Bread Before Dawn
Inside the early-morning world of Los Angeles bakers
UO Journal, Issue 1
Brad Barry
The early morning — say between 3:00 and 5:00am — is a temporal no-man’s land; it’s the time when even the most devout night owls have surrendered to sleep and the early risers haven’t yet had their first cup of coffee. But, at this time, no matter where you are in the world, there is a group of dedicated craftsmen awake and baking.
The time-consuming process of proofing and baking the bread and pastries we consume throughout the day dictates an arduous schedule for bakers. Many bakeries begin their production around midnight and pull their final loaves from the oven as the sun rises.
Baking at this dark, quiet time is a solitary task done in windowless back rooms as the world sleeps. Despite this isolation, bakers really aren’t alone. In every city around the world, there are others in the same boat. Bakeries across the globe serve as pockets of light, heat, and bustling activity in the darkest hours of the morning. These bakers are united by the odd hours, the fresh, yeasty smells of proofing bread, and the blast of a 500 degree oven.
In a city like Los Angeles, between the hours of two and five in the morning, you’ll find people preparing and baking everything from donuts and tortillas to baguettes and rye. Whether it’s in a large warehouse or at a kitchen counter, dedication to one of the world’s oldest crafts connects people from all walks of life.
La Mascota — 2:15am
Though the streets are dark, standing outside of La Mascota in East LA you can see the efficient movements of Edward Salcedo in a shaft of yellow light escaping from the darkened storefront. His hands move quickly and methodically through mounds and mounds of risen dough, as he hand rolls over two thousand bolillos between the hours of 10:00pm and 4:00am.
It’s hard to imagine being so quick and precise this early in the morning, but the thick calluses of his hands give away the secret: he’s been working this shift and flipping these same Mexican rolls for over 50 years.
Surrounded by stacks of colorful pan dulces and bubbling, oversized pots of tamales, Salcedo uses the same techniques that his father Ygnacio began passing down when he opened the bakery in 1952. The techniques have remained in the family ever since; the crew tonight, as it is every night, is made up of relatives and a few young bakers that come to learn the La Mascota methods.
The youngest baker here tonight, Homero Blancas, has learned the ropes quickly, but adjusting to the baker’s schedule has been more difficult. “I’m in school now, so there are times when I work through the night, get home at 6:30 in the morning, shower, and go right to school. I’m operating on about an hour and a half of sleep right now.”
As their biological clocks beg for sleep, the four men here tonight continue to recreate the recipes passed down from generation to generation. And it’s not hard to imagine this process — as well as the jokes and conversations that have become part of it — continuing uninterrupted for generations to come.
Ms. Donuts — 3:30am
Ms. Donut is a 24-hour glowing beacon on a dark stretch of street in Echo Park. Inside, Bonnara does what he does every night from 11:00 to 5:00am: he serves fresh donuts, though at this time of the morning, you’ll have to order through the side window. The selection is classic corner donut shop fare: brightly colored sprinkles, bear claws, and donut holes fill the florescent-lit counter case.
Amazingly, after six years of nights spent frying donuts as most of the city sleeps, Bonnara still has an infectious smile on his face. The occasional regular drops by the window to exchange one or two words and pick up a cup of coffee and a donut, but most of his time is spent tidying up and watching a small television mounted to the wall. Tonight, it’s a Japanese television program on World War II that helps pass the time and fight away the eerie silence.
After so many years of early morning work, Bonnara has found a schedule that works for him. “I get home and sleep for a few hours, go to the gym and go about my day, and then sleep again from around 4:00pm until I get up for work at 10:30 at night.”
According to Bonnara, this is the kind of fractured sleep that bakers have to learn to live with. “When I started, it was hard. But after six years, every day just becomes the same.”
Bread Lounge — 4:45am
Nestled in the Arts District of downtown LA, Bread Lounge is a cafe space connected to a large commercial bakery. Here, bakers work through the night to create the breads and pastries that will be shipped all over the city to groceries, hotels, and local restaurants like Republique and Sqirl.
