This Week in Texas Music History a Lubbock original makes his television debut, and a British legend takes note.
Episodes written by Jason Mellard, Alan Schaefer, and Avery Armstrong
Terry Allen on Shindig!
Jason Mellard from the Center for Texas Music History at Texas State University
On August 4, 1965, Terry Allen made his television debut on the new teen music program Shindig! in Los Angeles. The young Lubbockite was on the West Coast for art school, not a music career, but a friend in television heard him playing the piano one day and asked if he’d like to be on. It seemed like a big break for Allen. Just look at the more established artists he shared the program with that evening: Rolling Stones associate Marianne Faithful, “Chapel of Love” group the Dixie Cups, and the Righteous Brothers, who premiered their new single “You’ve Lost that Loving Feeling.”
The house band’s Texas connections helped set him at ease, too, including not only Billy Preston (later one of those dubbed the “fifth Beatle”) but also two artists who had spent time with Lubbock’s own Crickets, Jerry Naylor and Glenn Hardin.
Alone with a saloon-style piano at center stage, Allen enthusiastically belted out “Red Bird,” one of the very first songs he wrote.
As Brendan Greaves writes in his masterful new biography of Allen, “By the end of this obviously rushed, slightly unhinged performance, Terry . . . resembles some demonically possessed avatar of Buddy Holly.”
The teenybopper audience may not have been sure what to make of it, but sitting next to Terry’s wife Jo Harvey was an Englishman who just kept going “This guy’s great!” Jo Harvey introduced herself to the man, who turned out to be Beatles manager Brian Epstein. Epstein got Jo Harvey’s number and promised he’d follow up on the piano player. He didn’t, and Terry Allen progressed in the visual and performing arts with music as a sideline and recurring theme.
It would be over a decade before Allen properly launched his recording career with the now-classic albums Juarez in 1975 and Lubbock on Everything in 1979, both released in new deluxe editions in recent years.
Sources:
Brendan Greaves. Truckload of Art: The Life and Work of Terry Allen, an Authorized Biography. New York: Hachette Books, 2024.
