We first met D hosting the Creative Coworkers launch party for the eerie mobile game Afterland we wrote and performed music for, which left us casting the gauntlet to its primary artist Elin Jonsson, to have an art exhibition and engage us to perform at it... which we did, back in the same space, at last year's "Echoes and Ripples" kick-off to the 11th annual Accordion Noir Festival. (About which, look out, this year's is coming up in November! But I digress...)
Anyhow, the Creative Coworkers org has moved down the street to a new facility, the Pace (520 Alexander Street), and D invited us back to join a bill hosted by Bailey Creed including a reincarnation / memorial craft project facilitated by Emily Smith and culminating in a rousing set by Turkish tradpunks Something About Reptiles, who we haven't shared a bill with since Valentine's Day 2007, yow! Details on Facebook, tickets $15/20/25, and the party runs from 5:30 pm to half past midnight. If that's not enough seasonal festivity for you I just don't know what to say.
Just when you thought you'd seen your final Creaking Planks video...
Circa 2009, "Accordion" Bruce Triggs was finally getting into the thick of his research, and understanding that the form it would ultimately need to take would be in the book medium. Hosting the Accordion Noir radio program every week had opened the door, but poking his head in he could tell that what lay within was both vast and almost entirely unexplored. If he didn't write this book, no one else would. But first, he had to exorcise some stories he came across, accounts of anecdotes and incidents that were both highly memorable and not entirely bookworthy. And he would exorcise them in song form. There was the Curse of the Andrea Doria, the ship that sank with a hold full of accordions; there was the song about the windjammer musician at the Mississippi crossroads, burning his instrument because it would not accommodate the scales required to perform blues music. (... and also there was "Never Play Your Accordion Naked".)
They were inspired fragments in search of a band! If only Bruce was acquainted with a crack band in search of some original tunes! Waitasec...
Anyhow, ten years later, two full incarnations of the band had risen and fallen, and Bruce had completed his book, "Accordion Revolution". The situation called for a book launch, which called for a small side show of supporting activities. A little musical entertainment! Does anyone have any songs about accordion history? Hang on... I just remembered something!
Here's the page of his book pertaining to this false history. While there was a natural connection between sailors and accordions, it is a simple matter of chronology that could not, despite influential early film adaptations of Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island, have put the instruments in pirates' hands -- unless, as Bruce put it, they were time-traveling pirates. (Time Bandits?) Most likely pirates would have played tunes on fiddles, he reckons, and so we caught Wyoming Johnny during a chance visit into town to lay down the law (of the sea!) on his instrument. (And of course there is the caveat that today Somali piracy has resumed around the Horn of Africa, and there is a Somali accordion tradition, so while it's not impossible that there is such a thing as legitimate pirate accordion music, it is guaranteed that it sounds nothing remotely like anything you might expect.)
Our sole constant Blackbox Squeezebeard is taking it all in stride. The first original arrangement in the Creaking Planks songbook was around the lyrics to Derelict, aka the "yo ho ho and a bottle of rum" song. He was recruited into the Planks initially explicitly to facilitate their deliberately heading in a more piratical direction. Have all these years amounted to living a lie? (If so, it was a fun lie!)
As an accordionist in a pirate metal band, this is my new favourite song. https://t.co/10tiH9irWm
Anyhow, after exhuming this incomplete song and polishing it off (this is great, it writes itself! Why didn't we play this years ago? Oh wait, the next verse has a different rhyme scheme and a totally changed meter! Wait, I think I remember now!), we debuted it at Bruce's book launch, and fittingly opened our Wooden Boat Festival sets with it. Where will we be dropping this science next? It's really anyone's guess. Many thanks to Lee Shoal for baking so many tasty little jokes into the lyrics video!
Our band was established, as our name suggests, under the premise that we would be performing shanties to nautical audiences. Then we left it all behind (except for the name, strangely somehow we kept that bit) and skyrocketed to strange heights before splashing down in pieces. Now here we sit, a broken man on a Halifax pier, once again performing songs of the sea to salty crowds.
That's right, folks, the Vancouver Wooden Boat Festival at Granville Island is having us back for the third year in a row; we're playing two of its three days in such company as the Squeezebox Circle Orchestra, the Carnival Band and Salt Thief (and also many wooden boats), and you can find us -- in a radically revised yet somehow totally classic configuration of a totally different band -- headlining this Saturday from 4:15-5 pm and also performing from 12:15-1 pm Sunday the 25th with an oddly familiar set. You can find full details about the free performances out behind the Granville Island Public Market over here, and also further information about how the long-running festival is being run this year. Don't forget your eye patch!