For the past five years, owner Ran Zimon has produced some of the highest quality loaves in Los Angeles. The care put into each loaf is evident, as baker Ziv Wagner talks with pride about his ingredients. He points out the house-made zaatar that tops the Kalamata olive loaf, the fresh apples for the kouign-amann, the ricotta for their take on the cheese danish. Though loaves of bread quickly fill tray after tray as they are shuttled from the oven, each process has been going on much longer. Lifting a sunflower-poppy-seed loaf, Wagner casually explains, “This is our quickest loaf — it only takes 12 hours.”
He understands the time it takes to create great baked goods. Bringing his baking talent from Israel to Houston and now to Los Angeles, Wagner knows the sounds, feelings, and rhythms of a night in a bakery well. But, he asserts, there are never two nights exactly alike. “Wherever you are in the world, there are always changes and fluctuations in temperature and climate and ingredients. The dough is an active, living creature that can act different from day to day. To be a good baker, you have to adjust and give it special attention every single morning.”
Mark Stambler — 6:45am
Not every baker awake in the early morning hours is pulling dozens of loaves out of commercial ovens. During this pre-dawn time, Mark Stambler has to walk through his Los Feliz home quietly so as not to wake his wife or son as they sleep. He’s up every two hours or so throughout the night to tend to the fire inside his handmade brick oven in the backyard.
Stambler has baked bread at home for years, and in 2009 began selling his homemade loaves at local stores. That lasted until 2011, when the Health Department shut down his home-kitchen-based operation. “I knew that wasn’t right,” recalls Stambler, standing in the same kitchen. “So, I spent 18 months learning to write legislation and how to get it passed, and I wrote a bill.” That bill went on to become California’s cottage food law in 2013, making it legal to sell home-baked bread throughout the state.
The bread created here is artisanal in the truest sense. Stambler mills his own organic wheat and rye at the kitchen table, proofs each towel-wrapped loaf in the refrigerator, and bakes in his vintage-style two-door oven or outside in his wood-fired brick construction.
Stacked in wicker baskets on his kitchen table, his loaves have an incredible tanginess and gorgeous, crackling crust. Through years of fine-tuning his process, he has created some of the best bread in the United States. And now, with his Health Department permit proudly posted on his kitchen cabinet, he’s paved the way for bakers all over the state to wake up before dawn, coat their hands in flour, and fire up the oven.
Studio Visit: Jordan Sullivan
Urban Outfitters Blog
Brad Barry
Jordan Sullivan’s studio—located above a bridal store and quickie wedding chapel in downtown Los Angeles—is filled with the kinds of boxes and bins that are normally found in dusty attics. Yellowed paperbacks, old army tents, and faded photographs spill out to cover every available surface.
Sullivan incorporates these artifacts of another time into his own works of photography, painting, and collage. Digital photos are printed onto pages torn from old books. Weather-worn fabrics create texture beneath the paint on his canvasses. Found handwritten letters create the backdrop for his sculptural assemblages. The result is work that is shot through with nostalgia and history.
But unlike a “vintage” Instagram filter, this nod to the past isn’t just for show. While the detailed collages and stunning prints of big, offshore waves in Mexico propped against the walls are striking in their own right, it’s when Sullivan reveals the narratives behind his work that they start to become more than the sum of their parts.
The 15 books the 32-year-old artist has published are filled with personal stories, poetry, and fragments of dialogue, and his gallery shows are based around a central narrative. By finding or creating unified stories for each of his collections, he has been able to make fresh, new art with the depth and ethos of something much older.
During a recent studio visit, we got the chance to talk to Sullivan about the narratives behind his work, the recently released An Island in the Moon, and his preparations for an upcoming exhibition.
It's Hard to Pin Down the Music of Alexis Georgopolous
Synonym Journal, Issue 4
Brad Barry
It’s hard to pin down the music of Alexis Georgopolous. His albums under the moniker ARP have bounced from dense synthesizer explorations to carefree singer-songwriter psychedelia. His pieces for Jonah Bokaer’s modern dance pieces are composed of microtonal snippets of guitar feedback while his score for a recent collaboration with sculptor Tauba Auerbach featured only cello and french horn. His sounds have been released as ringtones and featured in a Chanel runway show. Speaking with Georgopolous, he explained why his work takes on so many different forms and flavors.
