Gary Higgins.

I picked up Gary Higgins' album A Dream a While Back a few weeks ago at Leary Records in Ballard. It's an ep that was recorded in 1970-1971, before the release of Higgins' cult hit Red Hash. This my beasts is a seminal folk masterpiece.

Gary Higgins - Song to Springtime by eyekhan

Higgins and his friends were “hippies living in the country,” as he puts it — hardly dangerous radicals. But because they were in small-town America during the Vietnam era, when Nixon had just declared his war on drugs, they attracted a lot of unwanted attention from police. “If you didn’t have a butch haircut and weren’t headed for the army, then there was something wrong with you,” says Cardillo. They regularly bought and smoked marijuana (“I even inhaled,” jokes Higgins), and when a sting operation in October 1972 failed to catch the local dealers prosecutors were after, Higgins and Cardillo — who knew one of the targets — were next in line. Both were convicted of selling hashish. “It certainly shocked us,” says Higgins. “But it brought forth an urgency in getting my music down on tape, because I didn’t know if I’d ever get another chance.”

In February 1973, out on bail and awaiting his sentence, Higgins went into the studio with members of Random Concept and The Wooden Wheel for a series of round-the-clock sessions, adding guitar and drums himself. Eleven songs from those sessions would become Red Hash, a free-flowing, meditative blend of bucolic folk, gentle psychedelia, and slowly unfolding melodies that took its title from a nickname the other inmates had given the redheaded Higgins before he made bail. Despite the warm pastoral feel of tracks like “Cuckoo” and “Down on the Farm,” his sometimes fragile singing is colored with a deep sadness.

Excerpt from Knowphase.