Reign Ghost

Reign Ghost grew out of the teenage music scene of Oshawa, Ontario, at a time when local bands were moving rapidly from British Invasion covers toward the possibilities opened by psychedelia. The group actually existed before Bob Bryden and Lynda Squires joined it. Reign Ghost had been a cover band whose lead singer had left; Bryden and Squires came aboard in 1968 and began steering it toward original material, which was where Bryden had wanted to go all along. He was seventeen years old and had only recently switched from drums to guitar.

Bryden and Squires already had considerable musical history together. Both had been part of the wonderfully named Christopher Columbus Discovery of New Lands Band, an Oshawa group whose repertoire included Jefferson Airplane, The Doors and the West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band. Bryden was also making regular trips into Toronto's Yorkville district to see groups such as The Paupers, Kensington Market and The Ugly Ducklings. The influences were there, but Reign Ghost would develop in the less glamorous surroundings of a General Motors factory town east of Toronto, where teenagers were building their own version of the counterculture.

The early Reign Ghost went through several bassists. Original bassist Jim West, known as “Moostapha Mule,” departed after Bryden and Squires joined; their former schoolmate Joe Gallant briefly replaced him before Jerry Dufek, another of Bryden's longtime musical friends, took over. By the time the first album was recorded, the lineup consisted of Bryden on vocals and guitar, Squires on vocals, Dave Hare on keyboards, Jim Stright on lead guitar, Dufek on bass and Bob Stright on percussion.

Their path to a record contract was remarkably informal. Bryden was spending time at The Disc Shop in the Oshawa Shopping Centre when he met Tom Reid, a sales representative for Allied Records. Reid became interested when he learned that Bryden belonged to a local band playing original material, and the shop's owner, Audrey Cook, also recommended them. Before long Reign Ghost had auditioned for Allied general manager Jack Boswell and were heading toward what everyone assumed would be a recording studio.

The “studio” turned out to be the suburban Toronto basement of Bill “Cousin Bill” Bessey, familiar to young Canadians as the cowboy-hatted host of a television country-music program. Reign Ghost recorded their first album there over roughly two weekends on four-track tape, essentially live off the floor, usually in one take and with little opportunity for overdubs, retakes or repairs. Bryden and Squires were both only seventeen. The primitive circumstances account for some of the album's roughness, but they also preserved something that more elaborate production might have erased. It sounds remarkably close to six teenagers actually playing together in a basement.

When Reign Ghost appeared in 1969, it revealed a group already pushing well beyond conventional garage rock. Bryden's songs moved between youthful romance, alienation, surrealism and cosmic imagery. ‘Travels of Blue Paradox’ drew partly from his experience of seeing Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, while ‘Standing Room Only, Mr. Mars’ was the first complete song he had ever written. At the other extreme were the nine-minute ‘Eyes Knows, So Does Ears and Carolina’ and ‘Reaching’, sprawling compositions built according to what Bryden later called non-linear writing: begin with an idea and allow the song to go wherever it wanted.

The record received genuine attention around Oshawa. The Oshawa Times photographed the band with its newly released album, and Reign Ghost played regularly around the region and travelled into Northern Ontario for shows. But this was still Canada before mandatory Canadian-content regulations. Bryden remembered the absurdity of local station CKRB holding a contest in which it gave away copies of the Reign Ghost album while refusing to play the record itself.

For a time the band was even managed by David Marsden, then still known professionally as Jack London. Marsden arranged something that has since become one of the great mysteries surrounding Reign Ghost: approximately an hour of the group was professionally filmed performing at St. Gregory's Auditorium on Simcoe Street in Oshawa. Bryden never saw the finished footage and never learned what became of the film after Marsden ceased managing the band. If it survives somewhere, it would be an extraordinary document of late-1960s Canadian rock.

The first Reign Ghost was already coming apart by the time its album appeared. Bryden remembered the band as divided musically, with he and Squires increasingly determined to move elsewhere. Jerry Dufek left during one particularly difficult period, Joe Gallant briefly returned on bass, and eventually Bryden and Squires quit altogether. Rather than abandon the Reign Ghost name, however, they almost immediately built another band around it.

The key was an Oshawa trio called Mechanic Elusion: guitarist and singer John Pudlis, bassist Russ Erman and drummer Rich (Helge) Richter. Bryden already knew Pudlis from one of his earlier groups, The Things, while Richter was the cousin of Bryden's friend Wolfgang Hryciuk. Bryden and Squires admired Mechanic Elusion and proposed that the five musicians combine. The resulting group initially appeared locally as The New Reign Ghost.