Following your work over the years, you’ve done quite a few site-specific or situation-specific music pieces. What draws you to those types of projects?
It's quite simple –– I'm always looking for excuses to try something I've never done. The art installation or the invitation to collaborate on a specific project provides the perfect impetus to address different subjects or ideas with different instrumentation.
In the “pop" world, people get confused by an artist pursuing different directions. If you make, say, an album with classical stringed instruments and then one with analog synthesizers and another with "traditional" rock instrumentation... that's too bad really.
It sounds like these are opportunities to expand your palette as an artist without it being noted as a dramatic shift in your “sound” or style. When you work on a one-off project is it artistically freeing?
There's a notion, handed down in various schools of thought – and culturally really – that an artist should find their line and pursue that line. But I find freedom in addressing each project – each album, each installation, each performance in some cases – in and of themselves.
My collaboration album with British composer Anthony Moore gave me the opportunity to record minimalistic chamber music, my dance scores allowed me to work with classical strings, I put out albums of synthesizer-based compositions, and I’m interested in making music for club-related dance floors, too. It’s a lot, but I think, in the end, a certain sensibility and certain themes and motifs do carry through, connecting these different strands.
How do you maintain that thread in your work for such varied situations? For instance, in your work with choreographers and dancers, what has the input from their side been like?
Every collaboration brings with it a new process. With the dance performances, the choreographers have often had a very clear idea of what they want. And I do what I can to give them what they're looking for. Sometimes this has meant my vision for what could have been is compromised. In most cases, I've tried to find the good in the end result. Though in some instances, I do feel if I'd been able to do what I'd liked, the overall work might've been stronger. But this is always the challenge with collaborating.
A few years ago, Chanel used your music for a fashion show. The result was stunning, but is there much collaboration when you work with a brand with such an established identity?
In the case of Chanel, the collaboration was a bit ... indirect. (laughs) Lagerfeld, I presume, liked the music on my In Light album and felt it was the right music for his Mediterranean/Moroccan-inspired line of that season. That said, I really do like the fact that he connected my music to that kind of landscape and culture – it was something that was not super obvious but was definitely in there.
Recently, you did some pieces for [postmodern architect] Philip Johnson’s Glass House. There was a recording of a beautiful string and horn composition inspired by the architecture of the building, but you also did a real-time performance that involved the live mixing of slowly degrading dub plates. For you, what is the difference between those two types of site-specific works?
Again, each work is approached in and of itself. With ERRATICS, the project I did for the Glass House, I thought about two ideas concurrently: first was the document, the object; and second, the sound installation, as experienced on the premises.
With the live performance, the goal was to make an unfolding experience that would invite the audience to think about how the sound relates to the setting. I wanted something that would inspire them to think about the house itself, the grounds, the idea of bringing the outside in, and also to think about a larger concept - of the materiality of the building. There was a section when the birds in the trees outside starting chirping like crazy. Many people in the audience told me they thought the birds were chirping in affirmation! (laughs) I guess the idea is that, with each project there can hopefully be many angles to enter from.
In that specific case, the composition was released as an album, while one had to be physically present to experience the sound installation. When you’re doing these ad hoc, site specific pieces, do you prefer that there is something that lasts longer than the event itself?
With the recordings, the listener will most likely experience the piece in their own setting, their apartment, their car, or walking around. Away from the Glass House, itself. And so, there is this companion idea – while you're listening, the idea of the Glass House is evoked. It's grounds are evoked. The listener may or may not have been on site, but I don't think it necessarily matters. An idea of a place, or a thing, is very powerful. Sometimes even more powerful than the place.
Then again, the Glass House and its grounds are pretty amazing.
Bing & Ruth on making 2014's most golden album
Dazed Digital; October 2014
Brad Barry
Over the past decade, ambient music has become easier than ever to produce. Today, it’s exceedingly simple to create interesting textures and expansive soundscapes from your bedroom, using free software on a laptop or even an iPhone.
