Reign Ghost Featuring Lynda Squires

By the summer of 1969, the Reign Ghost that had made the first album was already gone. Bob Bryden and Lynda Squires had become increasingly restless with the original lineup, and when the group finally broke apart they kept the name but rebuilt virtually everything around it. Bryden was only eighteen, yet in the space of a few months he would move through two different versions of Reign Ghost and begin assembling Christmas before the year was over.

The catalyst was Mechanic Elusion, an Oshawa trio made up of guitarist and singer John Pudlis, bassist Russ Erman and drummer Rich (Helge) Richter. Bryden had known Pudlis from an earlier band called The Things, while Richter would later follow him into Christmas. Bryden and Squires admired the trio and simply approached them about combining forces. The result was a five-piece initially billed around Oshawa as The New Reign Ghost: Bryden, Squires, Pudlis, Erman and Richter.

That change transformed the music immediately. The first Reign Ghost had contained a sometimes uneasy mixture of personalities and influences; the new group was more compact and much more evenly involved in creating the material. Bryden was no longer carrying most of the songwriting alone. Pudlis and Erman brought their own songs, melodies and chord ideas, while all five members contributed vocally. There were no keyboards this time, leaving the sound more dependent on guitars, bass, drums and the contrast between several very different voices. Bryden later remembered Pudlis and Erman as somewhat more pop-oriented writers than himself, but he enjoyed the difference.

The new band was already appearing publicly by the summer. An August 6, 1969 Oshawa Journal report on the rock show at the Civic Auditorium singled out Lynda Squires' singing, Bryden's voice and the group's “original sound,” while also remarking on the wide variety of music in the set. It is a particularly valuable glimpse of this second Reign Ghost while it actually existed, before collectors and later psychedelic-rock histories had attached their own labels to it.

Bryden and Squires were still under contract to Allied/Paragon, so there was little delay between forming the new band and recording it. Once again they ended up in Bill “Cousin Bill” Bessey's basement studio, working quickly and with little opportunity for corrections or retakes. Bryden later remembered the guitar sounds particularly fondly and described the vocals as nicely strident. Like the first album, the second was made before anyone involved had much time to second-guess what they were doing.

But Reign Ghost Featuring Lynda Squires does not simply repeat the debut. The first record had allowed songs such as ‘Eyes Knows, So Does Ears and Carolina’ and ‘Reaching’ to wander for nine minutes at a time. Here the writing is generally shorter, harder and more direct, with eight of the nine selections staying within conventional song length.

The opening ‘Long Day Journey No. 2’ announces the change immediately. Bryden had already recorded the song on the first Reign Ghost album, but this version strips away some of the earlier looseness and pushes it toward a much more forceful rock arrangement. Bryden later remembered simply wanting a rockier version, and that is exactly what it sounds like: the same composition reconsidered by an almost entirely different band.

‘More Than I’, written by Pudlis and Erman, introduces another important difference. Bryden remembered it as one of Pudlis's big ballads and, looking back decades later, still considered it a good song. ‘Mother's Got Troubles’ goes somewhere stranger; Bryden was particularly impressed by its unusual chord changes and regarded it as one of the more interesting pieces brought into Reign Ghost by the Mechanic Elusion side of the group. Their contribution was not simply additional personnel — it changed the musical vocabulary of the band.

Then comes ‘Pudsy's Parable’, a deliberately lightweight piece that the band treated as another sarcastic swipe at bubblegum pop. That humour had already appeared on the first album with ‘Gum Wrapper Song’, and it remained part of Reign Ghost's personality. They could spend eight or nine minutes pursuing an ambitious psychedelic idea and then turn around and make fun of the very idea of commercial pop songwriting. Bryden's own ‘Ain't It Great (How I Love You)’ is almost defiantly simple; he later described it as one of his lesser songs and wondered why they had included it at all.

Side two begins with another joke, although a sharper one. ‘Breast Stroke Blues’ was not Bryden earnestly attempting to become a blues writer. He has been unusually candid that the song was satire and that the band was essentially mocking the blues. Whether the joke works for every listener is another matter, but it reveals how opinionated Bryden already was about music at eighteen. He wanted songs to surprise him, change direction and resist repetition; conventional blues structures represented almost the opposite of what he was searching for.

‘Solar Nice’ is much more important to understanding where Bryden himself was heading. Of his compositions on the second album, it remained his favourite, and he later described it as a fairly accurate indication of the direction he wanted to pursue as a songwriter. Its slightly off-centre melodic character points beyond Reign Ghost toward the increasingly unusual writing that would soon emerge with Christmas.

John Pudlis' ‘Breadbox’ brings the album back to a compact rocker before the entire scale suddenly changes with ‘Enola Gay’. At more than eight minutes, it is the record's one real return to the extended form that had dominated parts of the debut. Bryden remembered how strongly Pudlis and the Mechanic Elusion musicians had been influenced by Iron Butterfly, something particularly apparent in ‘Enola Gay’. But the longer structure also suited Bryden's own instinct for songs that could keep moving until they found their own ending.

The original album itself hints at how peculiar the track was. The back sleeve offers “Special thanks to Boris Carloff for vocal on ‘Enola Gay’”, followed by the wonderfully strange line “All the baby birds are dead!” Even the songwriting credit is unsettled: the back cover attributes ‘Enola Gay’ to Russ Erman, while the record label credits J. Pudlis–R. Erman. The contradiction somehow feels appropriate for an album assembled so quickly and released only after the people who made it had already scattered.