Due to a great conceptual fit, as well as nepotism at the highest levels, the Creaking Planks have been keen fellow travelers with the Accordion Noir crew from just about the very beginning. We have guested on their radio program, playing up its angle to promote and expose the unexpected side of the instrument. (Indeed, we have performed its theme song!) We have played at their festival until they told us we couldn't play there any longer... and then we continued to do so! The radio program's host Bruce Triggs even sat in with us (on, if memory serves correct, Barbadian rhythmic saw) at our weird May Day gig (but I'm being redundant, all our gigs are weird by virtue of including us!) in Grandview Park four years ago.
So it makes a certain kind of sense for us to be performing a couple of songs at the launch for his long-fermenting accordion history book, Accordion Revolution, dropping this Friday night at Accordion Noir ground zero -- the lobby of CFRO Co-Op Community Radio itself, located at Columbia and Hastings. (Sometimes it seemed as though it wasn't clear which of us would publish a book first, Bruce's accordion history or our chronicles of our wasted summers on the road, but it looks like Bruce came out ahead! Guess this means we're next -- maybe we can book him to perform at our launch 8) The launch runs from 7 to 9 pm, the second half of which will be broadcast live over the airwaves! And for those who can't make it out in person, tune in at 100.5 fm (or stream from coopradio.org): the event will be bookended with some Celtic squeezing on the air prior to the launch and some experimental electronic accordion (courtesy of Ross Birdwise) immediately following our broadcast.
Admission is free but seating is limited, so don't delay and reserve your spot on Eventbrite today!
Basically, we can't accept gigs as the Creaking Planks anymore because we can't guarantee you'll get anything beyond a crazy accordion. This isn't to say that you ever just get a crazy accordion, only sometimes we don't learn just what else will be on offer until we take the stage. So it is that this weekend, we'll be delivering up a set of songs from the Creaking Planks end of the musical gutter, by three historical Creaking Planks... billed as "Stupid Accordion Tricks", Blackbeard Squeezebox's solo YouTube accordion cover song series.
We're back at the Accordion Noir stage at the Car-Free Main Street festival that we played at two years ago, still on the west side of the intersection of Main Street at East 21st Avenue. Our set, which should liberally be peppered with such new covers as have been populating the video series, is scheduled to run from 3 to 4 pm. We're part of a program of free musical performances -- with accordion! -- running there continuously from noon through to 7 pm, so if you're at the festival, do please swing by and check out what's being offered, it's all amazing stuff, culminating in a headlining set from our disciples in the Argyle Embargo! As for us, this is just about the end of our rope. You should be catching one or two of us making a joyful noise at the June 28th launch of Bruce Triggs' book Accordion Revolution (7-9 pm at the CFRO Co-Op Community Radio studios) but ... that's grist for a different post.
It would be ... a little much to expect a full-band concert out of the Creaking Planks at this point. We're hoping to reconstitute ourselves, but baby steps. That said, you can hear three of us playing this Saturday night! Not playing together, mind you, but at the same event at least!
It's a Radiohead tribute night called "Anyone Can Play Guitar" (sadly, Blackbox observes, anyone usually does), and in addition to Blackbox Squeezebeard, Ludwicka LePearl and Daisy Jones-Locher, you can hear Radiohead songs from the likes of A New Craze (Daisy-Jones' new band), Bob Neubauer, Carolyn Neapole with Jocelyn Cameron, Danny Echo and Tania Gosgnach. It's a talented lot, and the songs are good, so please consider joining us... cover is $10, at the old Cottage Bistro, now rebranded "Hood 29". The three-hour show starts at 8 pm!
Creaking Planks activities have been in a strange limbo these past few years: more than we might reasonably expect, and simultaneously less than we'd like. (And yet, we ourselves are the bottleneck. So... go figure.)
Case in point: this Sunday night, April 12th, our hirsute accordionist Blackbox Squeezebeard will be celebrating turning 40. He was a little down at the prospect, looking back at the amazing show we threw on the occasion of his 30th birthday, but perked up when he realized he could just... put that show on again a second time! Now, not all participants were able to join us this time around on such short notice, but hopefully you, at least, might well be able to.
