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When Reign Ghost's first album appeared in the spring of 1969, its principal songwriter Bob Bryden was seventeen years old. So was singer Lynda Squires when the sessions were made. That fact explains some of the record's rough edges, but it also explains much of its appeal. This is not a group of seasoned musicians carefully reproducing an established psychedelic formula. It is the sound of teenagers in Oshawa discovering that songs did not necessarily have to behave themselves.

Reign Ghost had existed before Bryden and Squires joined. Originally a local cover band, it gradually became something quite different after the pair arrived in 1968 and began pushing it toward original material. Bryden had only recently switched from drums to guitar and was still learning the instrument; remarkably, part of ‘Reaching’ grew from the very first musical idea he ever came up with on guitar. His first completed composition, ‘Standing Room Only, Mr. Mars’, had been written only the year before on piano.

The eventual album lineup brought together Bryden and Squires with lead guitarist Jim Stright, keyboardist Dave Hare, bassist Jerry Dufek and percussionist Bob Stright. Bryden and Squires had previously played with Dufek in The Christopher Columbus Discovery of New Lands Band, while Hare and the Stright brothers belonged to the earlier Reign Ghost. Bryden later remembered the combination almost as two separate musical camps forced into the same group. That tension would eventually pull the band apart, but on the record it creates some of its most interesting contrasts.

Their route to a record contract was almost comically informal. Bryden was hanging around The Disc Shop in the Oshawa Shopping Centre when he met Allied Records representative Tom Reid. Reid was interested that a local group was actually writing original material, the store's Audrey Cook also recommended them, and before long Reign Ghost had auditioned for Allied general manager Jack Boswell. The band suddenly had a record deal.

The studio turned out to be Bill “Cousin Bill” Bessey's basement in suburban Toronto. Bessey was familiar to Canadian television viewers as a country-music personality, an unlikely figure from the band's point of view to be recording a group of teenage psychedelic musicians. There was little glamour involved. Bryden remembers the album being completed over roughly two weekends on a four-track machine, live off the floor, usually in a single take, without overdubs or the luxury of correcting many mistakes.

That recording method is important. Reign Ghost is rough because it really was rough. Instruments occasionally push against each other, performances are not polished into perfection, and the recording has none of the carefully layered studio construction that would later become possible with Christmas. But the lack of refinement also means very little stands between the listener and the band. What went down in Bessey's basement is essentially what Reign Ghost sounded like in the room.

‘Travels of Blue Paradox’ immediately establishes Bryden's imagination as the centre of the record. He later connected the song partly with seeing Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey in Cinerama during the summer of 1968, but also recognized traces of his troubled relationship with the Catholic Church in its imagery. Even the title was personal: the “Blue Paradox,” Bryden concluded years later, was probably himself.

‘Long Day Journey’ is considerably more direct, essentially a young love song inspired by Squires, but ‘Standing Room Only, Mr. Mars’ returns immediately to alienation. Knowing it was Bryden's first completed song makes its presence on the album particularly striking. Within barely a year of beginning to write, he was already thinking outside conventional romantic pop subjects and trying to turn feelings of estrangement into something stranger.

The nine-minute ‘Eyes Knows, So Does Ears and Carolina’ is where the first side really opens up. Bryden later called it his first recorded “epic” and used a particularly good phrase to describe what he was doing at the time: non-linear writing. Rather than deciding where a song ought to go, Reign Ghost allowed it to keep changing until it arrived somewhere on its own. That instinct — long forms, abrupt shifts and ideas allowed to wander beyond conventional song structure — would remain central to Bryden's music through Christmas and eventually Lies to Live By.

Side two is even less predictable. ‘Curio Shop’ moves into a waltz rhythm; Bryden has freely acknowledged the influence of Country Joe and the Fish's ‘Janis’, although the song quickly becomes his own. Dave Hare's ‘Black Ode’ brings another writer into the picture and gives the album some of its most direct psychedelic colour, with Bryden remembering its fuzz and unusual changes particularly fondly.

