Sara A. Lewis: Welcome to Points South. I’m your host Sara A. Lewis of the Oxford American. On today’s episode, we’re excited to feature Terry and Jo Harvey Allen. We are big fans of the Allens here at the OA. Especially Terry’s album Lubbock (On Everything). His songs have been covered by Lucinda Williams, Sturgill Simpson, David Byrne, and many many others. Terry’s visual art has also shown at MoMA and the Met. Producer Christian Adam Brown met with Terry and Jo Harvey to learn about their work in radio, particularly the pieces that challenged audiences to reimagine radio’s possibilities. This is “We Watched The Radio.”
Christian Adam Brown: Hi everyone. Christian Adam Brown here. I want to re-introduce you to someone. I say “re-introduce” because there’s a really good chance you might already know Terry Allen. You may know him as a country music singer, but if you ask him, he’d probably say, “which country?” He’s been making music for a long time – starting back in the mid-70’s. His songs are like moving images. Of landscape, of people. Of conditions of both landscape and people… and how those become intertwined. Terry’s most famous song, or the one that’s been listened to the most on Spotify is “Amarillo Highway.”
Terry Allen: [singing Amarillo Highway] Cause I’m panhandlin, Man handlin, Post holin, Hi Rollin, Dust Bowlin…Daddy And I ain’t got no blood veins I just got them four lanes, Of hard…Amarillo Highway Yeah, I don't wear no Stetson
CAB: That’s a pretty classic sounding country song, right? Well, hold onto your Stetson, even if you don’t wear one. This is also Terry Allen.
TA: Torso Hell is an idea for a horror movie, a treatment. The story starts off in Vietnam. This guy and his four buddies are dug in and under attack. A rocket or mortar or something makes a direct hit. They’re blown to pieces. Literally. Their people get out to them, but all they find are just piles of arms and legs and blood and gore. The whole bit. Anyway, it’s such a mess. They can’t tell one guy’s limb from another so they just stick everything all together in one big bag and send them off in the helicopter. The main guy, the star of the movie, is a complete quad. No arms or legs, barely even stumps, a torso, but he’s alive. All of them are alive, by some weird miracle.
CAB: That’s why I wanted to re-introduce you to Terry. He has this other thing that he did that is not as well-known – and on the surface you may think it has absolutely nothing to do with his music. This was made for radio. But not just any radio… it was broadcast by NPR in 1987. It was about the aftermath of the Vietnam War. I wanted to know more about this, so I drove to Santa Fe to talk to Terry and his wife Jo Harvey. And to even begin to understand, we have to go back to the radio he grew up around. Terry was raised in the dust and wind. Otherwise known as the Panhandle of Texas. It’s that weird vertical rectangle if you look at it on a map.
TA: One of the first memories I really have of radio was a storm that hit Waco, Texas. This had to be the early fifties.
CAB: That’s Terry. Waco is about 350 miles southeast of the panhandle.
TA: I can remember sitting in the kitchen with my mother with the radio on and there was kind of frantic voices talking about how Waco had been hit by this terrible storm and a number of people had been killed. There was a desperate plea for clothes, for canned goods, anything to help these people that were homeless from the tornado. So I remember my mother rummaging through and kind of getting a box together full of canned goods to send to Waco.
CAB: His mother was a professional piano player, and she gave him exactly one lesson.
TA: My mother taught me the St. Louis Blues and then she played it like a bat out of hell. She was a barrelhouse player. She was a great, great player.
CAB: She was a serious jazz and blues pianist who was 40 when he was born in ‘43 -- and was apparently kicked out of Southern Methodist University back in the 1920s for “playing the ‘devil's music’ with blacks.” His Dad was a professional baseball player turned wrestling and concert promoter who was 60 when Terry was born.
TA: And my dad was always a ball player. I mean, he became an entrepreneur and he did a lot of other stuff, but he never thought of himself as anything but a ball player.
TA: Old musicians would kind of come through and ball players periodically and there'd be parties breaking loose or whatever. But I was always hearing my dad tell stories… about that time of his life.
CAB: Those stories from his family's past left an indelible impression on Terry, as did the stories coming out of the radio. What was that like – the role of the radio in the house?
TA: Radio was like an altar, like a TV kind of became, but it was a box of stories.
CAB: At first, though, it seemed like radio was destined for eternity. It was invented back in the late 1800’s as a means for just establishing location – like morse code signals to save lives at sea – it surged in popularity throughout the 20’s… Now, enter the golden age of radio – the 30’s and 40’s. Radio was the dominant form of news and entertainment. All controlled by the same big three networks we see today – ABC, NBC, and CBS. By the time Terry was born in ’43, over 80 percent of American households had at least one radio… there were over 5,000 live radio plays being broadcast.
TA: We would all move into the living room. My mother would give you a sandwich or whatever and we'd diligently look at the radio while it was playing these different programs. You did look at it.
Radio Announcer: The Green Hornet
CAB: Now fast forward to the early 50’s…These big networks were focused on retrofitting those beloved radio dramas for the latest tech… television. This new era was poised to cast a shadow over radio.