Starting around 8:30 pm, set sail on the Second Voyage of the Ship of Fools, featuring music by Monsterdinosaur artist and longtime Little Mountain Gallery proprietor Ehren Salazar, magic by the alter-ego of Planks alumnus Dr. Steelhand -- Travis Bernhardt, and poetry insanity by Al Mader, the Minimalist Jug Band! All that plus bare-bones Planking by Blackbox Squeezebeard plus... well, anyone who plays along with the Creaking Planks is deputized as a Creaking Plank, but conversely Planks can never manage to confirm scheduled appearances, so... we are looking forward to being joined by unconfirmed, unscheduled guests, some of whom may be actual historical Creaking Planks, Planking along with us. But due to the x-factor we can't actually bill it as a Creaking Planks appearance. All we know for sure is that there'll be Creaking and Planking.
Suggested donation $10. Be generous with your server at the WISE Lounge bar (downstairs at 1882 Adanac at Victoria), they usually don't have shows there at all on Sunday nights!
At our peak, we were sometimes playing two gigs in a single day. In our deepest slump, it felt like the pace was closer to two gigs in the same year. Having just poked our heads out of hibernation (never give a woodchuck on Groundhog Day!), we never expected to have a second gig lined up just a week later, and yet here we are! A big part of show business success is simply being in the right place at the right time, and as it turned out we were exactly the right shape to fill in for an unexpected cancellation looming on a venue's calendar. The plan always was for 2019 to see a renewal of the Creaking Planks, but I was expecting we'd need to reform the band first! I'm a little concerned that this pace isn't sustainable, but probably we will have a long break after this to strategize our next move.
But I'm burying the lede. Yes! You can find us -- well, two of us, the primordial, essential skeleture of the ensemble -- featuring this Friday night back at the monthly third-Friday Beats on Broadway acoustic open mic at the Mount Pleasant Neighbourhood House (800 E Broadway) for the first time since our last appearance there eleven years ago! It's an open mic, so if you'd like to share a bit of tunage or your latest poem also, don't hold back! Signup from 7-7:30 pm. See you there!
Bet you weren't expecting to see anything else come up on the listings here anytime soon, were you? Our big, beautiful band has well and truly scattered -- you can find one member on Vancouver Island, another in California, one unreachable midway up their ascent of the ivory tower, another swamped in local politics. Can we all find the time to come together and play some frivolous songs for a small and confused audience at a coffee shop tomorrow afternoon? Less likely than ever... and to be fair, we were always unlikely!
After a dozen years in show business, you build a reputation, accumulate contacts, and a certain momentum continues ... if not propelling you forward, at least buoying you up. But after enough gig inquiries are declined due to being impossible to fulfill, the invitations will eventually slow to a trickle and then eventually stop indefinitely (at least, until the 20th anniversary reunion tour.)
This isn't to say that we're done as a band! But it is safe to say that our particular most recent configuration of the band is done as a band. 2019 should be a year of rebuilding, because we still have songs in our hearts with no other outlets. If you know of anyone who'd like to casually perform unlikely tunes in a guitarless* acoustic idiom for peanuts, please send them by our way.
In the meantime, two of three original Creaking Planks (Hell has not yet quite frozen over, the prerequisite for completing the circle with the third) have managed to arrange to coincide on stage for one night, this Friday, Feb 8th, to do their strange thing for a good cause. We've had to turn down two of these so far due to inevitable conflicts with our impossible schedules, so we're very fortunate that the third time seems to be doing the trick.
Salal and Cedar have set up an all-ages benefit concert to help support legal defense of the Wet’suwet’en struggle against the Coastal Gaslink pipeline under construction in their traditional territory without the consent of their hereditary chiefs. From 7:30 pm on (doors at 7) through likely well past 11 pm, there will be musical performances going on down at LanaLou's (362 Powell St. -- on unceded Coast Salish territory, land of the Squamish, Tsleil Waututh and Musqueam) also featuring:
- the Celtic harp of Clarity,
- 2018 Accordion Noir Fest alumni and Creaking Plank acolytes, the folk-rockers of the Argyle Embargo,
- spoken word from Rudi Krause,
- morally centered pickin' tunes by Paul "Professor Banjo" Silveria,
- ripe fruit falling from Barbara Jackson and Earle Peach's Songtree,
- musical education from Jim Sanyshyn
