Forty years ago, outlaw country musician and visual artist Terry Allen released “Lubbock (On Everything),” a masterful album about fine art, finding love, the echoes of Vietnam, and, of course, the Texas Panhandle.
Its most famous song is the opener, “Amarillo Highway.” It was Allen’s declaration that — even though he doesn’t wear a Stetson — his trunk full of Pearl and Lone Star beers make him as much of a Texan as anyone.
But “The Great Joe Bob (A Regional Tragedy),” might be his most prescient track. It tells the story of a Panhandle prince, a state champion running back who falls from grace and loses everything.
“School boy football king / I told him hi in the halls / ‘Cause he could run them balls / But it was rumored down deep he was mean,” Allen sings in the first verse.
Sound familiar? Texas is littered with the carcasses of broken football dreams. In a phone interview with The Barbed Wire from his home in New Mexico, Allen called it “a strange mythology.”
To name just a few: There are the members of the Carter High football team, who were arrested for participating in a string of robberies after they clinched the 1988 Texas state title. There are the three former Wheatley High School players who were busted for leading a six-figure laptop theft ring. And, most recently, Edinburg High’s Emmanuel Duron was banned from playing Texas high school sports (and almost sent to prison) after tackling a referee during a game.
In each instance, there is a feeling of immense loss by the folks who piled into the bleachers every Friday night. John Creuzot, an attorney for one of the Carter High players, told the Dallas Morning News that the crimes, which included robbing a video store and a Mexican restaurant, “set the city on fire.” The idea that these vaunted athletes could throw away the glory of a state title or a scholarship is unfathomable.
“I think it’s really the forces that people are up against in that part of the world, just to play sports and to succeed at all costs,” Allen said. “I do believe it’s more the forces that are exerted against people that force them into that kind of mentality.”
It’s art imitating life imitating art; for every Earl Campbell there are a hundred Paul Rices, bouncing not off linebackers and into the end zone, but from school to school, and ultimately, into civilian life (or worse). Rice is, like Joe Bob, a mythical figure in Texas high school football history, with little in the official record. After a stellar career at Lewisville High School in the early ‘70s, Rice flipped from Southern Methodist University to the University of Southern California. He lasted exactly one scrimmage at USC before transferring back to the school he originally scorned, playing only one season in University Park. Rumor has it he was booted from there — and from Texas Christian University, too — before flaming out of football entirely.
Allen still receives newspaper clippings of athlete crime stories from friends and fans: the pride of the backfield ousted from a Power Four program for drugs, an all-state wideout from small town Texas arrested for an act of wanton violence.
Even though the subtitle of the song is “A Regional Tragedy,” Allen has received hard evidence that, in the 40 years since releasing the song, this is a statewide phenomenon.
“It’s not particularly unique to the Panhandle,” Allen says. “(Football is) more of a religion, I think, in Texas than really a sport.”
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Allen never intended on recording “Lubbock (On Everything)” in the Panhandle.
His mother Pauline was a musician, and his father, Sled Allen, was a professional baseball catcher and manager who had a cup of coffee in the majors with the St. Louis Browns in 1910, then moved the family to Lubbock when he was a toddler. But by 1961, the 17-year-old Allen had already fled the Texas plains for sunny Southern California. Most of the songs on “Lubbock (On Everything),” by virtue of geography, were composed on the West Coast — “The Great Joe Bob” included.
Allen and his wife Jo Harvey were living in Fresno in the late 1970s, but they spent one summer in Los Angeles. Allen’s friend had lent him some studio space on Sunset Boulevard, so he rented a keyboard and plugged away at writing songs. “The Great Joe Bob,” he says, took the longest to complete.
“I did a number of drawings while I was up there,” he says, “but really, it took me most of the summer to write that song.”
Tapping into the Lubbock side of his brain, Allen wasn’t thinking of a specific football player from the Panhandle who broke bad and lost it all. He did, however, have some source material to draw from. Allen played at Monterey High School for a spell, until, he says, “I just got tired of getting beat up and decided I’d much rather drive around and smoke cigarettes and listen to music.”
