Just before opening the door to the basement rehearsal space, the sounds of Black Spruce Bog leak through to meet you. It isn't even music. It's laughter.
Walking through that door knowing this is the end can catch a mental thread and unravel a bit. Black Spruce Bog... done, no more, calling it quits? How can anyone laugh at a time like this?
But they laugh because some endings are a false finish. None of these musicians will be hanging up the instruments. None of them will be moving away. They are going to maintain all their commitments to each other, but the magnetics of life simply means they can't stick to the band.
Then the laughter subsides and they power into a song, and you stand in the hallway just outside the rehearsal room and let it wash over you. Anything to break their groove would seem like spitting on a rose. So you wait until the song fades before stepping in to find out why. Why is the best band in northern B.C. playing their final show on Saturday night?
"I will add a caveat: for the foreseeable future," said Amy Blanding, one of the vocalists and the one who plays mandolin and trumpet.
"We have hesitated saying it quite that way," avoiding the phrase 'breaking up,' said Eric Welscher-Bilodeau, another of the vocalists who also handles some of the guitar work, some mandolin, piano and harmonica. "Things have changed. When we started as a band, it was full-on right away, and people were in a place where that was possible. Our lives are in a much different place, now, and it's like pulling the e-brake. A band like that can't just slow down. It's not a case that we don't like each other anymore or don't want to play together anymore. We just have a thing with this band that doesn't have a lot of margins around it and still be that thing anymore."
"Prince George has been unbelievably supportive and part of the reason we did so much was all the people asking, all the time, to hear us," Blanding said. "People were very connected to the band. A lot of people came to our shows and spoke up for us and took us in. There's a sense with us that we want to honour that and not try to make people follow us into places we ourselves don't want to go. There are passions that inspire us as a group, and it takes a lot of energy if you want to be true about it."
"We talked about how we didn't want to just be a band that got together once a year and played the hits from 2014," said Spencer Hammond, vocalist and bass player. "If we were going to be a band, it should be about writing and working up new material and being creators as a group."
There was a consensus, then, that they couldn't swap in or out any members and still be Black Spruce Bog. The music had grown - substantially right in the rehearsal room - from the group. The songs were themselves like members of their family. And since they never wrote music for a faceless audience of disconnected fans, they always wrote music for their family, they couldn't pretend themselves into something else.
"So we're putting out everything we've got. Here you are, take it all," said Hammond.
He's talking about the new album that goes along with their final show: The Hatchery Session. Most musicians using that title style apply an S because it's plural. This album was set up inside the open log beauty of the iconic fish hatchery complex on River Road, just west of the Railway & Forestry Museum and overlooking the Nechako River just a fly-cast away. When the Spruce City Wildlife Association isn't using the place, it sits ready for other creative purposes and Black Spruce Bog went in with a mission. They set up the gear, tuned up the instruments, and pressed the record button. In one constant take, they laid down the whole album.
They also filmed it. The sibling documentary will be released on Saturday night.
It's a collection of creative elements that feels a lot like The Last Waltz, the grand closing gesture from the stratospheric music group The Band back in 1976. Black Spruce Bog has drawn frequent comparisons to The Band for the numerous lead vocalists, multi-instrumentalists, rootsy subject matter that often referred directly to their personal places, and the flexibility in their presentation style. The Band and The Bog were both rightly called every style pulled by the moon: rock, folk, country, jam, mountain blues, etc.
That was put on national televised display during the opening ceremonies of the 2015 Canada Winter Games when the band was one of the cultural examples of the area showcased to the nation, playing their northern resource worker's anthem Tete Jaune Road accompanied by aboriginal star ballerino Tristan Ghostkeeper. And when the edict was made by the show's producers that none of the acts could make political statements, even T-shirts and song lyrics had to comply, the band still managed to split the defence by artfully adding the spoken line "this land is sacred, let's honour what's left, thank you for coming" then flashing a protest sign on the back of Welscher-Bilodeau's guitar.
Another crowning moment was when Black Spruce Bog held a concert event at the P.G. Playhouse last year calling in a torrent of guest musicians they backed up in an epic tribute to original Prince George music. It was entitled The First Waltz and attendees called it the single most important night in the history of our region's local music. It established Black Spruce Bog as not only a bringer of handcrafted music, but also great collaborators adept at enriching their peers.
"We're just putting a period on the end of our sentence. Then we will start a new sentence. But this gives us a chance to say thank you," said Blanding.
For some, the new sentences are already forming. Drummer Danny Bell is a regular cast member of the groups Frontal Lobotomy and Folky Strum Strum, plus sets up a lot of the acts performing on the busy stage of The Legion. He was so moved by the Black Spruce Bog experience that he got a tattoo of the fish drawn into the band's artwork.
Vocalist, guitar and banjo player Jeremy Pahl is ramping up his solo project Saltwater Hank.
The others can't turn off their creative sides any more than a river can stop its own flow so they are all expecting to be out on stages of the region in short order. They laughed that it was not inconceivable that they might meander into jams on some festival platform or some pub gig and suddenly realize all five band members (they consider manager Fraser Hayes a full-fledged member as well) are on stage together again. The idea delighted them.
The last deliberate confluence of Black Spruce Bog members happens at the Legion on Saturday night starting at 9 p.m. and finishing when they're exhausted.
Advance tickets can be purchased at 2nd Thoughts Buy And Sell (1412 2nd Ave.) or at the door that night while supplies last.
