It happened again: I inherited a box of dusty old records with a treasure inside.
If you ever come across some obscure Canadian vinyl you’ve never heard of before — on labels like Marc Productions, Snocan and Altair Four — there’s a good chance you’ll spot the name John Cybanski on it. For years he worked as a recording engineer and mixer in and around the nation’s capital of Ottawa, and has nearly 100 entries on Discogs. His golden ears have done work for the likes of Sneezy Waters, Fist, Eight Seconds, Metagenesis, TV’s The Raccoons and Marie-Soleil (Suzanne Pinel) as well as Dominic D’Arcy The Singing Policeman.
I swung by his place in the community of Manotick in the south of Ottawa recently after he offered me a box of records he’d set aside after “purging the house.” Digging through less-common records is one of my most-favourite things, but I never guessed there’d be a hard rock grail amongst the country, novelty and vanity albums.
Ever heard of Sphex? Me neither. There was nothing special about the slightly musty 7″ single I found. It looked like all the others. Pressed in 1978 on the typical gold labels of the Marc Productions Label. Marc was short for Marcel — the late Marcel Tessier, who ran the label and a recording studio in Ottawa from 1970 into the 1980s. His son Pierre was a co-worker of mine for a while prior to his retirement.
At the time this Sphex single was made, Marc Productions was on Cyrville Road in Ottawa’s Gloucester area — in a building which still stands, but is home to an HVAC, mechanical and plumbing business.
When I typed the catalog number of the single into Discogs, I stood up and looked for my reading glasses to be sure of what I was seeing — Sphex: Time / Leaving This Crazy City. Rating 5/5. How many people have a copy? 4. How many are looking for a copy? 92. Price the last time it sold? $485. Good gawd!
I put the little dickens through my cleaner and onto the turntable. Oh, man. Time is a slow, heavy rocker while the B-side, Leaving This Crazy City, is perhaps best-described as proto-punk, if such a thing can exist during the actual punk era. Post proto-punk?
Who the hell are these guys? All I could find about them, initially, is that they’re from Cornwall. Judging from two or three stage photos I found, and a posed photo — seemingly taken in a suburban yard or park — these are just four teen dudes. Well, they were in 1976. Today they’d be in their early 60s. I wonder if they still play? Do their kids or grandkids have no idea how cool they are? The single I have credits B.J. Nero as the producer and Cybanski as the engineer. John is credited as “J. Cybanski” instead of his full name, so I’m not sure what B.J. stands for.
It seems like this was recorded as early as 1976, after the band was approached by filmmaker Jacques Menard, who saw them perform in a coffee shop. A quick search of the NFB website shows one 37-minute 1976 film by Menard called Rien Qu’en Passant, but I’m not sure if the band’s music is in it — I don’t have an NFB Campus subscription. If you do, check it out.
The film’s plot centres on Suzanne, who has lived in Toronto for three years. By chance during a car ride, she finds herself in Alexandria, Ont. — the town where she was born and raised. She remembers her youth, the family home, the bilingual school, the church of great vocations and the little bars on Saturday evenings. It’s actually an interesting story.
Anyway, Menard was filming in Alexandria just as Sphex were doing a set in an upstairs coffee shop. They were loud. Too damn loud, so Menard asked the young men to knock it off. Clearly not ones to look a gift horse in the mouth, the Sphex boys told the Montreal filmmaker that they’d stop playing if he paid for some studio time. In exchange, they’d let him use the songs in his movie and then they could release it themselves.
Time and Leaving This Crazy City were recorded at the NFB in Montreal in 1976 and mixed at Marc Productions in Ottawa.
I’m not the only person who flipped out when they first heard these tracks — that’s why it’s so in-demand. In fact, it was re-issued in 2012 with a pocket sleeve and classic-look reproduction labels by music archivist Jason Flower on his Supreme Echo label. Flower spent six years hunting the band down after he was turned on to them by Frank Manley, who wrote Smash The State: A Discography of Canadian Punk 1977-92. He did indeed trace them to Cornwall, via Gilles Grignon who did their sound, lights and designed their logo. He even managed to get them together for a reunion photo. Thanks to Flower’s work, Sphex are now in the Canadian Pop Encyclopedia online. That’s where you’ll even find their names — Tim Hawn (bass), Rick MacMillan (drums), Gary Beaudette (guitar) and his brother Brian Beaudette (guitar).
It turns out Sphex formed in Cornwall in 1971 when the members were 10 and 11 years old. And yes, they do still play — just not altogether. Hawn and the Beaudettes still call the “crazy city” of Cornwall home.
Flower’s Supreme Echo 2012 pressing of the Sphex single can be found on Discogs for a much more reasonable $10 or so. To see the other cool stuff he does, check out his website and his Bandcamp.
Oh, by the way — Sphex is a type of wasp. Not to be confused with the metal band from Vienna, formed in 2017. The guys chose the name by picking a random word from the dictionary. Cool story, huh?
For his part, guitarist Beaudette is delighted with the continued interest in Sphex, and finds it all rather amusing. He was, he says, just 13 years old when he laid down his guitar parts on the single. “It was an amazing time for me. I remember sitting in the booth, my eyes open wide as the engineer smoked pot out of a pipe saying, ‘Yeah man, this is a good song.’ ”
He said the two tracks were already written by the time he joined the band, but is proud of the guitar harmonics he brought to the table on the recording. “Thanks for keeping the memory alive.”
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Area Resident is an Ottawa-based journalist, recording artist, music collector and re-seller. Hear (and buy) his music on Bandcamp, email him HERE, follow him on Instagram and check him out on Discogs.