That scattering happened almost as rapidly as the band's formation. By Bryden's recollection, Pudlis was preparing to marry and wanted to settle down, Erman was turning his attention toward his family's Oshawa printing business, and Richter followed Bryden into Christmas. Around the same period Bryden and Squires auditioned for the Toronto production of Hair. Squires got the part, removing another central figure from the group. By the end of 1969, The New Reign Ghost was finished.

The record remained behind. Although recorded in 1969, Reign Ghost Featuring Lynda Squires was not issued by Paragon until July 1970, many months after the band had ceased to exist. In one of the stranger coincidences in the Bryden story, Paragon released it at essentially the same moment as the first Christmas album. One LP therefore documented the group Bryden had already left behind while another introduced the band that had replaced it.

That timing makes the album particularly fascinating now. The two Reign Ghost records were made barely a year apart, yet they are products of almost entirely different groups. The first captures six young musicians learning how far a song might stretch; the second is tighter, more guitar-driven and far more collaborative, with Bryden's increasingly restless writing sitting beside the melodic instincts of Pudlis and Erman and the developing power of Richter's drumming.

For Bob Bryden, even this was already becoming part of the past. Before the second Reign Ghost album had reached the public, he had moved on again.

-Robert Williston

Reflections on the Second Reign Ghost Album
by Bob Bryden (Sept. 22, 2013)

1969 was an incredibly busy year for me. I was at the ripe old age of 18. In an era when bands were reinventing themselves at lightning speed with each album, I went a step further. In 1969 I was in three bands all of whom recorded. The first Reign Ghost album came out at the beginning of that year and by year’s end I had formed and recorded the second Reign Ghost album and founded my longest lasting ensemble, Christmas.

The second Reign Ghost album or ‘Reign Ghost featuring Lynda Squires’ as the cover states, or ‘The New Reign Ghost’ as we were billed at our initial gigs, had a rapid genesis. The line-up of the first album quickly changed in mid 1969 as Lynda and I were increasingly restless to find something different. There was a local 3 piece band we admired called Mechanic Elusion, comprising John Pudlis (whom I had played with in one of my first bands, The Things); Russ Erman and Rich (Helge) Richter. Rich was the cousin of my friend Wolfgang Hryciuk both of whom would later be in the first incarnation of Christmas.

I recall that Lynda and I thought Mechanic Elusion were a very cool ensemble. I recall that we approached them and asked if they wanted to amalgamate and become a new version of Reign Ghost. Obviously, they were into it. Pudlis, Erman and Richter had a lot of interesting original material. (What they lacked in lyrical content they made up for in melodies and interesting chord progressions - ‘Mother’s Got Trouble’ is a case in point). Clearly, Mechanic Elusion (and particularly Pudlis) had been big Iron Butterfly fans as is evident in some of their writing (‘Enola Gay’) and Pudlis’s vocal tone. Lynda and I didn’t seem to mind that too much.

Lynda and I were still under contract to Allied/Paragon so we brought the ‘New Reign Ghost’ into the studio very quickly. It would seem that all this transition took place between June and July of 1969. The new band played a lot gigs in the Oshawa area including high schools and the 2nd big rock show at the Civic Auditorium.

It’s incredible to me when I look back and think that in a few short months, the first Reign Ghost folded, the second Reign Ghost was born and then by the end of the year - that version of Reign Ghost had also folded so that by December I was rallying the troops to form Christmas! The New Reign Ghost, I remember, folded for a couple of main reasons - John Pudlis was getting married and wanted to ‘settle down’; Russ Erman wanted to devote time to running the family printing business in Oshawa (Arjay Printers) and Rich - well Rich, he came with me into the Christmas fold. Around this time Lynda and I had auditioned for the Toronto production of ‘Hair’. Lynda got the gig and that left me free to form and pursue Christmas, my ultimate dream band at that time.

In retrospect, listening back to this newly remastered version of the 2nd Reign Ghost album, I can enjoy it. My only regret is that I didn’t get some of my better songs on the record. The tune I’m most pleased with is ‘Solar Nice’ which is a pretty accurate indication of where I wanted to go songwriting wise. ‘Breast Stroke Blues’ was a complete satire and as such it’s a bit of a throwaway. I hate to say it - but we were kind of ‘mocking the blues’. ‘Ain’t It Great’ was one of my lesser tunes and I’m not quite sure why we put it on the record. Of course, ‘Long Day Journey’ is a carry-over from the first Reign Ghost album. I guess I wanted to have a rockier version of that. I’m impressed with the recording over-all. Considering, once again we were recording in Cousin Bill Bessey’s basement (see insert notes on first Reign Ghost album). The guitar tones are pretty cool and the vocal recording is nicely strident. As was the custom, the album was done VERY quickly with little time for corrections or re-takes but as such - the performances hold their own.

We artists can be pretty hard on ourselves, but I’ve learned to appreciate the older stuff over the years, for it’s historical value if nothing else. The Reign Ghost albums were both immediate and spontaneous products of the times. Things went from the mind to the studio to the public with amazing rapidity in those days. As the outpouring of a seventeen and then eighteen year (respectively) poetic mind I can’t really fault either album. The Canadian music business was still in the womb and nobody really knew what they were doing, therefore I’m amazed and pleased that the recordings can still generate interest with new audiences.

This new re-master hasn’t been tampered with too much. It’s just punchier, more in-your-face. I hope you enjoy it.
– Bob Bryden