Blood Sucking Maniacs – Blood Sucking Maniacs [2LP Vinyl]

Blood Sucking Maniacs, the Allen family band, helmed by patriarch and matriarch Terry Allen and Jo Harvey Allen, spans five generations and 121 years, including (among others) their sons Bukka and Bale Allen; grandsons Kru, Sled, and Calder Allen; Panhandle Mystery Band mainstays Charlie Sexton, Lloyd Maines, and Richard Bowden, and frequent collaborator Will Sexton. The wild and wide-ranging songs collected on their eponymous album are miscellaneous and multiplex, comprising heartrending ballads and arch in-jokes on a spectrum from sublime to unabashedly sentimental. The unifying principle here is not so much blood harmony as blood entropy. Get sucked.As a childa”this would have been sometime in the mid-1970sa”Terry and Jo Harvey Allens son Bale assembled in the front yard of their Fresno home a curious device, an elaborate congeries of crucifixes and mirrors suspended in deadfall. It was, the fledgling artist patiently explained to his bemused parents, a vampire trap.Half a century later, Blood Sucking Maniacs, the record by the eponymous Allen family band, resembles, in its own mannera”that is, unwieldy and convoluted, ardent and hammy, slightly derangeda”a vampire trap in both construction and intent. A bricolage of potent symbols and spare parts, wary of the eternal, at once affectionate and defensive, vulnerable and dangerous, fiercely protective of past and future wounds. In other words, a familya”or a mechanism for one specific family to write (and interpret) itself.These maniacs, ten kin, span five generations and 121 years. In order of descending seniority: Pauline Allen, Terrys hellraising, barrelhouse piano-playing mother, who died in 1984 but joins the party through a transmission from beyond the grave; Jo Harvey and Terry, the matriarch and patriarch, who, separately and together, inhabit myriad artistic endeavors; Bukka, their firstborn, an accomplished songwriter and studio and touring musician; Bale, their younger son, an equally accomplished visual artist, gallerist, and drummer; their three grandsons, Sled (a drummer, entrepreneur, and fisherman; see the asome like to fisha lyric in theme song aBlood Sucking Maniacsa) and Calder (another songwriter, musician, and fisherman), Bales two boys, and Bukkas son Kru (a piano-playing football star); their granddaughter-in-law Sophie (music industry executive and mother), and finally, Sled and Sophies baby boy, Lucky Marlo, Terry and Jo Harveys first great-grandchild, whose fetal heartbeat opens and closes the record with the actual (ultra)sound of coursing Allen blood.Terry has designated four additional official Maniacs, surrogate family members adopted into the Allen family fold: Richard Bowden and Lloyd Maines (credited as the aBlood Brothersa), the benevolent bedrock of the Panhandle Mystery Band since the first day of recording Lubbock (on everything) in the summer of 1978, and real-life brothers Charlie Sexton and Will Sexton (the aBastard Childrena), who, between them, have collaborated with the Allens and just about anybody else you can imagine. Though their bloodlines are, genetically speaking, different, these maniacs have drunk deeply of Allen blood, and their sympathetic playing elevates these recordings.The songs collected herein are miscellaneous and multiplex, comprising heartrending ballads and arch in-jokes on a spectrum from sublime to unabashedly sentimental, mordant to doting. These contradictory qualities, too, are redolent of family. The unifying principle here is not so much blood harmony as blood entropy.Appropriately, Terry and Jo Harvey contribute the greatest number of pieces to Blood Sucking Maniacsa”five each, if you include their joint rendering, tender and succinct, of the blues standard aIt Hurts Me Too,a here titled aWhen Things Go Wronga (because athe struggle of love,a of relationships, ais the important part,a as Terry told me). Jo Harvey wrote aLet It All Ina with their dear departed friend Susanna Clark, a songwriter and artist whose paintings grace the covers of classic albums by Willie Nelson and her husband (and Terrys fellow Rockin Taco), Guy. One hundred toasts with aone hundred sangriasa culminate in this wise counsel of renewal: aDont shut out no snakes / They might wind up friends / Its all worth the wonder / Worth going insane again.aThe concert staple aShuck Some Corn,a Jo Harveys most beloved poem, here appended as a coda to Bukkas aThese Four Rocks,a manages to encompass both metaphysical riddle and randy joke, playfully prodding the mystery of identity as subsumed and redeemed by family, by blood. (What is left after you agobble and gnaw / and suck it rawa? aA secret.a) aDown to the River,a Jo Harveys moving duet with Terry, a paean to their love of, and through, travel and the records spiritual centerpiece, contains its most singular and breathtaking image. We are suddenly transported to the Bay of Bengal, aWhere bonfires reflect the slow dark oxen / Where a hundred blue sails draw against the dawn.aIn the past few years Calder, under Charlie and Bukkas mentorship, has emerged as a formidable young presence among Austin songwriters. His three songs here demonstrate a distinctively earnest and mindful style that recalls his uncle Bukkas deliberate approach to songwriting, epitomized by aThese Four Rocks.a On one of their countless drives between Fresno and Lubbock, the Allens pocketed four small stones from the side of a road through the Mojave Desert, outside Needles. They claimed them as family totems of togetherness, one for each of them, eventually tattooing them on their hands as a quadrangle of dots.The writing and recording process, which took place mostly at Terry and Jo Harveys Santa Fe home and a local studio, the Kitchen Sink, was, according to Jo Harvey, athe most joyous time of all of us working together,a a culminating project for these inveterate family collaborators. aYou could hear music coming from all over the house a Calder was learning piano from Kru, Kru was learning accordion from Bukkaa”everyone was learning new licks and just having so much fun.a Such joy was not without logistical challenges. aGetting everybody together was like herding cockroaches,a Terry reported. Sleds poem aSanta Fea and Calders aArroyo Nightsa invite us behind the adobe walls of the Allens home for such a gathering, fueled by Topo Chico, tequila, Malbec, and black coffee, suffused with the heady aroma of pork pozole and green chile chicken enchiladas, and the raucous sound of Texan voices raised in laughter and song.Pauline appears as an inscrutable but benign specter, with her first-ever appearance on record, in two fragments captured on cassette tape by Terry at her home in Amarillo in the 1970s. The second, W.C. Handys foundational aSt. Louis Blues,a was her favorite song, which Terry incorporated into his family epic, DUGOUT, as leitmotif. (Krus piano improvisations conjure his great-grandmothers insouciant virtuosity on the instrument.) aRed Leg Boy,a another artifact of DUGOUT, invokes Terrys father Sled, a wrestling and music promoter and professional ballplayer. Sleds namesake, his great-grandson, introduces the song, just as he did as a four-year-old on Terrys 1999 record Salivation, though a couple of octaves lower this time. On the chorus, four generations call out to their forebear from a fifth.aIts all one thing,a Terry has often said, when confronted by confused critics, of his multidisciplinary practice, which embraces music, art, writing, and theater. The same formula applies to the Allens conception of art and familya”its all one thing, or it can be. Notwithstanding the popular misconceptions about the romantic life of the hermitic artist and his hermetic art, family need not be an inconvenience or impediment to sidestep on the path to artistic fulfillment or career success (whatever those two absurd, abstract metrics might mean). Art and family need not present separate or parallel conditions and experiences but can, as in aBloodlines,a the reprised title track of Terrys 1983 album, flow together in confluence.