Radio Announcer: [continued] He hunts the biggest of all game. Public enemies that even the G men can not reach; The Green Hornet.
TA: When television first came there was the first people on the block that got the television, made a schedule on their front door for the neighborhood kids. But all of the shows that kids wanted to see were the images of people that they had learned about on radio… Cisco Kid, Sergeant Preston, Green Hornet. And seeing these, for me, I remember it was a kind of collision because you know, you have such a set memory or idea of what a person looks like or one of these heroes looks like in your head. And then when you see the TV version of it… it inevitably was a disappointment. And I think those shows never meant as much to me as when you heard them because it was so much more fertile to your imagination.
AF: And that unknown, that kind of instability around who's there and who's listening is super fascinating.
CAB: That’s Anna Friz. She’s a radio and transmission artist, as well as a professor in the film and media department at the University of Santa Cruz. She also says radio is about much more than just the imagination
AF: For me, the most important thing is this relationship over a distance. Because so often communications media are put forward, especially in the early days as a means of closing distance, of engaging in union. Let's bring people together, let's eliminate distance, let's have understanding. Therefore, there is no distance. And I actually think that the opposite is really interesting. What if we experience distance? What if we understand that there's a difference between this position and that position in time and space, in culture… in sociality? That to me has tremendous potential to understand something other than my own narcissism and my own sort of perception of the world. So I want to experience distance and radio lets me do that.
CAB: But opening up a small town like Lubbock, Texas, where Terry grew up, to those outside voices was a threat. Because… well, the early 50’s were very conservative times. Lubbock was segregated… Songs like this were the norm:
Singer One: [singing That Doggie in the Window] How much is that doggie in the window?
CAB: Yep, that’s right. Doggie in the Window… But things started to change pretty quickly – if you scanned the radio dial on the weekends in Lubbock… You’d come across Terry’s dad’s show.
Hank Williams: [singing I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry] Hear that lonesome whippoorwill
Jo Harvey Allen: Being a kid, I remember, I guess my first radio experience was Terry's dad had a show at a big airport hangar called the Saturday Night Jamboree.
CAB: That’s Jo Harvey Allen. Terry’s wife of 60 years and close collaborator. They’ve known each other since they were 12 and 11.
JHA: Magic. It's just magic radio. And every Saturday, right after the bootlegger came, my folks would get dressed up, just fit to kill and go out dancing. I'd stay with my granddaddy, daddy Jess, and he would sit in his easy chair and I'd paint his toenails and dress him up in drag. And we'd be listening to the Saturday Night Jamboree.
I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry - Hank Williams: [singing] …to hide his face and cry.
CAB: Young Terry was in the room on the other side of that radio. He was working.. selling drink setups at the Jamboree because Lubbock was dry... people would bring in booze and young Terry would offer up ice and lemon to go with it. So these were huge concerts where Terry saw people like Hank Williams on Saturday nights. But if you went the night before… something.. entirely different.. was happening…
[audio of John Lee Hooker playing a guitar solo]
CAB: That’s John Lee Hooker…Lubbock had been segregated for over 60 years. And Terry’s Dad had a show.. that featured black touring musicians, like Hooker, only on Friday nights, to only black audiences. They’d come through Lubbock because…
TA: it's about 300 miles in any direction to the next town of any size.
John Lee Hooker: [singing Dimples] I love the way you walk. I love the way you walk. I’m crazy about your walk…
CAB: Both Hank Williams and John Lee Hooker shook the 50’s. Williams with his emotive grit and that rebellious spirit, and Hooker with his propulsive drone and swinging rhythm. They were later inducted into the Rock n’ Roll Hall of Fame, cited as early influences.
TA: I wasn't even aware of the incredible thing that was happening that I was getting to see and hear.
CAB: The times were changing. The post WW-II boom. Perfect lawns, mid-century homes. The dream. But the ideal veil of the 50's was being exposed. The US was coming out of the Korean War, the civil rights movement was picking up steam, television was growing rapidly…This was the start of the technological and cultural age that gave lift to the world as we know it. And though TV was on the rise in America…doesn’t mean radio just evaporated into thin air…Something else was coming.
TA: it was like a bomb hit.
Carl Perkins: [singing Blue Suede Shoes] Well it’s one for the money. Two for the show. Three to get ready, now go, cat, go. But don’t you step on my blue suede shoes. You can do anything…
TA: For me it was Blue Suede Shoes and Bo Diddley.
CAB: Carl Perkins’ ?
TA: Yeah, Carl Perkins’ version of Blue Suede Shoes. It literally changed the way kids thought, ya know? when rock and roll hit, because it was the first time you didn’t hear a bunch of…All the bullshit was about your family, America, God, and country… school. It was about you. And that was scary as shit to parents and exhilarating to kids.
Carl Perkins: [singing Blue Suede Shoes] Do anything that you wanna do, but uh-uh, honey, lay off my blue suede shoes.
CAB: Right after rock n’ roll hit, his dad hosted a cosmopolitan dance in Lubbock… It was the first ever gathering of black, hispanic, and white people in town ever. Terry and Jo Harvey attended and Ray Charles was on the bill.
