Terry Allen

★★★★ Bloodlines PARADISE OF BACHELORS. CD/DL/LP

The return of Texas country maverick’s 1983 album.

It’s not the first time Allen’s fourth album’s been reissued – Sugar Hill Records put it on a single CD that threw in his third album Smokin’ The

Dummy. But it’s its first time on vinyl, remastered from the original tapes, with new photos and linernotes by his devotees at P.O.B. (They’re giving the same loving archive treatment to Smokin’, which will come out separately the same day.) Bloodlines is up there with Allen’s best: Lubbock (On

Everything) (1979) and Juarez (1975); it actually revisits two songs from the latter. A song cycle with a dark/darkly comic take on religion, its bestknown song is the glorious Gimme A Ride To Heaven Boy, where a driver gives a ride to a gun-toting, hitchhiking Jesus. Originally released on Allen’s own Fate Records label, it was recorded in Lubbock with The Panhandle Mystery Band and produced by Lloyd Maines.