Album Cover

Gary Higgins Portrait

My Discovery of the Album

I was watching a video on YouTube when I noticed a haunting backing track.  At first it sounded a bit like Elliot Smith of “Miss Misery” fame.  The track “Thicker than a Smokey” is of Gary Higgins’ 1973 album “Red Hash”.  I’d never heard of Gary Higgins and a usually instantly gratifying Google search revealed very little.

Last.fm had a very brief biography: http://www.last.fm/music/Gary+Higgins/+wiki which revealed that the album suffered commercially because the artist was headed to prison on drug charges.  When an interested promoter caught up with him, he was nursing in Connecticut.

The article goes on to say that some 32 years later (after 1973, so the author must be referring to 2005) acclaim has come to Gary Higgins and that he is(was) performing.  I see little evidence of any further fame.

Any readers with more information about Gary Higgins, please comment.

If you like Elliott Smith or early Cat Stevens, you’ll love Gary Higgins although he has a unique contribution to the genre of ‘intellectual soul music’.

Tracks

Here is “Thicker than a Smokey” (one of the signature tracks that led me to the album):

And here is a playlist:

Gary Higgins – Red Hash Playlist

(The following information was compiled from various sources on the internet)

Album Information:

Gary Higgins – Red Hash (us 1973)

Born: Sharon, CT, United States

Members:

– Gary Higgins – guitar, vocals
– Dave Beaujon – bass
– Jake Bell – guitar, vocals
– Terry Fenton – organ , percussion
– Paul Tierney – flute, mandolin, vocals
– Maureen Wells – cello, vocals

Tracklist:

01. Thicker Than a Smokey – 3:38
02. It Didn’t Take Too Long – 4:02
03. Windy Child – 3:31
04. Telegraph Towers – 2:56
05. I Can’t Sleep at Night – 3:52
06. Cuckoo – 2:10
07. I Pick Notes From the Sky – 4:45
08. Stable the Spuds – 5:22
09. Down on the Farm – 3:08
10. Unable to Fly – 4:12
11. Looking for June – 3:51

Description

A beautifully wrought record of sun-drenched folk musings courtesy of Gary Higgins, Red Hash was
reissued in 2005 on Drag City to great acclaim. This is a “Buried Treasure” that lives up to
its reputation. – Ariel

Gary Higgins’ only album has much in common with many other vaguely hippie-ish singer/songwriter
records from the early ’70s on small or vanity labels. There’s a laid-back feel that seems two
or three years out of time (or behind the times), like an exhausted hangover from the wilder
peaks of the psychedelic era. Relative to this collector-oriented genre, however, the record’s
very much above average. For one thing, the production is much better than it is for many such
endeavors that suffered from limited distribution — subdued and no frills, perhaps, but clear,
well recorded, and well played and sung. Too, few other records of this sort are so downright
melancholy, though without succumbing to the unhinged despair that consigns many of them to an
extremely limited audience. It’s more like being trapped in a room where the candles are burning
down to their wicks, with the knowledge that there will be no encores once the music’s over.
Higgins was in prison in the early ’70s, and while it might be too much to project his personal
circumstances onto judgment of the proceedings, it does rather sound like the musings of a
gentle soul who somehow lost his way or got steered down the wrong path. There are dark
insinuations of insomnia, doubt, a loss of hope, and in the last lyric of the closing “Looking
for June,” desperate wondering as to where he’s gonna get some dope. “Down on the Farm” sounds
almost like a folky Captain Beefheart with its guttural vocals and twisted blues progressions,
but it’s not typical of an album that usually goes for a far more placid and mainstream (though
slightly bent) singer/songwriter sound.
~ [Richie Unterberger, allmusic.com]

————————————————————————————————

ROGUE BOY INTO JAIL

“Red Hash”, Gary Higgins’ melancholy masterpiece, is often cited in the same breath as such
admired hippy-folk obscurities as Skip Spence’s “oar”, Linda Perhacs “Parallelograms” and Vashti
Bunyan’s “Just another Diamond Day”. Unlike those artists, however, Higgins’ story has a novel
twist: by the time the album was relased in March 1973, he was doing time in a maximum security
Jail!

Higgins and his chums were self-described “hippies living in the country”, the extent of their
crimes limited to smoking marijuana (“I even inhaled,” Higgins reveals). The situation turned
serious, however, when Higgins and manager Gary ‘Chico’ Cardillo were caught up in President
Nixon’s newly declared War On Drugs. As a result of their involvement in an October 1972 pot
bust – they’d become unwitting pawns in a large undercover police operation – they found
themself facing long, hard prison sentences.

“It certainly shocked us.” says Higgins. “But it brought forth an urgency in getting some songs
down on tape because I didn’t know if I’d ever get another chance.”

The inspiration on display is of a much higher order than mere peacenik lament, however: Higgins
never directly touches on his own plight, and despite the title and the circumstances
surrounding the record, drugs are only a feature of one largely irrelevant track. Such
transmutation of private grief into patient hope is rare in the piteous annals of early 70s folk
music; tinged with a moving, red-eyed faintness, the restrained pleas of the ‘cuckoo in pain’
will resonate. Higgins refrains from the delicate melancholics that so fatally tempted lesser
folkies like Joseph Pusey or Arthur Lee Harper, and his mature sensibility is of a higher class
than most folk artistes you can name, well meriting this album’s reputation among responsive
folk critics – if Higgins continues to serve as the grandfather to the new Devendran fold, folk
is in good hands.

————————————————————————————————

Biography:

Born in Sharon, Connecticut, Higgins cut his musical teeth in 1960s New York, first in the
psychedelic group Random Concept and later with avant-folkies Wooden Wheel. In 1972, Higgins was
caught up in a drug sting; but shortly before entering a maximum-security facility, he cut a
record featuring members of his two prior groups: Jake Bell (guitar, vocals), Maureen Wells
(cello, vocal), Jerry Fenton (piano, organ), Dave Beaujon (bass), and Paul Jerney (mandolin,
flute, vocals). Besides singing and playing guitar, Higgins recorded drums for a few cuts.

The record was titled (not by Higgins) Red Hash, and it failed to sell out its modest printing
of a few thousand copies. After his release, Higgins held down a series of jobs in the
Connecticut/New York area, eventually marrying and raising a son. While he play in a bar bands,
he didn’t pursue further recording, and his record became a foggy memory.

In the 1990s, a small cult of devotion bloomed around the record, a cult that included David
Tibet of Current 93 and Six Organs of Admittance’s Ben Chasny, who covered “Thicker Than a
Smokey” for his album School of the Flower in hopes of getting Higgins’ attention. Eventually,
Sub Pop/Drag City staffer Zach Cowie located Higgins, signed him to Drag City, and oversaw the
re-release of Red Hash in the summer of 2005. In July of that year, Higgins played his first
solo show, supported by members of Random Concept, as well as his guitarist son, Graham.
~ (RYM)