Kenneth Higney - 'Attic Demonstration' (One Kind Favor)

For a record as legendary as Attic Demonstration, it's not a long listen, but it's pretty satisfying. Thankfully this reissue is easily available, because originals go for a fortune, as this was never actually 'released'. Higney, in the liner notes, explains that this was a series of demos he recorded to show his songwriting talent, and he sang these as drafts, without ever intending to be the ultimate singer or musician. This was pressed up as an LP to make it easier for him to send it to people (as this was the late 70s) but I don't completely buy that explanation. I mean, why would you put a photo of yourself front and centre if you're just trying to sell some songs to others? I think the answer is somewhere more in-between; clearly Higney was operating out of the privately-pressed lineage (though I guess it's hard to declare that as ever being a scene, being so geographically dispersed and also recording-based rather than concert-focused; I guess it's a scene that came together 30 years after the fact with The Acid Archives and all that). Additionally, the music is so fleshed out, a vision of dark ramshackle psych that is so complete (in how bare it is) that I would think a potential 'customer' would be overwhelmed by the flanged guitars shredding solos and the burnout pulse throughout. Well, no one bit. The instrumentation isn't credited to anyone specifically but the reissue liner notes thank a now-deceased musician named Gordon Gaines for the guitar playing; I wonder if he's also the bassist and drummer, or if this is Higney himself bashing around. I don't want to buy into a narrative that Higney couldn't sing or play, but certainly there is a rawness in the vocals that goes far beyond the Dylan/Reed school of the unschooled; at times the melody isn't even remotely clear, lost in a flurry of missed corners -- and you think a clear vocal melody would be the goal if one was genuinely trying to sell songs. Lyrics are printed on the back, which allows the lengthier tracks ('Rock Star' and 'Ley Us Pray') to be examined more thoroughly; the latter of these is the most fragile, and also populated with unclear characters (perhaps allegorical). Throughout all songs, though, the more visceral parts of Attic Demonstration jump out from the recording, burrowing into my mind, and making the lyric sheet feel disconnected anyway. I've always put 'Children of Sound' on mixtapes as it perfectly captures the dream of psychedelia after being watered down through a few years of disappointment. The cadences are often jerky (opening cut 'Night Rider' appears to start on the off-beat; 'Quietly Leave Me' feels like it's being made up as it goes along) and the mix is uneven too; again, I suspect this was meant not to be a serious foray into the music world but were any of these self-released items genuinely mistaken for stabs at greatness? In the annals of broken/outsider greatness I personally think Attic Demonstration comes from a place more primal, more desperate and more authentic than a lot of the others - it's a very male (hairy) attack on songcraft, but a convincing one, and it never slides even remotely close to novelty territory as many others do.