But, during this period of technological innovation, David Moore has taken a different tack. During those last ten years, the Brooklyn-based composer has been writing ambient music for large ensembles. His project, Bing & Ruth, matches the subtle textures and abstract tones of modern experimental electronic music with classical instrumentation. The result is something at once familiar, but hard to pin down. Cellos, clarinets, piano, and upright bass blend together into a lush, otherworldly new thing — drones with a little more texture than usual, waves of sound from rippling piano keys instead of an arpeggiator, and atmospheric beds of real live woodwinds.
In a genre seemingly dominated by digital synthesizers and MaxMSP patches, the human feeling behind a Bing & Ruth album sets it apart. Even the effects on the pieces are created and modulated in real time by an analog tape delay operator. This creates a personal, organic take on the musical realms explored by artists like Tim Hecker and Oneohtrix Point Never. And though the instrumentation gives these pieces a unique sound, it’s Moore’s compositions that makes them stand out. With a patient hand, he creates moving melodies, slow building harmonies, and plaintive piano lines.
Tomorrow Was the Golden Age, the newest album from Bing & Ruth, is out now on RVNG Intl., and we took the chance to talk to Moore about his shift from big band music to drones and microtones, as well as the perks and challenges of working and playing shows with a seven-piece ensemble.
Visit the Dazed Digital site to read the conversation I had with Moore.
I've started a new blog called Handwritten List, which collects handwritten lists from people I find interesting. I have the first few posts up, and I'm looking forward to posting more in the coming days. This was mine — a list of things I enjoy in the morning.
With this month’s mix, the focus is something I’ve been picking up on recently in the underground music world: beautiful music with something “off” about it. The notion of contrast in music is nothing new, as pairing loud with quiet, sweet with sour, and high with low have been common throughout the history of art. But the way the pieces I’ve selected this month are shot through with a sense of tension keeps drawing me in. Almost everything I’ve chosen incorporates the piano, an instrument with a timbre and tuning that lends itself to planned discord and shifting tonal variations. While I’m not usually a fan of the harsher side of experimental music, here the unease somehow only enhances the beauty.
Continue on for the tracklist and some commentary on the pieces I selected.
01. Quartz Safari — “Now” Quartz Safari [Fadeaway Tapes; 2013]
This soft drifting piece from North Carolina’s Robert Thompson — the man behind gorgeous synth project Mohave Triangles — and Norway’s Sepehr Lemar Nabi is made up of textures that, on paper, should be warm and enveloping. However, the overlapping swaths of sound and wobbly synth tones end up feeling desolate and hollow. Instead of comforting, these transitory tones end up feeling like the musical equivalent of a florescent-lit airport terminal at night.
02. Jace Clayton — “Evil: Parts I & II” The Julius Eastman Memory Depot [New Amsterdam; 2013]
Part of Jace Clayton’s reimagining of classic Julius Eastman works, this piano-based piece captures the seething vitriol of the original. Eastman, one of the first African-American minimalist composers, embraced the aggressive and off-putting in a world of tidy academic music. Flaunting its embrace of the uncomfortable in its title, the “Evil” suite is at once shifting, aggressive, and hard to pin down. Clayton, under his DJ/rupture moniker, has become comfortable with clashing sounds and styles, and his work here doesn’t just rehash the original — it finds still new ways to go against the grain.
03. Oneohtrix Point Never — “Replica” Replica [Software/Mexican Summer; 2011]
With both this album and his newest release, R Plus Seven, Daniel Lopatin has mined the garish sounds and deeply melancholy mood of early digital culture. Culling from the soundtracks of 80s and 90s daytime television commercials, Lopatin, creates oddly elegiac pieces. Here, the off-putting combination of an affecting melody, buzzing synthesizers, and early MIDI sounds somehow creates moving music.
