Allen’s sculpture of a gargoyle in a suitcase sits in the baggage department of the Denver airport. Shortly after the installation, Allen says, some fundamentalist Christians blamed the gargoyle for casting a “demonic” influence over the troubled airport.
And there’s the Stubb’s project, a work close to Allen’s heart. C.B. “Stubb” Stubblefield, was a Lubbock barbecue restaurateur who, according to those who knew him, was the patron saint of the Lubbock music scene until his death in 1995. (He’s the namesake of a barbecue joint and nightclub in Austin, though that opened after his death,) As Allen explains it, the Stubb’s memorial park will be on the spot of the original Stubb’s Bar-B-Q on Broadway in Lubbock. The land was donated by the property owners, Allen says.
He and other Lubbock musicians have helped raise money for the project with a series of benefit concerts, the last of which is scheduled for early March at Dallas’ Red Jacket (a nightclub Allen designed) featuring Allen, Byrne and Lucinda Williams. “The concerts have raised some money, but the main way we did it was selling bricks,” Allen says. “For $250 each, people bought bricks with their names on them. I’m real proud of the fact that we raised the money with no money from the county or the city. The county and city will maintain the park, but we raised the money to build it.”
Allen says a slightly-larger-than-life bronze statue of Stubblefield (who towered well over six feet tall) will stand in the area where his kitchen used to be. “He’s going to have these huge hands,” Allen says of the statue. “Stubb himself had these great big hands.”
Other long-gone landmarks of the old restaurant — the pit, the stage, the jukebox — will be marked with plaques. There will be a replica of Stubb’s oft-quoted sign, “There Will Be No Loud Talk, No Bad Talk In This Place”, and another sign with the words Stubb frequently used to introduce himself at public gatherings: “Ladies and gentlemen, I’m a cook.”
The Stubb’s project not only commemorates a kindly man and talented cook, it also immortalizes a brief time in the city’s history that saw several musical talents come together and blossom. The musicians who hung out together playing each others’ songs in places such as Stubb’s Bar-B-Q would not become as famous as Buddy Holly did 20 years before, but they would shape a generation of Southwestern songwriters who followed them. And they would have a great time doing it.
The bonds between those musicians who make up the so-called Lubbock Mafia are old and strong. “We all went to Monterey High School,” Allen says. “Butch, Jimmie Dale, Joe Ely. Jo Harvey and Jo Carol Pierce went there too.”
Allen says he knew Gilmore and Hancock, who are two years younger than him, back in their high school days. However, he says he did not meet Ely, who is four years his junior, until the late ’70s, when Allen went to Texas to record Lubbock (On Everything).
“I was the first to get out of Lubbock,” Allen says. “I got my driver’s license before they did.”
Allen had been gone for several years when Gilmore, Hancock and Ely formed the “more-a-legend-than-a band” group called The Flatlanders.
Although he didn’t start recording until he was in his 30s, Allen was surrounded by music all his life. His mother, Pauline Pierce Allen, was a professional jazz pianist who was kicked out of Southern Methodist University in the 1920s, her son says, for playing in a racially integrated combo.
His father, Sled, who was 60 when Terry was born, was a former professional baseball player for the old St. Louis Browns. In the 1950s, he was a wrestling promoter in Lubbock, A picture of Sled with a couple of midget wrestlers hangs proudly on Allen’s studio wall in Santa Fe.
But that’s not all Sled promoted. He also brought some of the greatest early rock ‘n’ rollers and R&B giants to Buddy Holly’s hometown. “He brought Elvis to the Cotton Club. Little Richard, Fats Domino, Ray Charles,” Allen says. “These were the first ‘cosmopolitan’ shows they ever had in Lubbock where you’d find whites, blacks and Hispanics all at the same place.” Allen, then a teenager, helped sell concessions at those concerts.
Allen met his future wife, Jo Harvey, at a Rainbow Girls dance in Lubbock when both were 11 years old. The meeting is immortalized in Allen’s song “30 Year Waltz”. The two married in the 1960s and soon after moved to California. After graduating from Chouinard Art Institute in Berkeley, Allen taught at California State University in Fresno. In 1975, he recorded his first album, Juarez, in San Francisco. The album, however, was only part of Juarez, which also consisted of a body of visual works revolving around four main characters.
About the time he was ready to make his next album, Allen received a call from artist Paul Milosevich, an old Lubbock acquaintance. Milosevich, who has done album covers for Ely and Tom T. Hall, convinced Allen he should return to his hometown to record the next album.