Then Jim Stright's minute-and-fifty-second ‘Gum Wrapper Song’ deliberately punctures the atmosphere. The band treated it as a joke about bubblegum pop and became intentionally silly when performing it. It is easy to dismiss as a novelty until you realize how revealing it is about these teenagers: Reign Ghost were already developing firm opinions about what they thought music should and should not be. They were, as Bryden later admitted with some amusement, musical snobs.

‘Southern Hemisphere Blues Legacy’ is one of the album's most enduring Bryden compositions. Its stream-of-consciousness language is exactly the sort of thing that might have been edited into something more conventional had an experienced producer been shaping the material, but that would have defeated the point. Bryden was seventeen and simply allowed the words to arrive, sometimes logically and sometimes not. More than fifty years later he still performs the song.

The album ends with another nine-minute piece, ‘Reaching’, written by Bryden and Jerry Dufek. Again the performance is imperfect — Bryden himself has pointed out moments where the guitars drift out of tune — but the composition is revealing. Like ‘Eyes Knows’, it refuses to hurry toward a conclusion. Ideas appear, disappear and return, and the band follows them. Bryden had grown up playing the Doors' ‘The End’ and ‘When the Music's Over’, and had absorbed the idea that a rock song could be a journey rather than a three-minute construction.

Perhaps the most important instrument on the album, however, is Lynda Squires' voice. Bryden supplied much of the material, but Reign Ghost never sounds simply like a vehicle for a teenage songwriter. Squires gives the group another centre of gravity, and the contrast between her singing and Bryden's is part of what makes the record feel so peculiar and difficult to categorize. A contemporary Oshawa writer covering the band later that summer singled out Squires' voice, Bryden's singing and the group's original sound, noting the unusual variety in what they played. That judgment, made while the band was still active, has aged well.

The album received tangible local attention. The April 12, 1969 Oshawa Times photographed the six musicians holding their newly released LP and reported that Reign Ghost had already been playing regularly around the area and hoped to travel more widely through Ontario. Yet the realities of Canadian radio before mandatory Canadian-content regulations could be absurd. Bryden remembered local station CKRB actually giving away copies of the album in a contest while refusing to play it on the air.

There was even an attempt to capture Reign Ghost visually. During a brief period when David Marsden, then known as Jack London, managed the band, a professional crew filmed approximately an hour of the group performing at St. Gregory's Auditorium in Oshawa. Bryden never saw the finished footage and does not know what became of it. If those reels still exist somewhere, they would constitute an extraordinary surviving document of late-1960s Canadian underground rock.

The first Reign Ghost did not survive much longer than the album. Bryden and Squires increasingly wanted to move elsewhere musically, while Dufek, Hare and the Stright brothers represented another side of the group. Within months the lineup had splintered, and by the summer of 1969 Bryden and Squires were already assembling what would be billed as The New Reign Ghost.

That short lifespan makes the record more interesting rather than less. Nobody involved had enough time to become comfortable. Bryden had barely learned guitar, he and Squires were still only seventeen, the recording circumstances were basic and the sessions were rushed. Yet within those limitations they produced two nine-minute pieces, surreal lyrics, fuzzed-out psychedelia, satire, love songs, waltzes and songs that simply wandered until they decided they were finished.

-Robert Williston

Reign Ghost - The First Album
New Reflections by Bob Bryden

I wrote my first complete song in 1967. It was called ‘Standing Room Only, Mr. Mars’ and I composed it on the piano having taken a bitter year of bedgruding lessons on that instrument. Having started in music as a drummer for a band with Jerry Dufek in 1965 called The Outcasts, by 1968 I had decided that what I wanted to do was write songs. I switched to guitar in that year. It’s also a matter of a little pride (and wonder) with me that the very first thing I did on that instrument was write a song. I only knew one chord so I played the A-chord then strummed open and repeated the pattern. That very ‘bit’ became a part of a song called ‘Reaching’ (It’s the ‘Seeking the Ghost of Reign envelops only one sad refrain’ section). So, not only was the first song I wrote on the guitar recorded but the very first thing I ever attempted on the instrument. I’m strangely proud of that fact!