04. Daniel Wohl — “Limbs” Corps Exquis [New Amsterdam; 2013]
On his first album, Corps Exquis, Parisian composer Daniel Wohl has created a knotty exploration of the crossover between both digital and acoustic and the pure and the corrupted. The instruments of a classical quintet mimic that static, screeches, and glitches of modern everyday life, while electronics and digital manipulation blur the line between them. The result, again, is beauty shrouded in unease.
04. Tim Hecker — “Virginal I” Virgins [Kranky; 2013]
Montreal’s Tim Hecker has made a name for himself by creating noisy, blown-out drone music. But Virgins, recorded mostly in Reykjavik, finds Hecker working with live musicians for the first time. The result is a claustrophobic melange of squealing saxophone, pounding piano, and the MaxMSP equivalent of a train wreck. Maybe it’s the human elements that creep through the mix, especially at the end of the piece, but somehow “Virginal I” still feels startlingly intimate.
05. The Caretaker — “I have become almost invisible, to some extent like a dead man” Patience (After Sebald) [History Always Favours the Winners; 2011]
This creaking, loop-based piece from Stockport’s Leyland Kirby is sourced entirely from dusty 78s of Franz Schubert. Like the work of William Basinski, the pieces Kirby creates as The Caretaker show that the repetition of carefully selected musical phrases can imbue a work with a profound sense of melancholy, making it more than the sum of its parts. Even with the entrancing piano movement, though, the warps and cracks of time add a creepy haze to this piece.
06. David Rosenboom — “Piano Etude I (Alpha)” Brainwave Music [A.R.C. Records; 1975]
In the 1970s, David Rosenboom worked to synchronize music with the central nervous system. Using an array of brainwave monitors hooked up to synthesizers and a range of analog effects, Rosenboom aimed to create music that both responded to, and tapped directly into, the human brain. He describes “Piano Etude I (Alpha),” recorded in Toronto in 1976, as “two pianos playing patterns in fast, note–by–note alternation with each other accompanied by brainwave–controlled filtering of the piano sound that is synchronized with the alpha brainwaves of the performer.” The result is a wobbly, underwater take on the minimal piano oeuvre that may be cognitively stimulating, but certainly isn’t comforting.
07. Andrew Chalk — “Ghost of Nakhodka” Nakhodka [Siren Records; 2009]
This piece from British sound artist Andrew Chalk is a bumpy, musique concrète take on crystalline drone. The collage of thin sounds is delicate and insists on not building to any kind of release. In the end, this is a piece that is inherently fragile — not like an easily broken piece of china, but like a beautiful piece of china that has been both broken and carefully Scotch-taped back together.
K Leimer: Underground Music's Secret Visionary
Dazed Digital; June 2014
Brad Barry
Kerry Leimer spent the late 70s and early 80s in a small studio in Seattle producing music that emulated the experimental sounds he heard coming from different corners of the world. In his work you can hear the floating flutes and driving rhythms of German bands like Kraftwerk and Tangerine Dream, rippling piano work reminiscent of Harold Budd, and forays into the the synthesised world music of Brian Eno and Jon Hassell.
Leimer produced a staggering amount of work that spanned genre, style, and instrumentation. He released most of the work on his own small label, Palace of Lights, but much of this music went relatively unheard for decades. Then, in 2011, amidst a resurgence of interest in modular synthesisers, loops, and new age music, Matt Werth, the head of NY-based experimental electronic label RVNG Intl., started to dig into Leimer’s catalogue.
Werth is no stranger to making the old – and sometimes forgotten – new again. With his label’s FRKWYS series, he pairs younger artists like Julianna Barwick, Sun Araw and ARP with originators and legends like Ikue Mori, The Congos and Anthony Moore for full album collaborations. He and Leimer worked together to assemble a collection spanning the artist's career. The result, A Period of Review (Original Recordings: 1975–1983), is available now on RVNG Intl.
Visit the Dazed Digital site to read the conversation I had with Leimer and Werth.
As we press on into the hot, sticky days of summer here in Texas, I’m finding myself fixated on glacial imagery. There’s something mesmerizing about the organic patterns of wear from wind and water decorating the surface of something so monolithic. With this mix, I collected pieces that balance that feeling of something grandiose and slow-moving with the intricate detail and rough edges brought about by the elements.
