| The sun may have shone on Canadian troubadours Stringband nearly a quarter of a century ago, but the band’s fans have proved that the sun need never set.
When the dreamy, funny, spirited, maple-soaked roots group hooked up in 1972, they took their music to the people in the streets, skating rinks and theatres in a way that was to become a Canadian tradition – town to town, van to van, musician to fan, with no middle man. And now they are doing the same thing again, only without the endless touring.
And as music corporations decry the Internet and home CD burners as unfair, Stringband’s longtime and loyal fans have just fronted about $25,000 to a group that, although it never officially broke up, hasn’t done any steady gigging since Expo ’86.
The fruit of their generosity has been richly rewarded with the release of Stringband 1972-2002, a two-album retrospective that follows Bob Bossin, Marie Lynn Hammond and various other members from those Toronto streets in the ’70s to Russian gigs in the ’80s and Stuart McLean’s Vinyl Café a couple of years ago. Along the way, players such as Ben Mink, Stan Rogers, Daniel Lanois and Chris Whitely loaned their talents to the group.
Engineer Richard Hess was the catalyst for the project. He volunteered to listen to the mountain of tapes in Bossin’s closet and present Bossin with 10 hours of good material to be narrowed down for the CD.
Bossin used his database of about 5,000 fans, collected at his own live gigs. Using the Internet to solicit donations, they soon had the necessary funds in place – fans contributed from $50 to $1,000 apiece towards the project.
From his Vancouver Island home, where he is raising two children while continuing his solo career, Bossin talks about Stringband with the animation of a 20-year-old.
"There was a real flowering of which we were a part," he says. "That was a moment in history in the late ’60s. We never were on a major label. With me, that was fairly conscious…. There was this whole youth movement, there were free concerts and free everything – it was all really very naive. You know, ‘power to the people’ and ‘food for the people.’"
In lieu of label support, the band did some arithmetic and figured they’d make more money selling a few thousand records on their own than selling 10,000 with a label. They have stayed true to that concept to this day, and Bossin now counsels countless younger bands to do the same.
"The world is changing to make this work so much easier – there can be a tremendous connection. When we used to tour, we would start off the tour with boxes and boxes of records in the van and they formed the base of a bed…. As the tour went on, the bed got lower and lower and lower as we sold off more of these records. So we were around for the beginning of it and we just happened to have lucked into doing this retrospective." |
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