I was living in a small city in Ontario called Oshawa just east of Toronto. There were only three choices in this town. Get out, work for General Motors on the assmbly line or be creative. I had been ‘diagnosed’ as an artist around this time so for me the choice was simple. The world was spinning in cultural, political and spiritual revolution and I knew which side I was on.

The years 1967-1969 were simply incredible to live through. Don’t let anyone kid you, it was truly magic time. The world was in upheaval but also in Renaissance. I don’t want to candy coat it too much. It was also extremely trying and difficult but creatively speaking, bands and musical artists were putting out (at least) two albums a year and the most brilliant thing was that they were completely reinventing themselves often from one album to the next. My case was no different although perhaps forged in much humbler circumstances than my counterparts in San Francisco, London, L.A. or New York. Although Toronto did have it’s own Haight-Asbury in the Yorkville scene which gave birth to the careers of Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, Gordon Lightfoot and Bruce Cockburn among others. I used to travel to that mecca nearly every week-end to listen to the unsung royalty of Canadian music history: The Paupers, The Kensington Market and The Ugly Ducklings.

Through most of 1967 my girlfriend Lynda Squires and I had been singing in an elegant, tasteful band called The Christopher Columbus Discovery of New Lands Band. Lynda and I had met in the cultural/spiritual trenches at Oshawa Catholic High School. As good as TCCDONLB was it was still ‘only’ a cover band. We did Jefferson Airplane, Janis Joplin, West Coast Art Experimental Band, The Doors, etc. (My personal showstopper was full length version of ‘The End’ complete with lightshow and dry ice which we traditionally ended our shows with). In 1968, when that band folded due to typical inner combustion, I was invited to jam with one of our local competitors who had just lost their lead singer, another ‘cover’ band calledThe Reign Ghost. Eventually both Lynda and I came aboard this band and Reign Ghost gradually became an original band which was my ultimate goal. Soon the original bass player for Reign Ghost, Jim West (alias ‘Moostapha Mule’) also left and Lynda and I brought our old Oshawa Catholic High School cohort Joe Gallant on board to play bass. Joe also left pretty soon though as he was definitely on some other plane compared to the other original members of Reign Ghost, Jim and Bob Stright (alias Stork) and Dave Hare. (There’s a photo of the 6 of us standing on a windy bluff with Joe, Lynda and myself on one side and Jim, Stork and Dave on the other and it absolutely looks like two separate bands which in many ways it was!) When Joe left we recruited yet another friend of ours, my (by now) ancient band-mate Jerry Dufek to handle the bass chores. The line-up for the first album was now in place.

Throughout this tiime and the rest of my life as well I did what a lot of disenfranchised, searching humans with revolutionary leanings do - I hung out in record stores. The store in particular was The Disc Shop at the Oshawa Shopping Centre. One day while leaning on the bins there I met a sales rep from a record label in Toronto. Tom Reid worked for Allied Records. Allied’s main claim to fame was that they distributed the Elektra label in Canada. So technically (in Canada anyway) we could say we were labelmates with The Doors, Ars Nova, Rhinocerous, Clear Light, Earth Opera, Eclection, The Incredible String Band and a host of other bands/artists I loved. They also had a little subsidiary ‘wing’ which produced and released albums - mostly country and western. That label at that time was called Paragon).

Tom Reid took an immediate interest in the fact that I was in a band doing original material. We also came highly recommended by the record shop owner, Audrey Cook. Shortly thereafter Reign Ghost auditioned for the general manager of Allied and owner of the Paragon label, Jack Boswell. We were en route to a recording studio in Toronto quite rapidly after that meeting.