Visit the Dazed Digital site for the tracklist and some commentary on the pieces I selected.
Surviving the Waco siege
Dazed & Confused, August 2013
Brad Barry
Earlier this summer I traveled to Waco, Texas to talk with Clive Doyle, a member of the Branch Davidian religious group who survived the 1993 siege of their compound. We talked about the 51 days he spent inside, his life in the twenty years since, and why he has chosen to stay in Waco and remain a follower of David Koresh.
The story, along with some amazing photography by Magali Pijpers, is part of Dazed & Confused's 1993 anniversary issue, which is out this month.
Though I recently returned from my trip up the coast of California, I still can’t get the gorgeous views out of my head. Driving through the winding curves of Highway 1, every turn had the potential for an amazing ocean vista or a picturesque look into a mountain canyon. The tension of the occasionally white-knuckle stretches of narrow road was rewarded with the release of gazing at the truly breathtaking scenery. For this edition of C60, I attempted to recreate the feeling of slowly weaving your way through those coastal mountain roads.
Visit the Dazed Digital site for the tracklist and some commentary on the pieces I selected.
Sun Araw in Jamaica
Dazed Digital, July 2013
Brad Barry
I recently got a chance to talk with underground California musicians Cameron Stallones and Ged Gengras about their work with dancehall artists in Jamaica. We talked about their experience working with legendary roots reggae band The Congos, their new label Duppy Gun, and recording up-and-coming artists everywhere from bars to backyards to the beach. The result is up over at Dazed Digital.
Make sure to check out the beautiful photography and video from Tony Lowe.
As we continue to explore natural environments through this mix series, I’m still thinking about the coast. But, this time, it’s not the sunny surf and sand that most people associate with summer. Living in Texas, where the summers are unbearably hot, I’m finding myself more interested in the bracingly cold water, overcast skies, and salty spray of a more northern shore. This mix is my attempt to evoke the feeling of an overcast day on a beach with dark waves, rushing tides, and an exhilarating trip into the ice-cold water.
Visit the Dazed Digital site for the tracklist and some commentary on the pieces I selected.
In anticipation for an upcoming road trip to Big Sur and up the California coast into Oregon, I’ve decided to venture from my instrument-focused mixes and, instead, explore music that evokes the different landscapes I’ll be seeing in a few weeks. With this mix, I was fascinated with the idea of the forest; I chose songs that inspire visions of soaring trees, mossy paths, and filtered sunshine.
Visit the Dazed Digital site for the tracklist and some commentary on the pieces I selected.
My latest mix for Dazed & Confused focuses on the long, resonant vibration of strings. Just like the piano, stringed instruments have been modified, repurposed, and co-opted to create a stunning variety of sounds — from the ancient harps and droning tamburas of Mesopotamia to the violins and cellos of Renaissance chamber music. Tapping into this rich tradition, the sustained, harmonically complex tones of stringed instruments provide a gorgeous palette for the modern underground musicians represented here.
Visit the Dazed Digital site for the tracklist and some commentary on the pieces I selected.
The Double Life of Terry Allen
Synonym Journal, Issue 2
Brad Barry
Terry Allen doesn’t see the disconnect between recording an outlaw country album in West Texas and making fine art for a gallery in New York. At 69 years old, the Lubbock native has created art that jumps between genre and audience, but somehow remains authentic. In his 50 years as an artist, he has worked in sculpture, music, painting, installations, theater, lithographs, literature, performance art, and radio plays. And, to him, it just seems natural.
“As a kid I kept notebooks and I would make lists of what I wanted to be,” Allen explained from his studio in Santa Fe. “It would always rotate between writer, musician, and artist. It wasn’t until much later that I truly realized that I could do all of it — that it’s all just telling stories.”
But telling stories in each of these different art worlds — worlds that are often exclusive and closed off to each other — leaves him as an outlier. His life has been an extension of the idea that the more “homes” one has, the less “at home” they feel in each. He was the Lubbock boy who wanted to be an artist, but also the LA artist who wrote country songs about West Texas. His ability to segue between those worlds, residing in both but belonging in neither, is still the driving force behind his work.