TA: You know, it was the mid-50’s. They were…People were very frightened because I think it opened a door to people all over, especially the South, especially rural kind of areas. It was the first time the world came in… that you really had a sense that you were in the world.
CAB: There were people in town that revolted against these sounds coming in.
TA: They were having these record burnings and he was throwing these dances… and preachers in town all trying to get the parents to get their kids to bring these disks of Satan, you know, to the fairground and make these pyres, ya know? Which did nothing but just boost record sales all over town.
CAB: But even after all of these big events, his Dad still thought of himself as a ballplayer first.
TA: He even waited to die. He literally waited until the World Series was over to go into his last coma and die. But he waited until all of the series was over….And after my dad died, the world kind of fell apart…that, ah…like my mother, uh, drank a lot and there were a lot of issues.. that.. just family things that started collapsing, falling apart. So that was another thing that catapulted me.
CAB: His Dad died in 1959. Shortly after, Terry turned 16 and got his driver’s license. It was him and the road. Then he had another realization. Terry says there are three great American inventions: duct tape, super glue, and putting radios in cars…
TA: Having that sound and those stories or songs or whatever in motion, you know? because it… that's that’s what I always think…music, theater, any kind of visual art, whatever… but I always think of it in motion. And I think it came from that first experience of kind of… moving through that flat space and hearing those sounds coming in.
Radio Broadcast: Wolfman Jack! It’s me. I’m back. My name’s still Wolfman Jack.
TA: Those were incredible times because it was Wolfman Jack, and the outrageousness of like border radio. But it was also playing at the same time… music, things you'd never heard, you'd never even thought about, you know? Like Wolfman Jack selling boxes of chickens and then playing some deep southern blues or something, you know?
CAB: Wolfman Jack was a late night DJ. But he wasn’t broadcasting from the US.
TA: Yeah. Cause they were illegal. The, you know, transmitter was on the, it was in Acuña and Wolfman Jack was in Del Rio.
CAB: Here’s Anna Friz again…
AF: Overnight radio has always been this area of potential for people breaking out of the mold. And so in the sixties and seventies, you definitely hear that in terms of the kinds of music that get played late night, but also the real characters of the late night DJ. You know, that’s like a really important part of.. counter cultural history in the United States in terms of music development.
CAB: Wolfman Jack first heard these border sounds on the radio all the way from his home in Brooklyn. He made his way down to Mexico in 1960, eventually becoming station manager at XERF where he turned a monthly profit of $150,000!
His outrageousness was only outdone by snake oil salesmen.
TA: And then right after his show, there was a preacher that literally was hustling Bibles. But with the Bible came a personally autographed picture of Jesus Christ… found in a cave in the holy land…
CAB: sounds valuable.
TA: Yeah, (laugh) very valuable. So anyway, you got an 8x10 glossy of Jesus.
CAB: These stations were strung along the border from Nuevo Laredo all the way to Tijuana spreading truth and fiction. But mostly fiction. These guys would bounce from station to station broadcasting miracle cures and spiritual prophecies – evading the law. They were master storytellers. But they were also phonies. Which would capture the imagination of people in towns like Lubbock for better or worse. Some would be conned, others would be inspired.
AF: That's a big part of the story of American radio. The kinds of characters who end up going across the border into Mexico where the licensing was like a lot more slack are people who were, kind of, from all across the board who are being, um, excluded from the radio dial. But, they're called border blasters. You know, they've got their station and their antenna organized like pointing back into the United States, sometimes vast, vast power on an AM station. So it can be heard all over the US.
TA: So it was like this kind of strange voice that was, you know… going full speed down some farm road, you know, listening to this… (rawwwwrr) And then he would put on a record that you never heard before and then, kind of, at the perfect place put a wolf howling right over the song. We would go out and maybe five or six cars of us carloads of people go out in the, and park in a cotton patch and park the cars in a circle with the headlights shining in and everybody's tuned to the same station—usually Wolfman Jack—and dance in the dirt. So I grew up around that. And I think that obviously that had some kind of an impact on what I ended up doing.
TA: [ singing Wolfman of Del Rio] Well he took his first release on a highway. In a 1953 green Chevrolet. And he was carrying an awful load for just a fifteen-year-old. Until he laid his mind on the center line and turned up the radio. Going a hundred miles an hour down the blue asphaltum line listening to the Wolfman of Del Rio. And he didn’t give a damn about the trouble he was in. Yeah deep down in his soul, he just wanted to go.
CAB: Layers of his childhood experiences found their way into songs like Wolfman of Del Rio…I think about the characters he was hearing on the radio at the time like Wolfman Jack contrasted by bible salesmen. Blurring the lines between truth and fiction – making possible the imagination and creativity of someone that… maybe needed to hear that.
CAB: Before Terry left Lubbock, he had a few additional experiences that really pushed his creativity.
