Christmas (Spirit of)

Christmas began in December 1969 not simply as a continuation of Reign Ghost, but as Bob Bryden's attempt to start over. Reign Ghost had broken apart and its singer, Lynda Squires, had joined the Toronto production of Hair, leaving Bryden free to assemble what he later described as his “dream band.” He wanted the strongest and most distinctive musicians he knew around Oshawa and called a meeting at the Sears coffee shop in the city's main shopping mall. Joining him were guitarist Robert Bulger, bassist Tyler Raizenne, drummer Rich (Helge) Richter, and singers Gary Squires and Wolfgang Michael Hryciuk.

The full name they chose was The Society for the Year Round Preservation of the Spirit of Christmas, soon shortened to the considerably more manageable Christmas. The group rehearsed intensively in a disused Air Force barracks at the Oshawa airport, with Bryden bringing in his songs for the others to develop. Their early music was described within the band's circle as “cosmic-symphony,” and it was not especially easy going for local teenage audiences. Christmas was already establishing the pattern that would follow it throughout its short career: original music first, accessibility second.

Their first album happened almost by accident. Through Bryden's connections with Allied Records, Christmas had been recruited as uncredited musicians for a budget Top Hits project. The sessions were going badly until the producers asked the group to jam. Those performances became ‘Oasis’ and the twenty-minute ‘Jungle Fabulous’, and the original covers concept was abandoned. Allied/Paragon combined the jams with three Bryden originals and issued Christmas in 1970 without consulting the group. What had begun as cheap studio experience for a collection of teenagers had unexpectedly become their debut LP. Contemporary RPM was actually encouraging, calling it an excellent first effort and noting that the group was already receiving Toronto radio exposure.

The accident soon gave way to something much more deliberate. By August 1970, Frank Davies of the newly established Daffodil Records had heard Christmas and was impressed by a sound he remembered as harder and more direct than Reign Ghost while remaining distinctly progressive. Gary Squires had already left, and Wolfgang Hryciuk did not continue into the Daffodil lineup, leaving Bryden, Bulger, Raizenne and Richter as a four-piece. Davies auditioned the band at Toronto's Hawk's Nest on August 20, and Daffodil soon brought them into the far more sophisticated environment of Toronto Sound Studios.

The result was Heritage. Recorded and mixed in roughly ten days during the fall of 1970, it was a remarkable leap from the improvised circumstances of the Paragon record. Bryden was only nineteen, Robert Bulger eighteen, and Tyler Raizenne and Rich Richter just sixteen. Bryden had also become the principal vocalist as well as songwriter, arranger and guitarist, surrounding the band's heavier sound with piano, organ, harpsichord and other keyboards. The album was still adventurous, but the wandering jams of the debut had been replaced by purposeful compositions such as ‘Point Blank (It Scares Me)’, ‘Zephyr Song’, ‘April Mountain’ and the title track. Bryden himself later remembered being barely able to catch his breath as he suddenly found himself carrying so much of the musical responsibility.

Released in December 1970, Heritage earned good press and regional airplay but never became the breakthrough the group expected. Daffodil's Davies later acknowledged how difficult it was to get a genuinely progressive Canadian group onto radio at the time. Even ‘Point Blank’, one of the album's most compact songs, presented a problem: when it was selected for a single, the word “goddamn” had to be bleeped for AM play. The album nevertheless travelled farther than its later obscurity suggests; by May 1971 RPM reported that Heritage had also been released in Australia and New Zealand.

Pressure for something more commercial produced one of the strangest episodes in the Christmas story. The group recorded Neil Sedaka's ‘I'm A Song, Sing Me’, a decision remembered with undisguised contempt in the band's later retrospective history. If the single was intended to make Christmas easier to sell, the strategy did little to change their fortunes. In September 1971 they moved in virtually the opposite direction when they opened for Crowbar at Massey Hall in Toronto, delivering what the later booklet called an “explosive and volatile” performance that polarized the audience.

The surviving Massey Hall tape is particularly revealing because it catches Christmas changing in real time. Alongside Heritage material such as ‘Point Blank’ and ‘Blues on an Iceberg’ were the unreleased ‘When Night Falls’ and a long performance incorporating ‘Field of Honour’ and early portions of ‘Beyond the Fields We Know’. The latter would not appear in finished form until Lies to Live By three years later. Christmas was already moving toward longer, darker and more elaborate compositions before Preston Wynn had even joined the group. Bryden later described the recording as “prog-punk,” a surprisingly appropriate description of what they were doing that night.

