Paradise of Bachelors P.O. Box 1402, Carrboro, NC 27510 www.paradiseofbachelors.com / [email protected] US/CA publicity: Jonathan Williger, [email protected] UK publicity: Lucy Hurst, [email protected] Everywhere else: [email protected] Legendary Texan artist Terry Allen occupies a unique position straddling the frontiers of country music and visual art; he has worked with everyone from Guy Clark to David Byrne to Lucinda Williams, and his artwork resides in museums worldwide. Widely celebrated as a masterpiece—arguably the greatest concept album of all time—his spare, haunting 1975 debut LP Juarez is a violent, fractured tale of the chthonic American Southwest and borderlands. Produced in collaboration with the artist and meticulously remastered from the original analog tapes, this is the definitive edition of the art-country classic: the first reissue on vinyl; the first to feature the originally intended artwork (including the art prints that accompanied the first edition); and the first to contextualize the album within Allen’s fifty-year art practice. “Things separate from their stories have no meaning. They are only shapes. Of a certain size and color. A certain weight. When their meaning has become lost to us they no longer have even a name. The story on the other hand can never be lost from its place in the world for it is that place. And that is what was to be found here. The corrido. The tale. And like all corridos it ultimately told one story only, for there is only one to tell.” — Cormac McCarthy, The Crossing Juarez is not just an album, at least not in any ordinary sense of the word. Songwriter and visual artist Terry Allen describes it instead as a “haunting.” For nearly five decades, Juarez has served as the elusive, enigmatic axis mundi of his artistic and musical practices. Never discrete or static, the Juarez mythos continually accretes a growing constellation of new meanings, mutations, and manifestations, defying linearity and finality, appearing as drawings, constructions, songs, prints, installations, texts, a screenplay, a musical theater piece (co-written with David Byrne), a one-woman stage play, and an NPR radio play (both starring his wife, the actor and writer Jo Harvey Allen). Herein Juarez inhabits the ur-corrido sonic artifact, a cycle of fifteen songs and recited poems—austere, atmospheric, cinematic—as recorded over the course of a few mornings at San Francisco’s TERRY ALLEN venerable Wally Heider Studio in 1974. Its stately, minimal arrangements—Allen on piano and vocals, with guitarists Peter Kaukonen (Link Wray, Jefferson Airplane, Black Kangaroo) and Greg Douglas (Van JUAREZ Morrison, Peter Rowan, Steve Miller Band)—belie its sinister, mongrel strangeness, its anxious hilarity, its casual alloy of spirituality and profanity, its uncanny enormity as story. Originally released in 1975 by print + label: Paradise of Bachelors workshop Landfall Press in an edition of fifty, with a set of nine lithographs (reproduced in full for the first time + catalog number: PoB-26 in the reissue’s extensive book), the record encompasses both conceptual corrido and cosmic cartography, song and séance, at once hermetic and wide-open. In these fifty-two minutes, geographies, climates, and spectral + formats: LP/CD/digital (vinyl is not returnable) bodies collide and elide, dragged and fate-flung across the parched Southwest, over mesas and arroyos and + release date: May 20, 2016 through the abraded lens of colonial history, throwing dust, shedding blood, and further blurring the already + UPC-LP / UPC-CD: 616892339441 / 616892339540 arbitrary, and forever contested, boundaries of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. As described in one of the periodic narrative “dialogue” interludes spoken by Allen, Juarez + genre(s): Country/alternative/art-rock recounts a deceptively “simple story”: a bleak journey, told in nonlinear terms, from Southern California through + territory restrictions: N/A Colorado and into the Texas-Mexico borderlands. Like many cross-country road trips, it’s as harrowing as it is humorous, often within the margins of a single song or even an isolated line. The action revolves around two + LP / CD box lots: 12 / 30 couples and their fateful—or arbitrary—murderous meeting in Cortez, Colorado. Sailor, on leave from the Navy, meets Spanish Alice, a prostitute, in a Tijuana bar; they get married and honeymoon in a mountain trailer park A1. The Juarez Device (aka Texican Badman) 1:23 Southern California (Jabo I, II, III) 4:30 in Cortez. Meanwhile, on a crime spree detour, pachuco antihero Jabo and the witchy “rock-writer” Chic Blundie A2. 2:08 B2. 