons, one gets the feeling that at age 83, he’s proud to have passed the proverbial torch to his offspring. Son Bukka and grandson Calder are actual working musicians. Bukka, who has recorded with the likes of Ely, Robert Earl Keen, Ian Moore, and the BoDeans, has released a couple of solo albums. Calder, who had a show at Santa Fe’s Tumbleroot Brewery and Distillery in June, has released three albums.
Other Allen progeny are hardly short on talent. Son Bale is a visual artist, gallery owner in Fort Worth, poet, and percussionist, while grandson Sled contributed “Santa Fe” and another song to the new album. And grandson Kru, still a teen, is a piano player. He has two short instrumentals on Blood Sucking Maniacs that are barely distinguishable from his great-grandmother Pauline’s tracks on the record.
Terry and Jo Harvey still have a yearning for exploration and discovery. “Usually every Sunday we go out, and we kind of go to a different place that we haven’t been before,” Terry says. “It’s amazing how within 30 minutes from here you can be in such extraordinary kind of country without humans.” They’ve got a lot of choices: the Jemez Mountains, the Ortiz Mountains, Kasha-Katuwe Tent Rocks National Monument, and, of course, that grand river.
Jo Harvey mentions it in another song on Blood Sucking Maniacs, “Down to the River.” She fantasizes about visiting exotic locales like the Bay of Bengal and the Nile, but concludes, “Baby, if it’s too far and we don’t have the money / Let’s hop in your pickup and let’s just head for the Río Grande … But tonight let’s just enjoy being home …”
Leaving the Allen residence, you can’t help but think of all the paintings, the songs, the poetry, the jokes, the love, and the gargoyles that have sprung from that beautiful “ugly house” over the past four decades. It’s not hard to enjoy being in that home.
Steve Terrell met Terry Allen in 1982 while eating Stubb’s BBQ at Terry and Jo Harvey’s 20th anniversary party at Sunrise Springs.