This second version was not simply the first Reign Ghost with replacement musicians. The creative balance changed completely. Pudlis and Erman were writers themselves, and every member of the group sang. There were no keyboards, giving the new lineup a leaner, more guitar-driven sound, while Pudlis and Erman brought stronger pop instincts, melodic ideas and unusual chord changes into Bryden's more restless approach. The band was already playing Oshawa high schools and the city's Civic Auditorium during the summer of 1969, only a matter of weeks after the original group had broken apart.

Still under contract to Allied/Paragon, Bryden and Squires brought the new group back to Cousin Bill Bessey's basement, where the second album was again recorded quickly. The resulting Reign Ghost Featuring Lynda Squires is therefore quite different from its predecessor. Much of the writing is shorter and more direct, and Bryden shares the album with substantial contributions from Pudlis and Erman. ‘Long Day Journey No. 2’ revisits one of Bryden's first-album songs in a harder arrangement; Pudlis and Erman's ‘More Than I’ introduces their more melodic side; ‘Mother's Got Troubles’ shows off the unusual harmonic ideas Bryden admired in Mechanic Elusion; and the eight-minute ‘Enola Gay’ provides the album's great return to extended psychedelic form.

Bryden's own songs also point in several directions at once. ‘Breast Stroke Blues’ was deliberate satire, essentially the band's youthful attempt to mock conventional blues; ‘Ain't It Great’ was a song Bryden himself later regarded as a lesser effort; but ‘Solar Nice’ remained important to him because he felt it came closest to showing where he wanted his songwriting to go next. By then, “next” was arriving almost faster than Reign Ghost could record it.

The New Reign Ghost lasted only months. Pudlis was preparing to marry and wanted to settle down, Erman increasingly needed to devote himself to his family's printing business, and Richter was destined to follow Bryden into his next project. Around the same time Bryden and Squires auditioned for the Toronto production of Hair. Squires got the part, while Bryden did not, leaving him free to begin assembling what he later described as his dream band: Christmas. By December 1969, Reign Ghost was effectively over.

The second album remained unreleased until July 1970, when Paragon finally issued Reign Ghost Featuring Lynda Squires. By then its musicians had long since scattered. In one of the more remarkable coincidences in Bryden's career, Paragon released the second Reign Ghost LP at essentially the same time as the first Christmas album. One record documented a band he had already left behind while the other introduced the group that had replaced it.

That extraordinary pace explains Reign Ghost better than any convenient genre label. Bryden was seventeen when the first album was recorded and eighteen when the second was made. In little more than a year, Reign Ghost had gone through two substantially different bands, two albums and a body of original music ranging from compact psychedelic pop and satire to nine-minute compositions already brushing against progressive rock. The imperfections are part of the story: these were young musicians discovering what they could do almost as quickly as they could get it onto tape.

The records subsequently developed a life their original creators could hardly have anticipated. Collector interest grew internationally, the two albums circulated through CD and vinyl reissues, and Bryden eventually acquired the rights to the Reign Ghost recordings, later supervising remastered editions from the original tapes. Music created quickly by teenagers in an Oshawa basement had become some of the most sought-after Canadian psychedelia of its era.

More than fifty years after those sessions, the recognition finally returned to Oshawa. In 2020, Reign Ghost was inducted into the Oshawa Music Awards Hall of Fame as a Lifetime Achievement recipient, acknowledging the band's place in the musical history of the city where it had begun.

Reign Ghost lasted only briefly, but that brevity is inseparable from what makes the records compelling. Two lineups, two albums and scarcely a moment of standing still: the band captured the speed, uncertainty and creative freedom of Canadian psychedelic rock while it was still being invented.

-Robert Williston

First Album Lineup – 1968–1969

Bob Bryden: vocals, guitar
Lynda Squires: vocals
Dave Hare: keyboards
Jim Stright: lead guitar
Jerry Dufek: bass
Bob Stright: percussion

The New Reign Ghost – 1969
Second album lineup – Reign Ghost Featuring Lynda Squires

Bob Bryden: lead vocals, guitar
Lynda Squires: lead vocals, kazoo
John Pudlis: lead vocals, guitar
Russ Erman: bass, vocals
Rich (Helge) Richter: drums, vocals

Personnel Notes

Jim West was the bassist in the earlier pre-album Reign Ghost. Joe Gallant briefly replaced West before Jerry Dufek joined the first-album lineup.

Bob Bryden and Lynda Squires were the only musicians to appear on both Reign Ghost LPs.

The second lineup combined Bryden and Squires with the complete Mechanic Elusion trio of John Pudlis, Russ Erman and Rich Richter. Although its album was not issued until 1970, The New Reign Ghost itself had already broken up by the end of 1969