Elliott Brood live at Crocks in Thunder Bay, 14 September 2013

An early concert at a club that usually opens late is an oddity, and the billing for 14 September 2013 made a feature of it. Elliott Brood were playing a “very special early Saturday evening concert” at Crocks. The regular Saturday DJ dance party did not start until eleven, so the room went back to being a club afterwards.

Loffredo & Associates and H.I.T Management presented the night. Elliott Brood were billed as live in concert with special guests, with no names attached, and tickets cost $20 in advance from Bean Fiend, Rainbow on Bay and Crocks. The last line of the billing promised dancing and live music in one night.

Seven to eleven leaves a window of four hours in which a concert, a changeover and the start of a dance night all had to fit. Crocks, at 16 Cumberland Street South, had a stage for the first and a floor for the second.

The night before, the fortnight after

Friday 13 September had been billed as the Sick Individuals Frosh Weekend Bash, so a student-weekend night came first and Elliott Brood followed. Two weeks later Mysto and Pizzi took the room on Friday 27 September.

The July announcement of the season had already carried the date, in capitals, as a “special early event”. Twenty dollars was a middle price for the room that year: other Crocks shows with a listed price ran from $10 to $40.

Three men and a banjo

Elliott Brood formed in Toronto in 2002, when Mark Sasso and Casey Laforet started playing together. Stephen Pitkin, a sound engineer, joined on percussion in 2005. Sasso played banjo among other instruments, including harmonica, ukulele and kazoo, and Laforet played guitar, keys and bass pedals. Pitkin added a sampler and backing vocals. The sound has been called death country and frontier rock.

Their first release, Tin Type, appeared in 2004, and the albums Ambassador in 2005 and Mountain Meadows in 2008 came out on Six Shooter Records. Days Into Years followed on Paper Bag Records on 27 September 2011. Each of those three was nominated for a Juno Award in the roots and traditional category.

The songs behind the date

Days Into Years has ten songs, and one of them, “Owen Sound”, is named for a town on Georgian Bay. It sits beside “Northern Air” and “West End Sky”, and the last of those began as a song for the film Grown Up Movie Star and was nominated at the 31st Genie Awards for best original song.

The lead single, “If I Get Old”, grew out of a visit the band made to a military cemetery in France where Canadian soldiers of the First World War are buried. Exclaim’s reviewer wrote that the sound had broadened and mellowed on this third full-length while staying melodic and lyrically rich.

By the Crocks date the record was two years old, and the next studio album, Work and Love, arrived in 2014. That puts the visit in a stretch between records. It is a reading of the release dates and not a statement from the band, and the promoters gave only the schedule.

Two visits compared

The band came back to Crocks on Monday 23 February 2015, and that night has its own entry. The Wilderness of Manitoba were the special guests, and advance tickets were $20 again. The price held across the seventeen months between the two visits.

Almost everything else moved. The 2015 doors were at 8 p.m. instead of 7, the event was marked 19+, and tickets could be bought online as well as at Crocks, Rainbow on Bay, Waking Giant Coffee Co. and Extreme Pita. Bean Fiend, a 2013 outlet, was gone from the list.

Advance tickets for that second show had been on sale since Friday 24 October 2014, four months ahead, and the shows page has the rest of that season. The date fell on a Monday in the middle of winter, a long way from the early-Saturday framing of 2013.