Red Hash RARE PSYCH LP Original Pressing Nice Copy

$

125

Here is a dark pyschedelic gem that doesn't come to market very often, Gary Higgins "Red Hash" on the independent Connecticut Nufusmoon label. Below are excerpts from several free access sites write-ups of Higgins and his strangely beautiful first recording. (I have provided the copyright information to give credit where it is due). The jacket, which is a light beige in color, shows some light ringing and minor wear at the corners, but has no splits, writing, or other significant visible flaws.The vinyl looks MINT (using Goldmine's visual grading scale)and plays flawlessly. My reserve for this album is only $75.00, way below typical retail for a copy in this condition.The last copy I saw for sale at a show here in Connecticut changed hands for $175.00 (the asking price was $200.00). Please contact us through eBay if you have any questions. Check out our other auctions for more high grade and rare records, many still sealed.Thanks for looking! Free-folk enigma Gary Higgins entered the popular consciousness more than three decades after his music career ground to an abrupt halt when the reissue of his 1973 cult classic, Red Hash, became a cause célèbre in the summer of 2005. Born and raised in Sharon, CT, Higgins received his first guitar at age seven, later studying French horn. In his late teens, he found inspiration in the folk revival of the early '60s, and in the wake of the British Invasion, he and schoolmates Dave Beaujon, Jake Bell, Simeon Coxe, and Ronny Baily teamed up in mid-1965 to form a rock & roll outfit dubbed Random Concept. The group soon emerged as a prominent local draw, finding its footing as the house band at a club called the Rumpus Room, but Higgins was forced to resign to attend college. His academic career proved brief, however, and after one semester he returned to Sharon and resumed his bass duties with Random Concept. Soon after the group played its first New York City gig, eventually relocating to Greenwich Village. In time, Higgins, Beaujon, Bell, and keyboardist Terry Fenton grew homesick and returned to Connecticut while Coxe -- assuming the single-word moniker of Simeon -- remained in New York, later forming space rock pioneers the Silver Apples. Despite remaining rooted in Connecticut, the reincarnated Random Concept continued playing New York, backing singers Gary "U.S." Bonds and Dee Dee Sharp and enjoying a lengthy club residency in Albany. Over time their music grew increasingly psychedelic, and in 1968 Random Concept were tapped as the house band at the Torrington, CT, club the Hukah. Higgins and Bell also moonlighted in a psych-folk group called Wooden Wheel with singer Paul Tierney and cellist Maureen Wells -- when Random Concept split in mid-1971, Wooden Wheel became their sole musical vehicle. But in October 1972 Higgins was arrested in a drug sting and sentenced to 13 months in prison for selling marijuana, and just days prior to entering jail he called on members of both Random Concept and Wooden Wheel to record an LP. Cut in the space of under 40 hours and released on the tiny Nufusmoon label in an edition of 3,000, Red Hash (a title selected without Higgins' consent) proved a dark yet beautiful song cycle of uncommon depth and urgency. Though well-received by those lucky enough to hear it, the record suffered from limited distribution, zero promotion, and the incarceration of its creator, and soon slipped through the cracks, remaining virtually unknown outside of collector circles. Following his April 1974 prison release, Higgins attempted to enter mainstream society, taking jobs as a dishwater and waiter. He eventually married and had a son, and in 1982 went to work for the State of New York. He eventually returned to writing and recording, building a home studio and occasionally gigging with local bands, but music remained only a sideline, especially after he became a registered nurse in 1988. Higgins knew nothing about Red Hash's growing collectability and cachet, however, even though by the late '90s original pressings were trading hands for as much as $200 on the Internet. A new generation of psych-folk devotees including Current 93's David Tibet sang its praises, and Ben Chasny even recorded a cover of Higgins' "Thicker Than a Smokey" on the Six Organs of Admittance album School of the Flower, in his liner notes seeking information on its writer's current whereabouts. In late 2004, the Drag City label finally located Higgins, who by now was overseeing community-based residences for Connecticut's mentally challenged. Drag City reissued Red Hash the following summer, and the resulting media blitz made Higgins something of a celebrity. Backed by members of Random Concept, he even played his first-ever solo gig at New York City's Tonic in July 2005. In the meantime, Drag City lobbied Higgins for more pre-Red Hash material; for his part, Higgins wanted to cut a second album. He won. In 2009 his sophomore effort, Seconds, was released on the label. ~ Jason Ankeny, All Music Guide Content provided by All Music Guide Copyright © 2008 All Media Guide, LLC "Lost" albums are all the rage these days. Underpromoted or too weird to generate sales upon their initial release, recent years have seen the resurgence of the "rediscover and reissue" brigade, whose leading lights so far have been Vashti Bunyan and Linda Perhacs (who literally walked out of the woods carrying the master-tapes to her legendary Parallelograms album). To this ever-evolving list we can now add an album that was consigned to the attics and basements of history due to a pot bust: Red Hash by Gary Higgins. Having played around New York city in a few fledgling rock’n’roll combos (one with a guy called Simeon who would go on to proto-electronic fame with the Silver Apples), Higgins retreated to rural Connecticut in search of clean country air, where he grew an impressive beard and honed his folk-rock stylings with an acoustic band called Wooden Wheel. Before long, these small-town hippies attracted the Nixonite heat ("I, like many at that time, experimented with drug use and even inhaled" quips Gary) with Higgins and a friend implicated in a pot bust and subsequently jailed - but not before he and the band recorded a classic psych-folk album in 1973 which wouldn’t reach an audience for thirty-two years. It was called Red Hash (after the nickname that the flame-haired Higgins earned while in custody). Although recorded in a forty-hour session under the shadow of a spell in prison, the album betrays little of the turmoil which surrounded its creation. "I had the feeling I might never get a second chance to complete it or any other musical project for, essentially, ever" says Higgins. "I was unavailable for mixing and final production of the album and watched from afar as Red Hash hit the streets." Listening to it today, one envisions Red Hash emerging as an airy folk-rock document with psychedelic flourishes, slightly eerie overtones and a warm, inviting melodicism evoking bearded bucolia from the sepia-toned 70's: a smoke-folk classic with all the easy charm and group mind of the passive peace pipe while still haunted by the creeping paranoia of the loner stoner. Higgins was locked up on a two-years-and-nine-months’ sentence for possession of marijuana and the album, released in a limited pressing on his own imprint Nufusmoon, disappeared in a puff of smoke. "At the time the album was very well received" says Gary, "but without live support and carried solely on undying enthusiasm and tireless effort from a small group of friends with essentially no experience in record promotion and sales, momentum slowed and cases of records quietly became collectors of dust, stored in basements along with fond memories and thoughts of what might have been."