When Terry Allen sings about Jesus, as he is wont to do, he is not one to mince words or tiptoe. He worries little about such petty distinctions as sacred vs. sacrilege or piety vs. profanity, unless of course such conventions can be twisted around into a complex knot of wicked wordplay. When the "Big Boy" comes into an Allen song, literally anything can happen: He can save the world, raise hell, share your beer or even carjack you with a mischievous twinkle in his flea-market painting baby blues. It's a stark frankness that simultaneously suggests a detached but curiously amused agnostic, the Lord's old college roommate or maybe the devil himself.

Ask Allen to lay his religious convictions on the Mexican restaurant table before him, however, and he adjusts his shades, cocks his head slightly to the side and smiles darkly. "I always say that what I believe in is between me and the midnight hour."

It makes perfect sense, of course, that Allen should prove elusive on so direct a point; any more clarity would fly directly in the face of his enigmatic esthetic. His catalog, reaching back to 1975's Juarez, has been uniformly eccentric and uncompromising, savage and beautiful, literate and guttural. His latest outing, Salivation, is a bitterly ironic, piano and steel guitar-driven soundtrack to the apocalypse, rife with bloodshed ("Ain't No Top 40 Song"), heavenly wrath ("The Show," "Southern Comfort"), and -- smack dab in the middle -- a loving, uplifting tribute to his late father ("Red Leg Boy"). Throw in a nine-minute suite about a tragically heroic pedal steel player ("Billy the Boy"), and you've got an album that could only be held together so seamlessly -- and make sense -- on Allen's own terms.

"I wanted it to be fairly relentless," says Allen over a plate of tacos in Austin. "'Salivation' obviously comes from 'salvation,' and with the I, me, or you put in it, it becomes a little frothier a word. It seemed to be a nice kind of parallel for that kind of rabid nature that I was interested in dealing with in some of these songs." And despite the many songs tackling Jesus and the end of the world, he points to the atypically positive "Red Leg Boy" as the album's centerpiece. "I think that idea of having a sense of who you are, and following that to whatever conclusion it is, is kind of the salvation in the salivation."

Though he was born in Kansas and now resides in Santa Fe, N.M., Allen was raised in West Texas and is regarded as a central figure in the "Lubbock Mafia," a close-knit family of idiosyncratic musicians that includes Jimmie Dale Gilmore, Joe Ely and Butch Hancock. When the "atomic bomb of rock & roll" hit sleepy Lubbock in the mid-Fifties, Allen had a rare in: his father, a retired baseball player who was near sixty at the time of Allen's birth, turned an old gospel church into a dance hall and brought in touring rock acts of the day like Chuck Berry and Elvis Presley.

"It was a time of record burnings, but ironically, my dad didn't get much heat for bringing in these bands, because he was a sports hero, he was a local boy, and people just somehow let that slide by," Allen laughs. "It was the devil that was causing this, not my dad."

Although music would remain an important facet of his life, it has never been Allen's sole pursuit. An accomplished visual artist, Allen's latest creation is a 3,600 square foot installation in the Houston airport, scheduled for completion this May. "It's right in the center of a terminal under a big dome," explains Allen. "The floor's like a skewed map of the world, and Houston's the center of the world with all of the continents aimed at it. And rising right out of the center of Houston is this thirty-foot oak tree that I had cast in bronze, and over each continent there's a speaker that's going to play an instrument indigenous to that part of the world." The music for the project, titled "Countree," was written and recorded by Allen with friends Joe Ely and David Byrne.

Next up for Allen? Customized cattle brands. "I've got one that just has the word 'irony,'" he beams. "And I've got another one that's, 'All artists trying to be God will burn in hell.' It's kind of a spiral brand. And I've been thinking of doing one that's K2Y Jelly, or something like that. Eventually, I want to have a whole bank of them, and do a show with them. Kind of like, 'Have brand, will travel.' For a flat fee I'll come and brand your wall or I'll brand your car or I'll brand your carpet. I did my first brand out at Ely's house - we branded half his house with irony. (Laughs) Highly appropriate. We nearly burned down his studio door, because the paint caught on fire -- but it looked great after we put it out."

RICHARD SKANSE
(March 23, 1999)