5:03 Dialogue: The Characters (a simple story) What of Alicia drive North from L.A. to Cortez on their way South to Jabo’s hometown of Ciudad Juarez (until recently the A3. Cortez Sail 6:10 B3. Honeymoon in Cortez 2:36 homicide capital of the world). Only one couple emerges from the bloody trailer, escaping across the New A4. Border Palace 1:48 B4. Four Corners 4:22 Mexican desert to Juarez, where they part, assuming (or absorbing?) new identities. A5. Dogwood 4:31 B5. Dialogue: The Run South 1:26 A6. Writing on Rocks Across the U.S.A. 2:50 B6. Parts: Jabo/Street Walkin Woman 1:41 Terry Allen is no stranger to the ramifications of border-crossing—it’s something he’s been doing A7. The Radio … and Real Life 4:45 B7. Cantina Carlotta 3:15 both literally and figuratively, geographically and professionally, for his entire adult life. A native West Texan who B1. There Oughta Be a Law Against Sunny B8. La Despedida (The Parting) 5:03 now lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico—he hails from Lubbock, also home to Buddy Holly, Waylon Jennings, and the Flatlanders—Allen occupies a unique position straddling the disparate worlds of country music and visual art. + The definitive, deluxe edition of a classic: produced in collaboration with the artist; remastered from the We’re not sure that you could say the same about anyone else, ever, and certainly not with the same level of original master tapes; first reissue on vinyl; first to feature the original artwork (including the accompany- aplomb, acclaim, and success—not to mention the same biting, self-effacing sense of humor about it all. ing lithographs); and first to contextualize the album within Allen’s 50-year art practice. Allen’s artwork resides in the collections of the Met, MoMA, the Hirshhorn, and Los Angeles’ + Available on virgin vinyl as an LP, with expanded tip-on gatefold jacket, printed inner sleeve, download MoCA and LACMA, among many other institutions, and has been exhibited internationally at Documenta and code, and 24 pp. book with related artwork, lyrics, and essays by Dave Hickey, Dave Alvin, and PoB the , , , and . You can encounter his public commissions across the + CD edition features replica gatefold jacket, inner sleeve, and 48pp. book São Paolo Paris Sydney Whitney Biennales + For more information: http://www.paradiseofbachelors.com/pob-26 U.S. He is the recipient of Guggenheim and NEA Fellowships. In the realm of music, in addition to several + PoB artist page: http://www.paradiseofbachelors.com/terry-allen projects with the aforementioned Byrne, Allen has likewise collaborated closely with Guy Clark, Lloyd Maines (pedal steel master, producer, and father of the Dixie Chicks’ Natalie), and the Flatlanders (Butch Hancock, + Allen’s songs extract strangeness from the known world & use it as a means of acquiring greater knowledge. – The New Yorker Joe Ely, and Jimmie Dale Gilmore). His songs have been covered, recorded, and championed by the likes of + A master lyricist ... he favors a style you might call Old West Psychedelic. – New York Times Dave Alvin, Laurie Anderson, Bobby Bare, Ryan Bingham, Don Everly, Jason Isbell, Robert Earl Keen, + A masterpiece. It stands equal with Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks and Newman’s Good Old Boys. – Dave Alvin Little Feat, Ricky Nelson, Peter Rowan, Doug Sahm, Sturgill Simpson, and Lucinda Williams. + Uniformly eccentric and uncompromising, savage and beautiful, literate and guttural. – Rolling Stone Forty years later, Juarez is widely regarded as Allen’s first masterpiece, timelessly relevant, + The single greatest concept album of all time. – PopMatters | It will stay with you like a tattoo. – Richard Buckner resonating with works of film and literature as much as other music, recalling the existential violence ofTerrence + One of the more fascinating country albums, like Willie Nelson’s Red Headed Stranger as reimagined by Tarantino. – AllMusic Malick’s Badlands (1973) and informing successors like David Lynch’s Wild at Heart (1990), Cormac + Nobody else does country music like Terry Allen ... There's not a wasted word or extraneous musical lick. – L.A. Times McCarthy’s Border Trilogy (1992-98), and Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 (2004). + Throw Lynch's Wild at Heart in a blender with Burroughs's Naked Lunch, & you're getting warm. – Houston Press + A vortex of sex & violence. – David Byrne | I love Terry. He’s a funny son of a bitch. – Guy Clark Paradise of Bachelors will reissue Terry Allen’s critically acclaimed 1979 double album Lubbock + People tell me it’s country music, and I ask, “Which country?” – Terry Allen (on everything), the follow-up to Juarez, later in 2016. UPC-LP UPC-CD 6 16892 33944 1 6 16892 33954 0.