R.I.P. Free Geek Vancouver (2006-2022)

Dag, we've reached the age where we have no further good news to report, and all of our posts are eulogies for our fellow travellers -- not only are we conspicuously absent from the scene, but gradually also every place we ever had a connection to is expunged from the record!  (Never did quite get around to mourning the Little Mountain Gallery, that loss is still a little too big to process.)  Where to start here?

20 years ago, Internet friends who had converged from across the lower 48 to inhabit (or visit) Portland, OR, began hosting an annual party.  The nascent Blackbox Squeezebeard started shlepping along his instrument during his Greyhound expeditions south to stink up their living rooms, cosplaying as a musical performer at their short films and social functions.  Within three years, he had been recruited into the Creaking Planks (themselves initially established, let it be known, with the intention of performing on the tiny triangular stage located in the corner of the original Portland location of iconic chain Voodoo Donuts -- PDX figured large in our band mythology!) and, well, the best way to put muscles on what he brought to the party was by packing along the rest of the band.

Thank goodness we are not currently memorializing the Horace Phair party.  Many of its resident party hosts and patrons were involved with Portland's community e-waste recycling initiative, the then-young (est. 2000) Free Geek.  We thought that it was a great idea, and when word got out that Vancouver was going to try its hand at opening a franchise in 2006, a side hustle pitched by some of the anarchist bikepunx we were already in deep with, we pledged our support via such unique skills and talents as we had to offer.  On the face of it an electronics recycler had little use for a jug band, but when you open your imagination a little to the power of a grand metaphor, a cadre of renegade musicos breathing new life into old tunes on unwanted music machines from bygone eras made our association make a little more sense. (Only a little.  Talking Heads give good guidance.)

The following year they had us open for a screening they hosted at SFU Harbour Centre August 2nd, the Basel Action Network's documentaries "The Digital Dump: Exporting Re-Use and Abuse to Africa" and "Exporting Harm: The High-Tech Trashing of Asia."  (Phew!  Tough crowd!)  "The CREAKING PLANKS will recycle and repurpose salvageable components of defunct and formerly toxic popular musics."

Formerly Toxic?  Well, it was a new introduction to our set and the arrangement hadn't quite gelled yet:

It wasn't until the end of that year, when they formally outgrew their initial space, that we had a chance to play one of their functions in situ.  December 29th 2007 we rang out Farewell to Old Geek in the dsitinctly industrial confines of their warehouse.  (The Portland FG site is assuredly a doomed e-waste Superfund site, though Vancouver's hadn't yet been in operation long enough for it to obviously be a present threat to our health.  To be fair, we surely don't need to search that far to find unsafe illegal venues we took up residence in!  I vaguely recall the fire code legal capacity of the Little Mountain Gallery was what, five?  And then there was Secret Location or, heck, the rusted hulk of the McBarge offshore.  But I digress.)

The most memorable element of that gig was that, true to its domain, most of the other acts booked to perform at its send-off party were electronic in nature -- drum machines, turntables and the like.  After we kicked things off with our acoustical brand of weirdness we were free to set our instruments down and enjoy some tasty adult beverages while the boots and cats got underway.  However, that night it turned out there was some trouble with BC Hydro... I vaguely recall a runaway car had unexpectedly crashed into a transformer box blocks away, resulting in something like ten thousand people in the neighbourhood suddenly finding themselves without power.  This situation is a major impediment to a DJ, of course, but all Planks remained on site, sitting on quite a bit of musical repertoire we hadn't yet shared with the room, so once we were able to get some tea candles lit and find our bearings we rocked on with a bonus set, the only glad noise in the area for hours.  We paused only to make way for a brief musical routine of an amazing disassemblable saxophone contraption that could make musical noise in any of its wide range of integral configurations, from rather long all the way down to very small.  Electronic musicians can of course do things that live performers can't, however like Apollo's musical duel with the satyr Marsyas, under certain uncommon circumstances the playing field really tips away from the new school.

