Connecticut songwriter Gary Higgins was arrested in the early 1970s on "very, very serious" charges for drugs. He served a few months in prison. After his release, he found a job, got married, and raised a family. But before he went to jail, Higgins made the album Red Hash on a shoestring budget during a 40-hour marathon recording session. Over the next three decades, the self-released LP spread through bootleg iterations. Finally, in 2005, Six Organs of Admittance Ben Chasny wrote, "If anyone has any information on the whereabouts or fate of Gary Higgins, please contact us at Drag City," in the liner notes of School of the Flower, on which he'd covered Red Hash's masterpiece, "Thicker Than a Smokey". By that time, Zach Cowie, the Sub Pop A&R guy who signed Chasny's other outfit, Comets on Fire, was leading a one-man letter-writing campaign to find Higgins. He sent the right letter to the right address. Higgins responded. Drag City re-released Red Hash, and Higgins began playing occasional live shows with many of the musicians that had played on the record. He, of course, made a comeback record.
Unfortunately, Seconds, Higgins' first album in 36 years, doesn't match the vitality of its backstory. In a 2005 interview for Splendid, writer Jennifer Kelly asked Higgins about his influences when Red Hash was put to tape. After he started explaining David Crosby's guitar tunings, she asked about his interest in non-Western music, ostensibly seeking the roots for the freak in his folk. "When the Beatles went towards the Indian influence and the tabla and the sitar, everybody became somewhat into that," he answered in much the same way you might expect of your parents or your uncle and aunt.
And that's how Seconds feels, too: avuncular and kind, experienced and maybe a tad bitter-- like a CD Baby adult-folk offering by someone with a sketchbook of songs, some friends who like to "jam," and a new copy of Garage Band. While Red Hash was a collection of wonderfully refracted folk-rock that seemed just out of focus, Seconds errs on the side of the straightforward and sharp. "When I Was Young", Higgins' testimonial to music's tonic power, works mostly to remind how immediate the songs and singing of Jackson Browne and Tom Petty could be. "Demons", meanwhile, is an overly calm three-verse reflection on a debauched friend whose riches lead him to ruins. It begins with a duet for badly recorded acoustic guitars and eventually makes way for a harpsichord solo. And "Ten-Speed", a laborious seven-minute listen, suffers in the worst ways-- schlocky synthesizers, slogging electric bass, thick-string acoustic solos, end rhymes you can predict a few seconds out. "She came to me in a hand stand/ She wiped my tears with her own hand," it goes. "Then I wanted to fly/ Then I wanted to cry."
Seconds isn't a total loss, though. Higgins works best here when he sidesteps the grown-man folk blues trope, either by breaking stride sonically or by taking a playful turn on a somber subject. "Little Squirrel" does both, floating Higgins' wise baritone over a synthesizer daydream. With no guitar to chase, Higgins relaxes to ease out a tender observational parable about a squirrel killed by a dump truck. Sure, it's a tad pedestrian, but the concern in his voice and the reflective textures beneath afford gravity to lines like, "Mama is high in the treetop/ Daddy is chasing a new nut/ Who'll be the one that will tell them what he's done?" The 12-minute "5 A.M. Trilogy" hints at both Dylan and the Dead-- the former with its juxtaposition of two unrelated stories that, in the end, make each other strong, and the latter for the intertwining acoustic guitar lines that move from sunny consonance to brooding dissonance.
Higgins begins "Mr. Blew", another droopy mid-album blues rock number, with a bit of spoken-word encouragement: "Now there's just one thing I want everybody to know: It just doesn't fucking matter. And if there was one lesson out of this song, that would be it. Yeah, that's right." In the end, that's the lesson of Higgins' story and this album, at least as it relates to any dismissive review like this. Even if these songs and their performances are lackluster, the tragedies of their characters-- the dead squirrel, the selfish "Mr. Blew", the mother mourning her soldier son on "5 A.M. Trilogy"-- and Higgins' overarching insistence that the world will keep turning are poignant. After all, before Higgins went to jail in 1973, he spent 40 hours with many of the people who play on Seconds, recording Red Hash, the strange curio that, decades later, lent him a cult legacy. Essentially, he gave the last bits of his freedom to music before heading to prison and, then, into private life. That he was able to make another record at all-- let alone one with the support of an institution like Drag City-- says more about the possibilities of resolve and redemption than I'd ever care to say about the failure of these songs.