As an aside, I always like to tell the tale of our arrival at ‘the studio’ which was not housed in a very studio-like setting but rather in a house in the suburbs. At that time the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation aired a TV program on Saturday afternoon which may have been the first video jockey show. It was hosted by a fellow named Cousin Bill who sat behind a desk wearing a cowboy hat and spun country and western songs while he showed still photographs of barns, fields, cows, tractors and various farm implements. Young people used to joke about him because at the time he seemed the epitomy of un-hip. (Today he’d probably be among the hippest!) You can imagine our surprise when we discovered he was our recording engineer!! Our first album was being recorded in Cousin Bill Bessey’s basement!

Reign Ghost spent perhaps a total of two week-ends working on our first album in the fall of 1968. There were no re-takes, no overdubs, everything was recorded to a 4-track tape machine live off the floor usually in one take and there was little chance to re-do or correct any mistakes. Hence the record is pretty raw but it’s also pretty real. I’m proud of it for that reason. Lynda and I were both only 17 years old at the time of recording!

As for the songs, lyrically ‘Travels of Blue Paradox’ was partly inspired by seeing Kubrick’s ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ in it’s original Cinerama format in the summer of 1968. Truly, a mind-altering experience. (I did NOT need or take drugs at this time!) In retrospect, the lyrics also seem imbued with imagery from my less-than-happy experience with the Catholic Church. ‘Standing Room Only, Mr. Mars’ an anthem of alienation, and as mentioned above was the very first song I ever wrote. I also composed ‘Travels’, ‘Curio Shop’, ‘Southern Hemisphere Blues Legacy’ on the piano while the remainder of my tunes on the lp were the very first things I attempted on guitar which I had just taken up that very year. I’m sure the poetic, unconscious outpouring of my 17 year old poetic brain in songs like ‘Long Day Journey’, ‘Southern Hemisphere Blues Legacy’, ‘Curio Shop’, ‘Eyes Knows, So Does Ear’ and ‘Carolina’ were all reflections on my relationship with Lynda at the time. She was my first girl friend.

As a band, Reign Ghost was an often very frustrated ensemble due in the main to the creative restlessness of Lynda and I. We wanted something different. On a trivia note, It’s a little know fact that for a brief time Reign Ghost were actually managed by another Canadian ‘legend’. Jack London managed the band for awhile. ‘Jack’ (or David Marsden - his real name) was none other than Jack London of Jack London and the Sparrows who later evolved into Steppenwolf. The ‘management’ situation didn’t work out. Although he did arrange to have Reign Ghost filmed by a professional crew at St. Gregory’s auditorium on Simcoe St. in Oshawa. Now that would be something – to find those cans of film. The shoot was directed by a fellow named Eric or John Till (I think.)

The album, recorded in 1968, was released in early April 1969. Reception locally was good but this was before the Canadian Content regulations were in place (which soon FORCED Canadian radio to play Canadian artists!). Crazy screwed-up ironies abounded. For example, local Oshawa radio station CKRB hosted a contest to give away copies of the album but the station couldn’t and wouldn’t ACTUALLY PLAY the record!!!

Reign Ghost played frequently and even did a little tour of North Ontario. (There’s a picture of me riding a horse at a place where the band was staying for one of those gigs). The kids around Oshawa responded well but not passionately to Reign Ghost. There seemed to be this dichotomy within the band. As previously mentioned, we seemed like two bands. There was Lynda, Jerry and I on one side and Dave, Stork and Jim on the other. Eventually this tension would provoke Lynda and I to seek greener musical pastures. A re-invention was about to take place - and quickly within that very year 1969. A ‘New Reign Ghost’ was about to be born and the dated photos reveal that this rapid transition most likely took place in June 1969, a mere two months after the first album was released.

A note on the re-mastering: I purchased the rights to both Reign Ghost albums from Jack Boswell a few years ago. We promptly took the master tapes into the studio and I ‘re-mastered’ them. This version of the first album particularly I firmly believe is the best it has ever sounded. I always felt the vinyl and all the cd reissues (including bootlegs) sounded very ‘soft’ and had no ‘kick’. This version of the album sounds like you’re in the room with the band. It’s loud, raw, with plenty of tape hiss - but it sounds like what we sounded like! I hope you like it.
-Bob Bryden, August, 2013