TA: But I remember sitting in, uh, in my English class and it was the sophomore year, and Mrs. Murphy was our English teacher, and she was reading Shakespeare… she was reading Macbeth or Julius Caesar or something. And class was supposed to be following her. And I was writing this beatnik poem. My idea for what I thought a beatnik poem was. And she stopped the class and she pointed at me and she said, you stand up and read what you're writing. I'm like.. pissed because I was not paying attention and I thought… shit. You know? (laughs) And so I stood up and I started reading this gibberish, this ungodly gibberish, I'm sure. But when I quit and set it down… she looked at me and she said, “you keep doing that.” And that was to me, the first permission that I had to..and uh, because it's one of the only things I remember in high school.
CAB: And after High School, he enrolled at Texas Tech in Lubbock.
TA: And I had no idea, really, what I was going to do other than go to art school. That was my plan. And I had a teacher at Tech. The only classes I had done well at all in Tech was this drawing class and a, uh, writing class. And I asked the drawing teacher if there was a school like his class. And he told me about this school in LA… And I literally applied by the end of the day and was out of there before I ever heard I was accepted or not.
CAB: That art school in LA was Chouinard, which opened up a world of possibilities for him. It was a place for like-minded and like-situated people. Where literature was encouraged, because well, according to Terry, that was considered “sissy” in places like Lubbock back then. It was the first time his curiosity of all media was fully reinforced. This was the early 60’s.
Radio Announcer: Here is a bulletin from CBS news: Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, you’ll excuse the fact that I’m out of breath but, about ten or fifteen minutes ago, a tragic thing from all indications at this point has happened in the city of Dallas. Let me quote to you this: And I’ll, you’ll excuse me if I’m out of breath. A bulletin. This is from the united press from Dallas. President Kennedy and Governer John Connally have been cut down by assassins’ bullets in downtown Dallas. They were riding an open automobile when the shots were fired. The president, his limp body carried in the arms of his wife Jacqueline has rushed to Parkland Hospital…
TA: We were in LA when Kennedy was assassinated, which was… talk about a radio event.
CAB: And nearly in tandem, the dirge that was the Vietnam War coming over the radio.
TA: Again, that tragedy on the radio. All of the Vietnam stuff. It was an incredibly volatile time to be in LA, ya know?
CAB: Chouinard was grounded in abstract expressionism… that’s a post-WWII art-form developed by painters like Pollock, Rothko and de Kooning. But once Terry graduated in ’67 he started thinking about a different artistic direction… one that would eventually fuse all of his interests. Music, theater, visual art… and radio.
TA: It wasn't so much the school, what you learned there. It was the town, the city, the places, the music that was starting to happen, the shows that were starting to happen in the museums and whatever. And the artists that you started to meet that we're making money actually and doing shows and stuff. It was the first time making something became serious. It wasn't like a hobby or a game. It was something that was cold-blooded and important.
CAB: The next phase of radio — grew out of his community in LA. Terry was invited to do a two hour spot on-air.
JHA: Terry walked in… you know, all I ever really wanted the most in my whole life was to have kids. So we had Bukka and Bale, and I was thrilled being at home with them. And Terry said, well, are you going to do anything else? Well, I really hadn't thought about it. And I just popped off. I said, yeah, I'm going to radio school. I never heard of radio school in my life. And he came in the next day and he said, “You still going to radio school?” And I go, oh, yeah. And he goes, well, I got your radio show. And he said, the first one is taped, all the rest are live. So I was thrilled. And we started doing “Rawhide and Roses.”
Radio Announcer: This is KPPC AM and FM in Pasadena. Our AM facility has just come on the air.
Buffy St. Marie: [singing Rawhide and Roses Theme Song] Every time I go uptown boys keep a kicking my dog around. Makes no difference if’n he’s a hound. The boys keep a kicking my dog around.
JHA: [on radio] Hi this is Jo Harvey Allen, bringing you a little Rawhide and Roses.
JHA: right on your corner, left at your heart and straight on your way home. And then of course, Buffy St. Marie.
Buffy St. Marie: [singing Rawhide and Roses Theme Song] …a little walk to town.
JHA: [on radio] Rawhide and Roses sashaying and dashaying, rip roaring wild and wooly. ripe and unpredictable. One hour of the best past, present, and future, A pure down home, honest to goodness country music. We're gonna feature a loosely documented look into the backwater origins, the honky tonk glitter, and the Cadillac glamor of the music that makes America home.
JHA: And, Oh, BB King…all the greats would come that were performing in LA because it was the first underground rock station in the country. You could say anything so people wanted to be on that radio show.
CAB: They were also literally underground – broadcasting out of the basement of the Pasadena Presbyterian Church.
JHA: People interested in theater, blues, rock and roll, country and everybody together. And I interviewed people and did all the talking on the show. And Terry mostly did the programming. But I would go out to UCLA and work in their archives. And I would just tell stories… weird stories about my family.
CAB: Jo Harvey became an early pioneer of women in radio. Terry says she was one of the first known female country music DJ’s. Each “Rawhide and Roses” show explored a different theme.. From animals…
JHA: [on radio] Did You ever stand in front of mirror and just growl at yourself? Stand there naked and just look at what an animal you really are. I, I really get a good feeling when I start feeling like an animal. . Sometimes you can put on all these disguises and try to forget it, but it comes right back down to the same thing…
CAB: To truckers…
JHA: [on radio] You know in country music there’s always been a real close comradeship between a country artist and a truck driver and I think it’s really great that country people dedicate so many songs to the truck driver. And that’s what our show’s gonna be about. It’s gonna be about that breed of man, and here’s a really great song called “White Line Fever” by Merle Haggard.
