Heritage

Only a few months separate the first Christmas LP from Heritage, but musically they sound like records made by two different bands. The Paragon album had happened almost accidentally, capturing a young Oshawa group still discovering itself through original songs and long studio jams. By the time Christmas entered Toronto Sound in October 1970, Gary Squires and Wolfgang Hryciuk were gone, leaving the remarkably young quartet of Bob Bryden, Robert Bulger, Tyler Raizenne and Rich Richter. Bryden was only nineteen, Bulger eighteen, while Raizenne and Richter were just sixteen. Those ages are worth remembering, because Heritage contains more ideas, confidence and sheer ambition than many bands twice their age could have comfortably handled.

Daffodil producer Frank Davies had heard the transformation for himself. He recalled auditioning Christmas on August 20, 1970 and finding the new group considerably harder and more direct than Reign Ghost while still retaining a progressive character. He was equally struck by Bryden’s writing, which had moved toward social and political concerns and a much darker view of the world facing young people. That description fits Heritage perfectly. This was no longer six teenagers experimenting simply to see what might happen. Christmas had found its identity.

The brief instrumental ‘Zenith’ opens the door before dropping almost immediately into ‘Rise Up’, and the difference from the debut is obvious. The sound is heavier and more assured, the arrangements have purpose, and Bryden’s writing has become considerably more ambitious without losing the restless quality that made the first album interesting. His presence is everywhere — guitars, vocals, piano, organ, harpsichord, electric harpsichord, celeste and assorted effects — but Heritage never feels like a solo record. Robert Bulger’s guitar gives the music another sharp edge, while Raizenne and Richter form an extraordinarily solid rhythm section for two sixteen-year-olds.

‘Goin’ to Oklahoma’ carries the romantic fantasy of simply getting on a horse and disappearing somewhere new, while ‘Something Borrowed’ turns inward, almost fragile by comparison. Then comes ‘Point Blank (It Scares Me)’, barely two and a half minutes long but one of the album’s most concentrated statements. Its imagery of the Pentagon, nerve gas, warships, predictions and military power makes clear how far Bryden had already moved from conventional teenage rock writing. When Daffodil later chose the song for a single, Davies remembered that the word “goddamn” had to be bleeped for AM radio — a small but revealing example of the awkward relationship between Christmas and the commercial world they were expected to inhabit.

Then ‘Zephyr Song’ takes over the remainder of the first side. At more than thirteen minutes, it is where the scale of the band’s ambition becomes impossible to miss. Rather than treating length as an excuse to jam indefinitely, Christmas moves through distinct moods and passages, allowing the composition to expand, collapse and rebuild itself around Bryden’s increasingly surreal imagery. There are moments when it threatens to outrun itself, but that is part of the excitement. These were teenagers who apparently had not yet been taught that there were supposed to be limits on how much could be attempted within a single song.

That willingness to stretch continues throughout side two. ‘Bustin’ Out Tonight’ is the closest the album comes to simply putting its head down and rocking, driven by the youthful need to get somewhere — anywhere — beyond the confines of home. ‘Blues on an Iceberg’ takes heartbreak and turns it into something much stranger, its frozen imagery giving what might have been a straightforward blues lament an oddly displaced, dreamlike atmosphere.

The ten-minute ‘April Mountain’ is another journey entirely. Seasons change, summer disappears, winter arrives and Bryden’s mountain becomes simultaneously a destination, a memory and somewhere to escape to. The song moves from pastoral imagery into darker territory before unexpectedly arriving at a Christmas refrain, one of those turns that should probably feel ridiculous but somehow belongs perfectly within the album’s world. Bryden’s writing continually moves between the personal, political and surreal, sometimes within a few lines, and the band follows him without ever sounding intimidated by the scale of the material.

The short closing ‘Heritage’ gathers many of those concerns together. Its language of inheritance, enemies, freedom, recognition and a threatened future gives the record an appropriately uneasy ending. The title becomes even more effective when paired with the album’s extraordinary packaging. On the outside, four long-haired teenagers sit on a military tank. Open the gatefold and they are standing against the wall of an old military building beneath the warning “TRESPASSERS WILL BE PROSECUTED BY ORDER MINISTER OF NATIONAL DEFENCE.” Whether taken as political theatre, youthful irreverence or simply four teenagers amusing themselves with the surroundings, the image could hardly suit the record better.

There is another important dimension to the photograph. The album’s original liner notes explain that Christmas had rehearsed in a rotting, disused air force barracks on the outskirts of Oshawa, the same unlikely environment in which Daffodil first encountered the group. The military setting therefore was not some studio-created concept pasted onto the finished record. It was part of the landscape in which Christmas actually developed. That gives the cover and the songs an unusual unity: young musicians literally surrounded by remnants of an older order while writing about the world they were inheriting.

The contemporary reaction suggests that at least some people understood what Daffodil had found. RPM called Christmas a solid Oshawa group and, in one of the better descriptions ever applied to them, predicted strong promotion for a band that was “uniquely Canadian in a heavy way.” Davies later acknowledged that getting radio exposure for such a progressive group was difficult, but the album did not simply disappear. Heritage appeared on RPM’s album survey in early 1971, and by May the magazine was reporting that it had also been released in Australia and New Zealand.

The timing nevertheless could hardly have been worse. Heritage arrived in December 1970, just as George Harrison’s All Things Must Pass was dominating the North American album market. Harrison’s triple LP sat at the top of the Canadian album chart through much of the opening weeks of 1971, exactly the sort of enormous international release that could overwhelm a young Canadian act dependent on the same distribution machinery for attention.

And then there was the name. Daffodil released an album called Heritage by a band called Christmas during the Christmas season, complete with an austere white sleeve that offered little immediate clue as to what was inside. Some retailers reportedly placed it among seasonal Christmas records. It is difficult to imagine a better illustration of the band’s problem: one of the strangest and most ambitious young rock groups in the country sitting in a bin beside holiday music.

Yet none of those circumstances diminished what Christmas had actually accomplished. If the first album captured a band being invented almost by accident, Heritage captures the moment that invention became deliberate. The loose psychedelic wandering of the Paragon LP has been pulled into something heavier, darker and considerably more structured, but the sense of possibility remains. Christmas still seems willing to follow an idea simply because it interests them, regardless of whether it fits neatly into a three-minute single or anything radio programmers were likely to understand.

And the album is not perfect. Some passages stretch further than they need to, some ideas collide rather than connect, and Bryden occasionally reaches beyond what the song can comfortably carry. But removing those excesses would remove much of what makes Heritage special. There is something exhilarating about hearing musicians this young trying to make a record this large. They had not yet learned to trim the edges, lower their expectations or worry about whether everything they attempted was sensible.

More than half a century later, Heritage stands as one of the great Canadian heavy psychedelic and progressive albums of its era. It is tougher, darker, stranger and vastly more accomplished than the accidental Paragon debut, yet the same essential quality remains: the feeling of young musicians following their imaginations without first asking permission.

The original liner notes ended by wondering how musicians so young could possess so much insight and understanding. Listening to Heritage today, the question still seems entirely reasonable.

They were sixteen, eighteen and nineteen years old. They should not have been this good yet.

-Robert Williston