“Paul called up and told me about Joe Ely and some of the other musicians there and said I ought to do the whole thing in Lubbock,” Allen says. “The day I talked to him, I got some money by selling a painting.”
The record, Lubbock (On Everything), turned out to be a 20-song double-album full of musical character sketches of Texas archetypes: “The Beautiful Waitress”; “The Great Joe Bob”, a high school football star who turns to crime; the “Lubbock Woman” who drinks too much and wears too much makeup, “but she’s got a good heart.”
Returning to Lubbock, playing music with the likes of Ely and the Maines Brothers (Lloyd, bassist Kenny and drummer Donnie), eating Stubb’s barbecue, seeing old friends and confronting old ghosts helped Allen come to grips with his conflicting feelings for his old home.
“For years I’d been scapegoating the town,” he says. “But listen to Lubbock (On Everything) and you’ll find nothing about hating the place. I felt empathy and loving toward it.” But, Allen adds, “I don’t think I could live there again.”
Other albums on Allen’s own Fate Records followed. Like Lubbock (On Everything), the next two would be recorded at Caldwell Studios in Lubbock, with the same basic group of musicians — the Maines boys, Richard Bowden, guitarist Jesse Taylor and accordionist Ponty Bone. (Sugar Hill reissued Lubbock (On Everything) on CD in 1995 and released Smokin’ The Dummy and Bloodlines together on one disc in 1997.)
In 1985, Allen released Amerasia, a cassette-only soundtrack for Wolf-Eckart Buhler’s film about Americans who stayed in Southeast Asia after the Vietnam war and the children of American soldiers left behind in Southeast Asia. Part of the album was recorded in Bangkok with a Thai band. It was completed in Lubbock with The Panhandle Mystery Band. During this period, Allen produced Youth in Asia, a massive multimedia art project dealing with the aftermath of the Vietnam war.
In the early ’90s, Jo Harvey stumbled upon an old journal of a prostitute named Chippy who worked her trade in West Texas during the oil boom years. “Chippy wrote her diary for about 40 years,” Allen says. “These diaries give the most extensive history of that era I’ve ever seen….Her life was totally transitory. She hitchhiked rides to get tricks. She had syphilis and she’d trade doctors treatments for tricks. She got beat up a lot. She was in quite a bit of pain. But she was determined about surviving no matter what happened.”
Chippy’s story became a play, which showed five weeks in Philadelphia and one week in New York. There also was an album, Songs From Chippy, that was released on Hollywood Records in 1994 and featured the Allens, Ely, Butch Hancock, Wayne “The Train” Hancock (no relation), Jo Carol Pierce and Robert Earl Keen.
In 1996, Sugar Hill released Human Remains, Allen’s first non-soundtrack album since Bloodlines. It contained some fine duets with Lucinda Williams (“Back To Black”, “Room To Room”, “Flatland Boogie”); a blistering indictment of his own generation (“After The Fall”); a look at today’s youth (“Crisis Site 13”) that starts off funny but turns sad; and “Peggy Legg” (featuring vocals by Pierce), about a one-legged dancer who, in her own peculiar way, offers hope and inspiration.
In 1997, Allen was honored by his old hometown, which inducted him into the West Texas Walk of Fame — an honor bestowed upon a wide range of entertainers and artists including Buddy Holly, Bob Wills, Roy Orbison, Waylon Jennings, Tanya Tucker, Joe Ely, Paul Milosevich and the Maines Brothers. (Jimmie Dale Gilmore and Butch Hancock were inducted last year.) Allen was inducted the same time as the late Dan “Hoss Cartwright” Blocker, sculptor Glenna Goodacre and the late cartoonist Dirk West. The Lubbock Avalanche-Journal reported that Allen seemed nervous. The paper said that in his speech the man who wrote “Peggy Legg” paid tribute to the creator of “Peggy Sue”.
“No stars before Holly wore glasses,” the bespectacled Allen said. “Those glasses and those songs opened a door to a whole new world for me.”
“When I was up there I thought of what Joe Ely had told me about the time he was inducted,” Allen says. “He said when he was up there, he kept looking over at the jail and remembering when he got thrown in jail as a kid for being drunk or something. It’s like a collision of all those things you wanted to leave and all those things you love about a place.”
Stephen W. Terrell is the Santa Fe New Mexican’s crime reporter and music critic. He does two radio shows for KSFR FM in Santa Fe and sometimes plays his own tacky Potatohead music in local beer joints and coffee houses.