After Massey Hall, the band retreated to a country barn to work without distraction. Preston Wynn, from nearby Whitby, joined on vocals, piano and guitar, allowing Bryden to step away from being the group's principal singer. Davies felt Wynn brought more melody and carefully constructed vocal harmony to the music without diminishing its progressive character. During this period Christmas also became The Spirit of Christmas. There appears to have been no carefully planned reinvention behind the change; Bryden later admitted that he could not really remember why they altered the name. What he did remember was where the music was heading: “very dark and progressive.”

Work on Lies to Live By began in 1972, but completing it became an ordeal. Daffodil's worsening financial position repeatedly interrupted production, at one point shelving the project for roughly eight months while Davies searched for new investment. Additional funding eventually allowed recording to continue, explaining the otherwise curious original LP credit to Wild Bill Ballard and Myron Wolfe for the “organisation of additional funds.” With a considerably larger budget and sessions at Toronto's Manta Sound, the group finally had the resources to match the scale of its ideas. Bryden has specifically pointed out that the album contains a real Mellotron, while Wynn's vocals and piano gave the band an entirely different emotional range.

When Lies to Live By finally appeared in late 1974, it was less a continuation of Heritage than the culmination of the direction Christmas had been pursuing since Massey Hall. ‘All the Wrong Roads’, ‘Stay Dead Lazarus’, ‘Voice in the Wilderness’, ‘War Story’, ‘The Factory’ and ‘Beyond the Fields We Know’ formed a dark, interconnected collection concerned with war, death, industrialization, authority, faith, individuality and the search for some kind of meaning beyond them. The industrial anxiety of ‘The Factory’ was especially personal to Bryden, who directly connected it with spending his teenage years in General Motors-dominated Oshawa.

The album was difficult to place on commercial radio, but it was not simply ignored. Davies remembered American progressive and FM publications responding strongly even though he was unable to secure the U.S. release he wanted. In February 1975, Billboard reported that Lies to Live By had become Daffodil's second-biggest album in terms of incoming interest, behind only A Foot in Coldwater's All Around Us. The interest was real; turning it into a sustainable career proved much harder.

By early 1975, Christmas / The Spirit of Christmas was finished. In barely five years the group had moved from basement-level psychedelic experimentation through the heavy progressive rock of Heritage to the much darker and more elaborate world of Lies to Live By. Bryden later observed that the three studio albums — four records if the Massey Hall recording is included — can almost sound as though they were made by entirely different bands. For him, that constant movement was simply part of Christmas: the group never stayed in one place long enough to become predictable.

The audience they had struggled to find during the band's lifetime arrived gradually. The albums became prized among collectors, legitimate CD reissues brought the music to listeners who had never seen the original LPs, and Bryden finally issued his preferred mix of the September 23, 1971 Massey Hall concert in a tiny 1989 archival edition. He later remarked that recognition had grown especially strongly outside Canada, although Canadian interest had begun catching up as well.

That recognition eventually came home. In 2020, Reign Ghost, Christmas and The Spirit of Christmas were inducted into the Oshawa Music Awards Hall of Fame as Lifetime Achievement recipients, bringing together the intertwined history of the groups that had grown out of the city's late-1960s and early-1970s underground.

-Robert Williston

Original Lineup – 1969–1970
Formation and first Christmas album

Bob Bryden: guitar, vocals
Robert Bulger: guitar
Tyler Raizenne: bass
Rich (Helge) Richter: drums
Gary Squires: vocals
Wolfgang Michael Hryciuk: vocals

Daffodil Lineup – 1970–1971
Heritage era

Bob Bryden: guitars, vocals, piano, organ, harpsichord, electric harpsichord, celeste, effects
Robert Bulger: guitars
Tyler Raizenne: bass
Rich (Helge) Richter: drums

Live at Massey Hall Lineup – September 23, 1971

Bob Bryden: vocals, guitar
Robert Bulger: lead guitar
Tyler Raizenne: bass
Rich (Helge) Richter: drums

The Spirit of Christmas Lineup – 1972–1975
Lies to Live By era

Bob Bryden: rhythm guitar
Robert Bulger: lead guitar
Tyler Raizenne: bass guitar
Helge Richter: drums, percussion
Preston Wynn: main vocals, piano, guitar