Merle Haggard: [introducing White Line Fever] Here’s a song that goes out, especially for all the truck drivers we might have with us. Do we have any here tonight, Muskogee? [singing] White Line Fever…
CAB: Terry’s programming would feature a lot of the songs he learned back during the Saturday Night Jamboree and from Wolfman Jack… It was the first radio station in LA to play Willie Nelson, and featured songs from newcomers like Merle Haggard.
TA: We just played what we liked and Jo Harvey, no matter what the show was about, she talked about her family.
JHA: Oh I did not! Not every time Terry…
TA: (laughing)
CAB: They would stay up through Saturday night preparing the two hour program. Jo Harvey’s improvised stories were poetic and moving. It was one important chapter of many that laid the groundwork for what happened after.
JHA: And then the sixties, they literally ended.
Radio Announcer: In a scene described by one investigator as reminiscent of a weird religious right. Five persons, including actress Sharon Tate, were found dead at the home of Ms. Tate and her husband, screen director Roman Polanski.
JHA: You felt it.. the sixties, the door slammed shut on the sixties the very day of the Manson murders.
CAB: Rawhide and Roses ran from 67-69. It was wildly popular. Jo Harvey received many invitations – like to be in a Dennis Hopper film, and offers to host other radio programs. But – she walked away to focus on her own projects.
So the years passed. Their next phase of radio wouldn’t happen for another 17 years. They raised their kids, Bukka and Bale. Jo Harvey worked at truck stops and restaurants. She was documenting the lives of waitresses – which became The Beautiful Waitress play and book. Terry taught painting at Berkeley and Fresno State. And in the mid-70’s, he started writing and recording songs – like “Amarillo Highway” and “Wolfman of Del Rio.” But then in the mid-80’s... Torso Hell happened.
TA: So I wrote this piece called Torso Hell. I had been working on a body of work called Youth in Asia, that dealt with the aftermath of the Vietnam War.
Radio Announcer: Welcome to New American Radio, A series exploring new territories for the art of radio.
TA: [on radio] At the hospital. It's so crazy and confused that when these guys come in, the doctors and nurses don't know what, from what they just start sewing. The main guy stays a torso, but they put his arms and legs back on the other guys. Two guys each get one of his arms, two guys each get one of his legs. I know this isn't realistic, they can't sew that stuff back on, but this is a movie. So the star is a torso, and each of his buddies have one of his limbs. None of them, of course, know anything about it. As they are all knocked out on morphine, they get sent off in different directions to different hospitals. So years later, back in the world, they all figure everybody but them is dead.
CAB: He wrote Torso Hell as a movie for radio – it first broadcast in 1986 on KPFA LA as a one off live radio performance. In the 80’s, nearly everyone owned a radio. But surprisingly – radio became more tightly controlled than ever…Huge corporations were spending hundreds of millions buying up thousands of stations. More money was being fed into realizing the use of radio as a product. Here’s Anna Friz again…
AF: There are certain kinds of social norms that were being upheld. And the fact that most stations in the United States are for profit and are driven by advertisement, that means that the prime goal of a radio station in its real function is to put advertisers and ears and receivers in connection with each other. And the programming is kind of the gravy to get people in. And in that sense, that's really similar to social media.
CAB: But that didn’t put a stop to more experimental programming.
Regine Beyer: Well, the few people really trying to do artistic work in public radio or in community radio were kind of networking at the time.
CAB: That’s Regine Beyer. A documentarian and radio producer from Germany. She along with Helen Thorington had a program called New American Radio on NPR.
RB: So in the mid eighties… and one dear friend who died unfortunately last year was Jacki Apple. She was a media artist and a critic. And she commissioned four half hour pieces by performing artists in 86, and one of them was Terry.
RB: And when we asked her, do you know any interesting people, she sent us the tape and we said, okay, we have to buy the broadcast rights. And after that, we commissioned him to do three pieces.
TA: That kind of set up the relationship with them. And it went to these NPR stations all over.
TA: [on radio]
This torso would have no next of kin, but an aunt lives in some little shit town out in New Mexico and runs a boarding house. She hears about his situation. The army keeps her updated on his progress, but she could care less since he's the youngest boy of this dead half sister. She hated care less till she gets a letter saying he gets full disability. So the idea takes hold that she could bring him to the boarding house and get the government money. This woman needs to be established as a total bitch deluxe.
