You’ve probably never heard of the Lubbock Mafia. Even at the peak of the Texas Outlaw Country renaissance, while artists like Waylon, Willie, and Johnny were parlaying their rough-hewn response to slick Nashville country into platinum records and household-name status, Lubbock artists like Jimmie Dale Gilmore, Butch Hancock, Joe Ely and the Flatlanders remained obscure footnotes to that chapter in country music history. Which makes Terry Allen a foonote on a footnote. This is a damn shame.

Throughout the 70’s and early 80’s Allen released a series of albums that contain some of the finest examples of country-that-isn’t-country ever created. They featured hilarious, frequently heartbreaking snapshots of a played-out American landscape populated with a sprawling cast of sad-sack waitresses, sailors, train robbers, artists, farmers and drug addicts. Allen and his crack Panhandle Mystery Band performed his songs with an unvarnished, straightforward delivery and DIY aesthetic ten years before the first desperate-for-a-catchphrase music critic ever penned the term “cowpunk” and twenty years before “alt country.” At a time when Nashville was pumping out commercial product hyping the CB-radio craze and artists like Olivia Newton John were releasing country albums (and the members of Uncle Tupelo were still in grade school), Allen was writing songs like Gimme a Ride to Heaven, in which the narrator pulls over to pick up a hitchhiker who turns out to be Jesus. The rest of the song has the pair driving down the highway discussing theology while passing bottles of beer back and forth until Jesus abruptly pulls a gun from his robes and leaves our narrator stranded by the side of the road, ending with the lines:

Well I pulled off scared but I heard him say
As he left me beneath the stars
“Well the Lord moves in mysterious ways and tonight, my son
He’s gonna use your car.”

That song appears on the Sugarhill re-release of Smoking the Dummy and Bloodlines (two albums packaged as one CD). Allen’s first four albums, spanning the period from 1975 to 1983, are all excellent, starting with the border-town concept album Juarez and continuing on through 1983’s Bloodlines, but if you’re looking for a good place to start I’d recommend 1979’s double album Lubbock on Everything. It’s as good an example of lyrical story-telling and character study as you’ll find, and even at his most cutting his writing displays a genuine affection for his subjects that belies his sometimes harsh treatment. He also pokes a lot of fun at himself and his own improbable place in the art world (Allen is a highly-regarded sculptor and has largely made his living as an artist and art teacher.)

Allen’s emphatic piano playing could be described as anywhere from “rudimentary” to “I could play that!” but it gets the job done, and his backing band is above reproach. Anybody who appreciates wry lyrics that are smart and heartfelt, sad and funny, fictional and true all at the same time should do themselves a favor and check out Terry Allen.