Half a year down the line the Velofusion post-Critical-Mass series of dance parties at the ANZA club held a benefit for Free Geek (every month's event would fundraiser for a different cause) and FG invited us to be part of their night:

We had one further Free Geek experience to recount -- our intersections were few but they trended toward being highly memorable -- some nine months down the line.  February 6, 2009, they invited famously particular (and in the meantime since, rather cancelled) GNU guru Richard Stallman to do a talk at the Maritime Labour Centre... with us opening for RMS!  We found ourselves thrown in the deep end when the organizer volunteered us to accompany the headliner on a folk song of his own arrangement, The Free Software Song, adapted from a Bulgarian folk song, "Sadi Moma"... in 7/4.  Unrehearsed!  Why the hell not, you're only young once.  We wrote it up at the time, but in retrospect it's a great case study of the wild and completely unpredictble adventures your life path can dump you into, out of control and totally out of your comfort zone, simply by casually picking up an accordion in your youth.  

Holy guacamole!  Dumped online 13 years ago and forgotten about, this recording has accumulated over ten thousand views!  It's not our finest moment -- unwilling to play anything potentially wrong, all our accompanists retreated to pure percussion mode, leaving Stallman an unassailable train of rhythm to hitch his own wagon to... but he may have been accustomed to conducting the orchestra rather than submitting to its dictates, and consequently the performance suffered some timing issues originating from its lead vocalist. Anyway, it sure as hell hammers home that We Were There, thanks to our oddball association with Free Geek Vancouver, which is now conclusively defunct.

While we're mourning past greatness, I'd just like to coda this post with an acknowledgement that while our live performances have really trailed off into nothingness (Blackbox holds up his end to his fullest extent possible, but it's really not the same), our possibly shortly-to-be-extinct Twitter account @creakingplanks carried a bright beacon doing a stellar job of representing our particular brand of acoustical outsider music comedy and weirdness in a similar vein to our actual performances.  That one deserves a farewell tour all its own!

R.I.P. Cafe Deux Soleils (1994-2022)

Well, hats off to Cafe Deux Soleils.  It managed to hang in there for six years beyond the Railway Club, but three of those were Covid years, which ... were not good years for a live music venue and community hub.  As a band we ourselves are ... pretty dead, so it's not for us to go pointing fingers and making accusations.  The last time we played there was a decade ago and ... I'm not going to lie, it certanily seemed pretty vibrant at the time.  But a lot can change in ten years in Vancouver, especially where real estate is involved.

The natural home for Vancouver's Poetry Slam community after a harrowing series of marginal events in unsuitable venues, occasional Accordion Noir Festival venue (and host to the very brief run of the Vancouver Song Slam) Cafe Deux Soleils also will be remembered for a spell hosting the hottest open mic series in town Thursday nights, where you could roll in at 7 pm for pre-signup and take your chances whether anyone might or might not be hearing you before midnight (or indeed, even that week at all!)

Unlike our friends in High Society, who basically turned it into their living room (in fact, the news of its closure left their next engagement there, already booked!, high and dry... moved to the WISE Hall on short notice!), we never spent all that much time at Cafe Deux as a band, though our hours there include some of our most iconic and formative moments.  (And it was sure a lot easier to walk home from after hours than the Railway!)  Quick, Robin -- to the nostalgia gallery!

We can't find any imagery going back this far -- Facebook was yet to open its doors to people with non .edu e-mail addresses -- but our first appearance there in our own first couple of years was the inaugural installment of "RC Weslowski's Christmas Special" Dec 12th, 2006, featuring "Ivan Hrvatska, Santa and the Baby Jesus fighting to see who owns Christmas, Al Mader, Vitamin F, and much more. It'll be a fund raiser for the Union Gospel Mission's Christmas meals for the homeless program and a partial fund raiser for IWPS. So, whether you are pro or con or atheist or jew or muslim or scientologist, come on out an[d] have some fun."  Here's a clip from the one two years later, which was... let's be fair... more of the same:

 

I vaguely recall our set -- still on the performance art end of things in our vague and formless nascence -- included a take on James Brown's "Santa Claus Go Straight To The Ghetto", a recitation of a brutal Charlie Brown Christmas fan comic printed in The Stranger ("Did Amadou Diallo have naturally curly hair?") and inappropriately seasonally-cheerful "Fa la la la" refrains accompanying Al Mader's dark, dark poem "Love Isn't Blue".

Time passed and we kind of figured out how to be a little entertaining as a band, and three years later RC had us back (our roots run deep with him, not just infecting the Creaking Planks with accordion while promoting the performance poetry revue That's My Brain... And You're Killing It! back in 2005, but even earlier, to the turn of the century at the Sugar Refinery's Scrambled Angst series) to support his conceptual gong show "AwesomeFace: The Children's Show For Grownups!", on which occasion -- January 23rd, 2009 -- we filked the lyrics to Nine Inch Nails' "Closer" (already played straight as part of our repertoire) to be family-friendly... and the world was never the same again! 