CAB: Terry says the script for Torso Hell grew out of a triptych – a three panel visual piece he made. That was a part of Youth In Asia. A huge body of work which consisted of nearly 300 pieces: images, objects and collages, two books of poetry, three catalogs, unpublished plays, an album of songs, four large installations with accompanying soundtracks… and Torso Hell. And after spending time with many of these pieces.. I’m left with more questions than answers…
RB: He doesn’t give answers, he suggests things. And then you can make up your own mind. And I mean, even with Torso Hell, I think he would say, you can see it as a parable of war, or you can see it as a comment on Hollywood movies, or you could see it as a comment on Disney cartoon culture. And it's all of these things. It's at different levels... It's all of these things. So I think in his case, to try to make too many distinctions is not right, because his mind doesn't work that way. I mean for instance, the end of Torso Hell for me is brilliant because the torso… so those poor Vietnam vets who had been blown to pieces and had no arms and legs… by some weird miracle gets whole again. But is he really whole? Is just the body whole? Isn't the soul damaged? So in a sense, it's a happy end because poor torso has all the limbs back. But because he took pretty awful revenge on his aunt and the sadistic cousin who tortured him… isn't that a trauma? what about his trauma? So you're not left with a happy end, but with a question.
CAB: And there was a reaction there – to the questions posed by Torso Hell…
RB: the openness of programmers was not there anymore. What happened is when the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, when they realized what they had funded, they stopped funding it pretty quickly…Because they hated Torso Hell. That really got us into trouble with them. Poor Helen had to go to a meeting with the audience researchers and with the director of the CPB program fund. And they really told her it was obscene, it was disgusting, Terry's work, and it should never be put on air. But that was ugly. That kind of programming should not be done, period. And we never got money from them again. But if you look at it in a different way, like war is cruel and obscene and disgusting. And if you look at what happened in the aftermath of the Vietnam War, two traumatized veterans… You have a different take on it that goes beyond just it being a splatter movie for radio. But you have to be willing to do that. And I'm not sure that people are used to listening to the radio and putting that kind of mind work into it.
CAB: New American Radio began as an exploration into American voices in radio – this was an art form that was popular in Germany, but there was nothing like that here. It didn’t exist.
AF: You know, this time when New American radio was on NPR, what was interesting is to think about these quite controlled segments that normally are part of the NPR landscape of like, you know, the interviewer. They say, well, we've only got 90 seconds. But in that 90 seconds, I have the last question for you. Like you always here the clock kind of ticking in the background, you know? And someone who makes a radio art piece can kind of suspend that clock from ticking for a moment. Because often they're proposing a different form of listening. And sometimes that form of listening is to make you aware of the fact that you're listening to the radio, that you're engaged in that relationship to remind you that relationship is sort of front and center.
CAB: Despite the CPB funding challenges, New American Radio maintained their commission to Terry. His radio works grew progressively more personal and more biographical for his next piece.
TA: Anyway so Helen Thorington… she was happy with what happened with it. She called and asked me if I would do another show, another radio show and so I started working on Bleeder. I'd always wanted to do something with my friend. ’Cause he had such an extraordinary life and had such an extraordinary effect on the people that were around him. And that disease was so monstrously weird.
TA: [Bleeder] History exists temporarily and people take place. Events are carried away to different directions through the mind as images. Images dissolve across the passage of years into memory. Stories are told, songs are sung. Hearts become rooms set aside and hallucination begins.
JHA: [Bleeder] He's really running through my heart tonight. I guess he always had this strong religious bent cuz every time we'd all get together and start drinking, you know, get really drunk, we'd tell stories. And he was a great storyteller, great hilarious stories and dirty jokes, really filthy. We'd all be laughing our asses off, just rolling around howling on the floor. And then all of a sudden he'd just stop, freeze. Not even blink, you know, just get up and go sit down at the piano and stare at the keys. And then he'd start playing and singing real soft, some wonderful, beautiful, sad gospel song like the Devil had suddenly just hopped right out of his mouth. And sweet Angel had stepped in. Spooky, his favorite song was a Rock of ages, you know, cleft for me. Let me hide myself in thee. God before he'd be finished, we'd all be crying. It was just amazing, you know, strange and weird. It wasn't that he was religious in all, you know, like a church going sense, though he did keep up that end of his appearances. But he really honest to God, just seemed to have this special feeling in his heart for Jesus. I think it was all that blood.
TA: You know, I've always gravitated to those things that were just such perplexing mysteries to me… like in Bleeder. That person was such an incredible kind of unique human being and one of the first eccentric people that I met, ya know? Other than my own parents.
CAB: Bleeder is built around a hemophiliac – hemophilia is a condition in which one bleeds excessively. This guy was a close friend of Terry’s and he said the idea grew out of the album Lubbock (on everything). The one that “Amarillo Highway” and “Wolfman of Del Rio” are on.
TA: It was an important thing that happened to me when I went back to Lubbock to record Lubbock (on everything) because I had expressed real hostility toward that place the whole time I was in California up until that point. And we sat down and listened to the songs after we'd recorded them. And it was the first time it dawned on me that I didn't hate the place… that I was making all of these pieces, that I actually loved the place and the people and whatever. That was coming to terms with a lot of things when I left and just real negative thoughts and feelings I had about Texas and I had about, especially Lubbock.
CAB: Bleeder, like Torso Hell, started its life elsewhere – as a theater piece, performed by Jo Harvey. It was Terry’s approach to biography - of a person, and subsequently, of a disease, that Jo Harvey connected with. She took the text, and adapted it for the radio.
