West Texas meets Southeast Asia in this reissue of an album long considered an oddball curiosity even within the curious career of Terry Allen. Something of a chicken-fried Renaissance man, the native Texan (long based in New Mexico) has earned acclaim extending from the fine-art galleries that house his paintings, sculptures and multimedia installations to the roadhouses where his honky-tonk songs are sung.
The sardonic streak of hard-boiled humor that highlights his “Amarillo Highway” (covered by Robert Earl Keen), “New Delhi Freight Train” (covered by Little Feat’s Lowell George) and “Gimme A Ride To Heaven, Boy” (long a highlight of Joe Ely’s live sets) is much in evidence here, yet Amerasia could hardly be more serious nor more pertinent. While the album was originally released on cassette in 1987 as the soundtrack to a little-seen and long-forgotten film by Wolf-Eckert Buhler, Allen’s musical exploration of cultural imperialism seems all the more timely in the wake of America’s more recent misadventures in the Middle East.
The album is a collaboration between Allen’s Panhandle Mystery Band and a group of Laotian musicians that he traveled to Bangkok to record. Their interplay often seems less like a synthesis than a clash of extremes — an American bull in an Asian china shop.
“Display Woman/Displaced Man” seethes with a sexual fury and a propulsion that recalls Junior Walker’s “Shotgun”, while “Lucy’s Tiger Den” transposes the ragtime of a New Orleans bordello to a serviceman’s haunt in Thailand. Beneath the whir of an Apocalypse Now chopper, the stately chorus arrangement of “The Burden” likely influenced “Down In The Light Of The Melon Moon” by Allen’s Lubbock homeboys, the Flatlanders.
Produced by Allen and longtime compadre Lloyd Maines, the music ultimately negotiates an uneasy peace between East and West — a call-and-response between the Texans and the Laotian musicians led by Surachai Jantimatorn, whose sing-song lilt provides contrast and complement for Allen’s sagebrush swagger. You’ll never hear a sadder, lonelier Christmas song than “Sawahdi”, a more syncopated “Chop Sticks” than pianist Allen’s “Chop Sticks/Thai Sticks”, or a more melancholy adaptation of “My Country ‘Tis of Thee” than the album-closing “Let Freedom Ring”.
Over the course of the collaboration, Jantimatorn provides Thai lyrics for Western melodies, while the Texas musicians add Laotian bamboo flute and Thai elephant skin drum to their arrangements. There’s a spirit of common humanity in the cultural diversity, amid the profound sadness of war’s wake and imperialism’s enduring stain. This song-cycle journeys halfway around the world to hit the American listener uncomfortably close to home.