Joe Bob, king of the gridiron and the hallway, destined to be a superstar before blowing it, was an archetype.
“That mythology was in the air as far as schoolboy football went and high school and graduation, and then people being uprooted after that,” Allen says.
The song transforms into a sort of death waltz at its conclusion, a tuba punctuating each measure until a high school band joins for the coda. It may sound warbly and a touch off, but it’s not just any high school band. Once he returned to Lubbock to record the album at Caldwell Studios in 1978, Allen had the Monterey High School band, his alma mater, join him, to play a section of the school song. It was the spectators, those not physically gifted enough for the gridiron, eulogizing the death of Joe Bob’s dream.
“They played it,” Allen says now, “and it was kind of perfectly out of tune.”
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Joe Bob’s sins are self-inflicted, mostly. He wasn’t felled by a knee-shredding tackle, like Odessa Permian superstar Boobie Miles, but rather by his own avarice and wanton disregard for, well, everyone else. His first evil act is “drinking during training and breaking the coach’s neck.”
What’s truly fascinating about the story of Joe Bob isn’t just his salacious means to his own end; it’s about that football dream, crushed underfoot, and our ongoing obsession with re-telling this same story.
In addition to the felonious footballers in Texas history, there are so many more who didn’t fulfill the dream projected upon them by the community. That is to say that the common thread between Joe Bob and Miles, whose story is chronicled in Buzz Bissinger’s book “Friday Night Lights,” is what they meant to the diehard fanatics in their towns.
“It spread like country wildfire,” Allen sings in one verse, about the news of Joe Bob’s breaking bad. He ends each chorus with, “Nobody understood it / When the great Joe Bob went bad.” Here, Allen slyly implicates the exceptionalist culture surrounding Texas high school football.
Yes, Joe Bob broke the social contract in many ways, but he was also pressured by an adoring crowd to win — and continue to be a winner. Joe Bob was the town’s favorite surrogate son, and there were unrealistic expectations placed upon him.
The central theme, endlessly repeated in real life and onscreen, is escaping the confines — cultural and geographical — of small-town Texas. The promise of football glory serves as the getaway car.
“It’s the pressures exerted by the geography and by the culture that a person comes up in,” Allen says. “It’s like a trap.”
Though each case is different, they ring a familiar, sorrowful note: of talent wasted, a community let down by the heroes it feels it created, and a neverending societal obsession with teenagers pummeling other teenagers.
Allen takes a holistic approach in assigning blame in the song’s narrative, even if he stops short of actually condemning anyone involved. It’s the culture of Texas high school football, not just one (fictional) ball carrier.
“What really drives the song is, rather than the personality of the person, it’s more the forces around him,” Allen says.
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By the time the ’90s rolled around, Allen had grown tired of playing “The Great Joe Bob.” It was still a popular song, lyrically spanning time and geography. If anything, it has gained relevance as his clippings piled up. There has never been a shortage of gunslinging, strip-sacking teenagers accused of sexual assault or robbery. But after NFL Hall of Famer O.J. Simpson stood trial for double murder, Allen brought Joe Bob out of retirement.
Some of the similarities were uncanny. After the eternal Joe Bob is suspended from Texas Tech for canoodling with a dean’s daughter, he has a fling with a waitress named Ruby Cole. Simpson met Nicole Brown, a waitress, when she was 18, in the twilight of his career as a superstar running back. Ruby Cole and Nicole, Joe Bob and O.J., it all made phonetic sense, too.
“There was a connection, so I just started singing it again,” Allen says. He still does, from time to time.
Today, Allen says the story isn’t a morality tale. His responsibility as a songwriter is to the song itself. Regardless, that dream of alchemizing high school football glory into big bucks and pretty women — and endless pride back home — is as alive as ever, seemingly just beyond the grasp of millions of young men.
As Allen sings at the end of the first verse, “There ain’t nothing as American and clean.”