JHA: [Bleeder] His image was that of a gambler in a charlatan. They called him second rate and evil. Rumors had it vampire with pills. Several stories actually exhausted themselves into legend. He quaffed himself in the rigid but fashionable gospel plow. He spooked the proper remark, wore stormy tweeds and smoked gracefully. He was born to oil and married into cattle and lived intact. Every item in his home was of a combative influence. Whatever mythologies that had been gathered were carefully placed behind glass in the den. Lyndon Johnson wrote him letters. He was born to face the music.
TA: I wrote it like a script, like a film script.
TA: Jo Harvey's been a great asset. She's such a…verbal schizophrenic.
TA: She can shift personas in the middle of a sentence. And so that has been a great tool. But another thing that's like talking about Bleeder, she knew that guy too.
JHA: [Bleeder] Pills, he called them as little red children. “The little red child flies,” he'd say. His first memory was a shadow. It leaned on him. He was asleep in his crib when a brilliant razor thin vertical shaft of light slid open the room. He watched it, terrified, move at him. Slowly he screamed and screamed and screamed, but it touched him anyway, on the stomach. And he poured out 33 times from this, this thing into his life. The next morning he suffered his first serious hemorrhage. Tiny wings flew out of his mouth, and over in the corner his mother swoons and beats at her breasts like an ape…croonin’ “Oh, baby,”
RB: I don't think you can really talk about at least Terry's radio work without appreciating what Jo Harvey does. I mean, in Bleeder, she does something extraordinary. She's going from slight whispering, bursting into song… the nuances and cadences of her voice, the intonation, the warmth…She is the perfect embodiment of his text. She's a performing artist, she's performing it. She's not reading it. It's beautiful.
TA: Ya know, there's a thing in Bleeder… there's this kind of rumbling sound… and it's hallucination and then it's memory, hallucination, people, image… but that… floats through the same structures, bleeds through each of these structures. And that's an aspect of Bleeder that I really like. The way the whole idea of the piece is the same as the structure of the piece, you know?
RB: His ideas are always more than what the title says.. Bleeder. It's of course about a person who bleeds, but it's also about America bleeding perhaps at the time, Vietnam War, for instance.
CAB: I think it’s also about…in part.. about a contrast. And what I mean by that is this contrast between what traditional radio is or is supposed to be… and what he is sending out into that controlled landscape.
AF: And then further to that, I think there is something important about a social ecology in the case of Terry's work, maybe something quite personal, a very personal version of existing in the world of being in a particular place in time that you scatter out into the possibility of other people's listening literally broadcasting like seeds, like scattering seeds. Not every seed is going to land somewhere where it then turns into a plant, but there's this possibility that someone hears and is like, oh, I really relate to that. Or, oh, that was really interesting. Or, oh, I'm super enraged. Well, why did I have to listen to that? There's a reaction. There's something that happens there.
CAB: Terry does have a certain setting in mind when he thinks of his radio pieces.
TA: Well, I always associate listening to these stories at night. A lot of times I've thought of some truck driver out in the middle of the night driving and all of a sudden Bleeder comes on.. what that's doing. And that's real interesting to me.
CAB: We all share stories. Always have, always will. But what really got me… and kind of the reason I initially set out to tell this story, is this last piece he made for New American Radio.
TA: [Dugout] An empty room, dead center. She's sitting in the only chair. Roses lay in her lap and make a pile like blood around her feet. Four windows, one in each wall are open. Wind blows every curtain straight out, quite as sheets of ice, rigid and parallel with the floor. Only her fingers move easily and in a rhythm like she is playing the piano. Her mouth is painted. She smiles. Red. And you can almost breathe the goddamned St. Louis Blues. Dugout.
JHA: The most personal is Dugout for Terry, which I performed. It was about his family and everything that sort of haunted him, all the problems that he went through, and a lot of things he didn't know because his parents were older and they always sat around and told stories.
CAB: Dugout was also unique because it was the only piece Terry made that didn’t start as something else. He made this for radio first, and then it evolved into a series of art installations almost a decade later.
JHA: [Dugout] Outside a photographer covers up his head and looks out the camera. Up close and center to the left. The shadow of a figure running is blurred black against the wooden slaps outside of livery in the middle and slightly to the bottom. A crowd of people wave at a great black train covered with flags. Pulling away in the distance far to the right, near the top, the dark silhouette of a man in a flatbed wagon with what appears to be a piano tied to the back. Even at this distance command seems excited, frantic, even as he whips a horse whose head is lost, disappeared off into the edge. Inside the photograph, sepia toned and centered with a white border on black paper held with tiny black corners glued down with spit. At the bottom someone's written in small, but elegant script. “Summer of 1918, our boys go to war.” And under that, in the same slanted hand, “while they take their leave, we make the windows slick from crawling out at night. If there's sound, it's a piano.”
JHA: You know, it weighed on him heavily for a long time. When he first said he was going to do Dugout, it scared me to death because I thought, “oh my God, this is going to put him into a deep depression and he's going to relive all of these things that had been so hard for him.”
