Terry Allen

Terry Allen is playing in Austin tonight, at the Cactus Cafe, a little place on campus that sells beer. It's going to be a great show. I was supposed to go with a friend who owns a sticky note artwork that Allen did based on his song "The Beautiful Waitress." The end includes a recitation that goes like this:

A waitress asked me what I did
I told her I tried (to make art).
She asked me if I made any money.
I said no...I have to "teach" to do that.
She asked me what I taught and where.
I told her.
She told me that she liked art, but that she
couldn't draw a straight line.
I told her if she could reach for something
and pick it up, she could draw a line that
was straight enough.
She said she wasn't interested in that kind
of drawing... but had always liked horses.
I said I did too, but they were hard to draw.
She said yes that was very true... said she
could do the body okay, but never got the
head, tail, or legs.
I told her she was drawing sausages... not horses.
She said no... they were horses.

I've tried to recreate the sticky note below, but the original is a lot better. Sorry.















Anyway, I can't go to the show because I don't have enough money to pay for the gas back to Buffalo and I need to start saving. I'm too down about it to write more, but there's an excellent entry at Pole Hill Sanitarium if you want to know more. They also have a link to a torrent for his 1979 masterpiece Lubbock (On Everything), but if like me you don't know your ass from a peer-to-peer protocol, you can just download it here instead.

Lubbock (On Everything)

1. "Amarillo Highway (for Dave Hickey)"
2. "Highplains Jamboree"
3. "The Great Joe Bob (A Regional Tragedy)"
4. "The Wolfman Of Del Rio"
5. "Lubbock Woman"
6. "The Girl Who Danced Oklahoma"
7. "Truckload Of Art"
8. "The Collector (and the Art Mob)"
9. "Oui (a French Song)"
10. "Rendezvous USA"
11. "Cocktails for Three"
12. "The Beautiful Waitress"
13. "Blue Asian Reds (for Roadrunner)"
14. "New Delhi Freight Train"
15. "FFA"
16. "Flatland Farmer"
17. "My Amigo"
18. "The Pink And Black Song"
19. "The Thirty Years Waltz (for Jo Harvey)"
20. "I Just Left Myself"