When Canada's globetrotting instrumentalists The Sadies recorded the soundtrack for the Ed "Big Daddy" Roth biopic "Tales Of The Rat Fink" in 2006, the band named each of the reverb-drenched surf-tacular cuts with the names of some of the musicians' favorite places to play. Track 20: "The Bug Jar."

"With that soundtrack we ended up with about 60 little songs that we needed," says guitarist/fiddle player Travis Good. "And we were getting so swamped down by it, so we thought we could probably name 50 of our favorite bars in North America. And I like everything about the Bug Jar."

The Sadies can play everything. And Good, his brother Dallas Good (guitar, vocals), Sean Dean (upright bass), and Mike Belitsky (drums), have been playing everything everywhere with everyone for the past 15 years. Perhaps that's an over-simplification, but Christ, it's close. This band is amazing.

The Sadies' sound is a heady mix of classic country, bluegrass, rock 'n' roll, punk, psychedelic rock, garage rock, and surf dusted with a dark ambient cool. It's Gram Parsons' cosmic Americana realized. Good agrees with most of the classifications.

"We were nominated for a Juno Award for roots band, which I thought was odd," he says. "But if they had a punk category, I'd be real disappointed if we weren't in that one."

The Sadies is the go-to backing band - both live and in the studio - for artists like Neko Case, Jon Langford, Andre Williams, John Doe, and Jon Spencer and Matt Verta-Ray's Heavy Trash. Yet according to Good, all the artists that sign on for that trademark Sadies sound are responsible for coloring it as well.

"It's an influence that we back up so many styles, so many different people," he says. "Neko has her sound, and it's very different than playing with Andre Williams or Jon Langford. This past weekend we played with Glen Matlock. So that really molds our sound a lot. We've got to be pretty chameleon-like when we back people. But at the same time, we make it clear they're getting us for our sound."

And there are the collaborations that The Sadies dream about, too.

"Well, you know," says Good, "There are obvious ones, like Roky Erickson, Ray Davies - we'd drop everything for Ray Davies. He's mentioned working together one day, he's actually heard of us."

The Sadies started off as a three-piece, Toronto-based outfit in 1995 that emerged from the wreckage of a band Dallas Good had played in with members of Shadowy Men From A Shadowy Planet, a band that "was a huge influence on the beginning of our band," says Travis Good, who had yet to join up with the group at that point. "Our first tour was opening for them. They were nothing but instrumental, and we were pretty much instrumental."

"I guess the sound of The Sadies really changed when Sean [Dean] bought an upright bass and Dallas got a dobro and switched the neck over to a guitar," Good says. "They were living together and practicing a lot acoustically, just working on a lot of old Carl Perkins and country songs. Then they started doing a lot of murder ballads and that was the set."

Good had been on the road with The Good Brothers (members of The Canadian Country Music Hall of Fame featuring his father and two uncles) when he made the leap to The Sadies in 1997.

"When I joined the band," he says, "I joined strictly as a fiddle player. At that point it was more instrumental kind of stuff, and spooky stuff - a lot of reverb and a lot of ambient sounds. It wasn't such a hoedown fiddle at the time," he says. "If you start at the beginning... first of all, we all listened to a lot of different stuff, with the exception of me and Dallas, who at the time were fresh out of the nest. We grew up with the same record collection. Everything's changed now, but closer to the start of the band we were into very much the same stuff we had grown up with, and we were also starting to like country at the same time, and bluegrass."

With all of those different influences the band's sound started to expand. Still, there was some exclusivity. The list of things that didn't make the cut was brief. Good scratches his head.

"I think it'd be hard to find that much jazz," he says. "Wait a minute... I'm sorry; I know what's not there: there aren't any sort of elements of new country music. Anything that's played on country radio today, I think you'd be hard pressed to find any of that."

You'll also be hard pressed to find a band more committed to its live show. The Sadies deliver maximum bang for your concert buck. Dressed in their countrypolitan gentleman suits, the band members spin the dial between original songs, and the songs found in their musical DNA. In a sweaty, two-hour frenzy, you'll hear the band deconstruct, playing stuff from The Byrds to Pink Floyd, and many points in between.

Good frequently flashes forward to the stage when laying a song down in the studio. It's a habit that has really come to the fore on The Sadies' soon-to-be-released album "Darker Circles," on Yep Roc Records.

"I often think, ‘What am I comfortable performing on stage? What does the set need?' When I write something I think, ‘I'm going to have to sing this in front of a bunch of people someday.'"

Good says "Darker Circles" marks the band's move to being more song-centric. "We're continuing our path to less and less instrumental songs," he says. "There's only one instrumental song on this record. It kind of just happened, especially after doing the ["Tales of the Rat Fink"] soundtrack, after writing 60 fucking instrumentals. We'd kind of had our fill. At that point, it's time to work on words."

The band's non-stop road schedule has increased its fan base beyond its initial cult following. Technology has helped some, too. Good doesn't particularly mind how the recorded music gets to the fans. The band earns its bread the old-fashioned way: playing live.

"In Ontario we're starting to play really small towns, like population 500 to 1000. And we go into a town hall or legion hall and we can do pretty good," he says. "I don't think you could do that before everyone had a computer. I don't think a couple of posters in town and word of mouth would really pull it off in rural Ontario."

"I don't know what it was like 20 years ago, because I wasn't doing it," he says. "But I guess they used to sell records. Luckily for us, we're not affected by people downloading music. In fact, it has helped us, because we never sold records in the beginning. It makes no difference how people get access to our music. It's always been our live show - always, always."

The Sadies

w/Jerry Leger and Dave Donnelly

Friday, February 26

Bug Jar, 219 Monroe Ave.

9 p.m. | $12 | 454-2966, bugjar.com