Growing up in Lubbock, Texas, a world where it was a foregone conclusion that boys would play football or baseball, Terry Allen was what he describes as a “closet reader.” For Allen, “literature and then, eventually, rock music were exciting because they offered the possibility of something beyond the horizon. It let me know there was something beyond Lubbock.”
Allen began writing in songs and playing in bands around town, but it wasn’t until he heard about Chouinard Art Institute in Los Angeles that his path out of Lubbock became clear. He applied to Chouinard and left Lubbock before he had even heard back from the school.
Moving to Los Angeles offered an escape from the anger and bitterness that Allen had towards Lubbock, and he confirmed that being around artists in a big city was the life that he wanted. At Chouinard, he found himself eating lunch with Man Ray and listening to guest lectures from Marcel Duchamp. But in that world, being from a small town in the wide open country of West Texas made him different.
“I’ve never been a big group person,” Allen explained. “Art movements and things like that didn’t interest me. I always felt like my work was this independent, private act — it was never my inclination to be a part of a group. I wasn’t the kind of person who lasted long in the Boy Scouts.”
Still, being around artists, many of them also outsiders, inspired him to look at the things he was already doing in a new light. Allen explained that when he got to art school, “that was the first time I was around people that made things seriously. I had written songs in high school, but those were really just to get in trouble, you know. To these people it was a cold-blooded act to make a song or a painting.”
Allen began working in earnest on his art and music. He wrote and recorded a song called “Going to California” and was a part of a large-scale performance art piece called Al’s Cafe, a working cafe that sold art instead of food. There were more art pieces and performances, but it wasn’t long until Allen was drawn back to West Texas.
“Out in LA, I wanted as far away from that Lubbock mentality as I could get,” said Allen, “but I eventually ended up back there to record. Joe Ely, who had gone to my high school, and Jimmy Dale Gilmore and Butch Hancock, both of whom I had known, had a band and there was a studio, so I ended up back there recording what became Lubbock (On Everything).”
The album was a masterful collection of songs that Allen, in his mind, thought expressed the anger and hostility that he felt toward the place where he grew up. But, while listening back to the songs during the mixing of the album, he came to the realization that “all of those songs were really about loving the place. I had outwardly been so hostile, but it was then that I realized how important that area was in my life. Everything had come full circle.”
Allen’s skill for keeping one foot in Texas and another in Los Angeles mirrors — and may be the very source of — his comfort in dividing his time between art forms. As a musician, he isn’t afraid to try sculpture; as a painter, he doesn’t feel alien in the world of theater. For Allen, moving from medium to medium is just how he tells a story.
“The muse takes control of me in a funny kind of way. I can be working on a song that gives me ideas for some images, and so I go do a drawing, and the next thing I know there’s a narrative that emerges.” Whether it’s visual work or music or theater, Allen follows the stories he wants to tell — stories that are often rooted in the characters and landscape of his youth. But Allen doesn’t limit himself to rehashing those stories in a signature style.
“There is this cultural idea that an artist should just focus on one thing,” Allen said. “But it doesn’t hold up — limiting yourself like that would be like getting up in the morning and saying ‘I’m shutting down every one of my senses except vision.’ The beauty of life and of art is that it’s all there, it’s all possible at any given time.”
For Allen, exploring all of those available avenues is a necessity. He says that limiting yourself to a specific style or medium is just “looking for a way that you don’t have to think.” It’s when you open yourself up to new avenues of work that you see new possibilities to challenge yourself.
This is how he has ended up with the unique experience of being just as at home in a dive bar as in an art gallery. Not becoming reliant on one audience or one method is the message in Terry Allen’s work. For Allen, moving between mediums provides the same realization he came to when listening to Lubbock (On Everything).
“You really have to get away from a place to see it. You have to get out of the way. When you’re in a place or a certain mindset, you don’t know anything else. But once you get outside, that’s when you start to see it for what it really is.”
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