TA [Dugout]: He squat down and looked at it, his dog was hung up in the fence. The face was gone except for one eye and part of the head. The part with that spot, like a musical note, the dog had got tangled up in the wire and cut off all the blood to three of its legs. They'd gone green and big as gourds by the time he'd found it. He loved the dog, but he shot it straight away. He didn't even pet it. Years later…
CAB: It was performed by Terry as his dad, Jo Harvey as Terry’s mother, and Jo Harvey’s mother Katie Koontz even makes appearances as a narrator. There is also another image that shows up again…
RB: Certainly the blood, well, actually that is another thing. The metaphor of blood is interesting because it works on so many different levels, like the opening image of Dugout. What you have is an empty room, an old woman sitting in a chair, white curtains blowing like sheets of ice stretched out, and she has roses in her lap and rose peddles on the floor like blood, and she has red lipstick. So red lipstick is something of beauty and of joy, and blood is not really something wonderful. So again, you have those different impressions. You cannot pigeonhole him, not even as a radio artist. He is a multiple media artist. Because it is all like history and past in his pieces. They bleed into each other, they melt, they blend. It’s one thing.
CAB: I was struck by this… kind of austere impression of his family and the landscape of where he was raised. I was curious about why he would go about creating this….
TA: I always had in the back of my head doing something with those stories of my folks. And they always changed. So they were all very true, even though everybody, ultimately it was made up, but it was like any fiction that gets closer to the truth and the reality kind of… of what happened.
JHA: But it's interesting how Terry took part of his family stories that he didn't know the answer to, and rather than go into some dark place, because of some of his experiences, he chose to go the other direction, and it was… it worked a miracle for him.
AF: There's also something about stewardship too, about like being part of keeping something alive or referring to things that feel valuable. Are there traditions? Are there ancestors? Are there kind of cultural touchpoints that one values that one wants to honor?
JHA: And everything he realized, he didn't really know the true stories – because he was young and what had happened… he put the sweetest spin on everything in Dugout. And it absolutely… working on that piece freed him. He really let go of a lot of the ideas he had about what had happened, and he made up a different story. And it was good because he didn't really know the truth anyway. He was young. And so he made it up in a sweet way. And it…I think that's what’s so amazing about sometimes working and writing on something and being able to work through something... That creative thing makes it better.
TA: And also I had it in the back of my head that the only connection my kids will have with my family is going to be this piece, ya know?
JHA : An then, our.. Bukka and Bale, they were crying. They loved it so much, and they were, but they were, it just emotionally hit 'em. And I think what was happening to them is they were learning about Terry's family, their grandparents, and it was just very emotional because it was just like family running through.
TA: I don't think you plan that…
JHA: It was freedom…
TA: Yeah. And I think people will always need stories. People like to hear people tell stories, ya know? It's like going back to the cave almost, you know?
CAB: And finally, I asked Terry.. why radio? What makes these specifically radio pieces?
TA: Ya know… (laughs) That starts putting kind of restrictions on things that I have… I have no interest in. It's like, who gives a shit if it's a radio show or not? It's what it is.
TA: They're just, they're pieces. They're, you know, works. And… Just like an album is a work or a drawing is a work or a theater piece is a work…
Christian: Why do you think people want to categorize, why do you think people want to gravitate towards that…
TA: Because it makes it easy to not think. If you can come up with a label or category for it, you don't have to think about it.
TA: [Dugout] Your life just turns into a bucket full of stories, with a little bitty hole in the bottom.
JHA: [Dugout] Or a bucket full of holes, with a little bitty story in the bottom. She told me years later… giggling…He is cussing the Yankees. It's the final game of the World Series. He is cussing the television. Baseball should never have been put on television. He cusses the players. All they care about is the money. The pictures take forever to throw the ball. She can hear him from the kitchen. His brother is with him. He says he has come to say goodbye, but she doesn't like his eyes or the way they look at her. She pours a small whiskey. The Yankees win. The television is off, the game is over. He is 73 years old. He talks two hours with his brother. The brother will never mention what was said. She comes in and takes his hand. It's time. Her fingers move lightly over his big knuckles like she is playing the piano. He feels himself suddenly come loose and fly out in a great high and familiar arc. And in some infinite and secret place, she flies away with him.
SAL: Visit OxfordAmerican.org/PointsSouth to see Terry’s visual pieces from his radio works, as well as photography from Jo Harvey’s theater performance of Bleeder. To hear the radio pieces from this segment, visit Paradise of Bachelors Records. This episode was produced by me and Christian Adam Brown. Our Points South intern is Adam Forrester. This episode is dedicated to the memory of Helen Thorington, who started New American Radio. Our deepest thanks to Terry and Jo Harvey, Brendan Greaves of Paradise of Bachelors Records, and Dr. Curtis Peoples at Texas Tech’s Southwest Collection – home to Terry and Jo Harvey’s archives. Special thanks to Dr. Anna Friz and Regine Beyer, as well as Rob Rosenthal of Transom for his guidance. Post-production and score thanks to Curtis Fye and Trey Pollard of Spacebomb. This episode is supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities.