Album Review: A Dream a While Back by Gary Higgins

When Drag City reissued Gary Higgins' 1973 album Red Hash, it was deemed, rightfully, an underground classic. It stands apart from other privately pressed recordings of the era because of its overall quality, from its songwriting to performing to production. DC wanted more material from the Red Hash period to issue as a follow-up. Higgins admitted that more songs from the period existed and was willing to release them, with a caveat: he wanted to record an album of recent material to reveal that he was still active.

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Everyone loves a good comeback story, and the return of Gary Higgins has been one most dramatic and unlikely in recent memory. In 1973, Higgins released his debut album Red Hash, and then, following a stint in prison on drug charges, disappeared entirely from the public eye. Over the intervening years, a small but fervent group of fans came to consider Red Hash a lost psych-folk classic.

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In the world of reissues, Gary Higgins’s Red Hash is one of the great success stories. Given new light by Drag City in 2005, it proved a brilliant and surprisingly timeless folk record. 2009’s Seconds, though, Higgins first new music in over three decades, couldn’t capture the same lightning in a bottle. Songs plodded along, as did the overly long stories they told, and it all seemed like the days of Red Hash‘s bittersweet wandering had drifted away.

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