A Top-Notch Country-Folk Cult Figure

Terry Allen is more prominent as a visual artist than as a musician (Exhibit A for locals is his downtown sculpture of a businessman with his head shoved into the wall of Citicorp Plaza). But the Lubbock, Texas, native is a country-folk cult figure of the first order, and his appearance at Jacks Sugar Shack on Thursday drew a lively congregation.

Being a part-timer, Allen hasn’t pushed his musical career to its potential, but as a songwriter and a character, he easily ranks with the best of his Texas contemporaries, including Butch Hancock, Joe Ely, Guy Clark and Lyle Lovett. He brings his own set of eccentricities to bear, though, and his sensibility meshes with that of someone like David Byrne, who plays a big role on Allen’s latest album, “Human Remains.”

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Allen embraces classic themes--his bedrock is the tension between settling down and letting it all go--and he jumps eagerly into the genre’s conventional vehicles--a big old car and the open desert road, a beautiful waitress, a faithless lover.

But he revs them into a place that’s all his own. His portraits are intimate and realistic, but suggest a mythic dimension, and even his cosmic meditations have a narrative momentum. His sweeping observations--the American dream dissolving to the sounds of Wolfman on the radio, an elegy for the tumultuous ‘60s--are both trenchant and sympathetic.

At Jacks, Allen sat at an electric piano and delivered with straightforward, unaffected intensity while his versatile three-piece band provided all the power and flavor the songs required. Allen’s dry twang imposes some expressive borders, but in his songs even the Texas sky isn’t the limit.