ST

Christmas, released on Paragon in 1970, is a record born not from careful planning but from pure, accidental alchemy. Bob Bryden, only 18 and fresh from the breakup of Reign Ghost, had set about assembling what he regarded as his dream band in Oshawa, Ontario. A meeting at the Sears coffee shop in the city’s main shopping mall brought together Wolfgang Hryciuk, Rich Richter, Gary Squires, Tyler Raizenne and Robert Bulger, all drawn into Bryden’s determination to create something original. Yet the session that produced their first album began under considerably less ambitious circumstances: Christmas had been recruited to record a cheap Top Hits album, essentially a collection of current cover songs intended for the bargain bins.

The plan did not last long. With the tape running, the producers asked Christmas to simply jam. What followed was spontaneous enough that the cover-album concept was abandoned, leaving the group’s own songs and improvised performances to form an album that had never really been intended to exist. The retrospective history later included with Christmas Live states that Allied released the resulting LP without consulting the band. In another wonderfully strange twist, Paragon issued the first Christmas album on the same day as Reign Ghost Featuring Lynda Squires, leaving Bryden with records by both his former and current groups arriving almost simultaneously.

That accidental beginning explains much of the record’s peculiar appeal. Side one opens with three Bryden compositions — ‘Just Suppose’, ‘Your Humble Suitor’ and ‘Sorry I Bore You Victoria’ — that drift through a hazy, subdued strain of psychedelic pop. There is an appealing lack of urgency to them; the band sounds as though it is still discovering what it wants to be. The atmosphere is dreamy, slightly lethargic and occasionally almost somnambulant, with the songs allowed to unfold at their own pace rather than being pushed toward obvious hooks or conventional arrangements.

The six-minute ‘Oasis’ is where things begin to open up. Bryden’s guitar becomes more prominent and assured, while the rest of the band gradually loosens its grip on conventional song structure. The track feels almost like a bridge between the relatively contained material preceding it and the complete abandonment waiting on the second side.

And then comes ‘Jungle Fabulous’.

Running more than twenty minutes and occupying the entire second side, ‘Jungle Fabulous’ is the album’s defining moment — a sprawling, largely unrestrained group improvisation that wanders wherever the musicians happen to take it. The comparison with the Grateful Dead’s ‘Dark Star’ is difficult to avoid, although Christmas sounds younger, rougher and considerably less calculated. There is no sense that they were consciously trying to manufacture an epic psychedelic statement. They had been told to jam, and they jammed. That lack of self-consciousness is precisely what gives the piece its strange pull. It can be hypnotic, indulgent, beautifully aimless and maddeningly long, sometimes within the same few minutes.

RPM gave Christmas a surprisingly positive notice at the time, calling it an “excellent first effort” and noting that the Oshawa group was already receiving exposure on Toronto radio. The problem was obvious, however: ‘Jungle Fabulous’ ran for more than twenty minutes, making the entire second side virtually unusable for conventional radio programming. Beyond Toronto the album appears to have received little attention, and later accounts even recall copies being mistakenly filed in record-store Christmas sections. It was hardly the sort of beginning from which anyone could have predicted the album’s remarkable life among collectors decades later.

The record disappeared quickly enough that its obscurity eventually became part of its attraction. As Canadian psychedelic records began to be rediscovered by collectors, original copies of Christmas became increasingly difficult to find, and prices climbed accordingly. Today it is considered one of the top five most collectible albums ever released in Canada, with exceptional original copies commanding several thousand dollars. That is an extraordinary afterlife for a record that, by Bryden’s own recollection, was never really supposed to exist in the first place.

Yet rarity is ultimately the least interesting reason to hear Christmas. What makes the album important is that it catches the group before anyone had decided exactly what Christmas was supposed to be. Only months later, with Gary Squires and Wolfgang Hryciuk gone and the band reduced to the Bryden-Bulger-Raizenne-Richter quartet, Heritage would reveal a dramatically heavier, more deliberate and sophisticated group. Here everything is still loose. Ideas wander off, songs breathe too long, and the musicians follow one another into places they probably had not anticipated going.

That makes Christmas something more revealing than a polished debut could ever have been: a snapshot of artistic transition preserved almost by accident. It sits directly between the psychedelic experimentation of Reign Ghost and the increasingly ambitious music Christmas would create on Heritage and, eventually, Lies to Live By. It meanders, resists hooks and occasionally tests the listener’s patience, but those imperfections are inseparable from its charm.

What survives in the grooves is the sound of a group of very young musicians discovering themselves while the tape happened to be running. There was no grand plan, no carefully calculated debut and apparently very little expectation that these sessions would become anything significant.

More than half a century later, the accident has become a Canadian psychedelic landmark.

-Robert Williston