Terry Allen & The Panhandle Mystery Band "Smokin The Dummy" LP

Recorded exactly two years after acclaimed visual artist and songwriter Terry Allen’s masterpiece Lubbock (on everything), the feral follow-up Smokin the Dummy is less conceptually focused but more sonically and stylistically unified than its predecessor—it’s also rougher and rowdier, wilder and more wired, and altogether more menacingly rock and roll. The first album by Allen to share top billing with the Panhandle Mystery Band, here featuring Jesse Taylor on blistering lead guitar alongside the Maines brothers and Richard Bowden, Dummy documents a ferocious new band in fully telepathic, tornado-fueled flight, refining its caliber, increasing its range, and never looking down. This first-ever vinyl reissue, remastered from the original analog tapes, includes a gatefold jacket and inner sleeve with restored, new, and alternate art and photos by Terry and Jo Harvey Allen; an insert with lyrics, original notes, and Terry’s letter to H.C. Westermann about the songs; and a high-res download code.No veteran country songwriter sounds more attuned to the national mood. His songs still feel like little guidebooks for staring down a harsh universe. – The Washington PostA reigning deity of a certain kind of country music since the mid-70s. – The New York TimesThe kind of singular American artist who expresses the fundamental weirdness of his country. – The WireIt has always been a fool’s errand to frame Allen in terms of other artists—there was nobody like him before he showed up, and the subsequent forty years have been equally light on plausible peers. – UncutSome of the strangest art-rock you ever heard … desperado dadaism. Dummy is environmental art at its best. – The Village Voice (1981)Like The Grapes of Wrath revisited … masterfully done. Call it Lubbock New Wave. It’s going to offend some people, like the best rock and roll should. One of the best albums I’ve heard in a long time, period. Dazzling. – The L.A. Times (1981)