And of course our homemade gig posters never went so hard ever again!  Daisy Jones-Locher's poster template for our 2009 gig there with Raghu and the Outlaw Band was quite a bit more pro however:

Why go to all the trouble of cooking up your own poster and then minimising your own presence on it?  Well, you always know what Raghu and Joey will be looking like, but in three Creaking Planks gigs you might be served up three nearly mutually exclusive sets of musicians!  Better play it safe and handwave your way through.

Here's one that was quite a bit more flowery: we were all jazzed up for Hallowe'en on Devil's Night -- October 30th, 2010 -- looking forward to supporting Maria in the Shower at their prime!  Memories are vague, but our notes suggest that this gig somehow got double-booked ... I recall we all tightened our belts for short sets: two of their bands played, two of our bands, and Jeff who put the show together gentlemanly withdrew from the bill, a noble gesture that paid off in our gladly playing more gigs with him down the line.

See what I mean?  There you go, the very next time we overloaded Cafe Deux's limited stage, it was with Jeff Andrew back in tow, along with Portland's Underscore Orkestra on March 4th, 2011.  

gRaPhIc DeSiGn iS mY PaSsIoN!  Gig poster design so often is a struggle to make sense of that which is fundamentally nonsensical (and even when not: it is always a challenge to represent an audio phenomenon visually), but we were nonetheless jazzed to be scheduled to take the stage along with the Bay Area's singular punk rock accordion phenomenon Duckmandu for the Accordion Noir Festival and channeled that weird buzz into a textbook example of probably what not to do on your gig poster.  Poor Duckmandu never made it past Canadian Customs (I believe there was something about a flamethrower-accordion) and after ducking this poster all the way up to 11 we had to play the gig without him, filling the gaps with festival friends like Barbara Adler and Geoff Berner.

Jeff, we continued respecting your sacrifice on our behalf and continued cooking up more strange gig posters for gigs with you, as evidenced by this engagement, The Carnival of Shadows II, October 29th 2011... a second crack at our East Van Hallowe'en at Cafe Deux.  All the particulars were lifted from Google Image Search, but the decision to collide these specific elements of shadow puppetry were entirely the product of our demented, feverish imagination.  

Our friends Strangled Darlings, then of Portland, OR, provided this poster, which manages to both be a lot more specific yet less busy.  We played there with them July 6, 2012 -- our second gig of the day, after performing at an art opening at the Gallery Gachet!  Gather ye rosebuds while ye may, for tomorrow Cafe Deux Soleils may close! 

For a time, we were drawn into the whirling vortex of Blackberry Wood's gravitational well.  We invested so much of our band identity in our accordionic side, holding down Accordion Noir Festival gigs for so many years, this was possibly the first time we were tapped due to our many years diligent representation of Team Ukulele -- often we would feature two ukes on stage simultaneously, though good luck if you were hoping to hear either of them!  This poster is possibly on par with our Duck Apocalypse poster above, but if it is madness, they are clearly committed to it.  (Doubly so, as it is bespoke rather than just being composited from convenient relevant elements.)

And there it was: the final time we performed at Cafe Deux Soleils, November 2nd, 2012.  If things were different, we might conceivably have been able to mount a triumphant return to their stage exactly ten years later, but sadly it closed one month too soon for that to be possible.  (Also: we are nowhere remotely near in comeback shape, still way far-gone.  But the point stands: when we do revive, it won't be Cafe Deux which will be hosting our grand return by public demand!)

Even after we stopped playing gigs there, attending gigs there, and even residing in Vancouver, its stage still doubled as a nice play area for little kids during weekend brunches.  And there, at the back of the stage, a large black piece of fabric draped across the side wall bore testament to its alter ego, as a place where things happen that can't happen elsewhere -- spotted with dots of paint, hearkening back to the moment circa 2007 when our colleagues in Trike spontaneously demonstrated a new, performance-painting element to their stage show.  In exchange for their troubles, they were banned forever from playing there again.  But in its heart Cafe Deux always remembered the room it was meant to be, and kept those memories close... by refusing to ever wash the paint spots off the backdrop fabric.

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Speaking of Trike, here's a fitting exchange bottled from the venue's memorializing on Facebook:

Commercial Drive is done.  It's been staggering on since Bukowski's and La Quena closed, but this nails its coffin shut.  Maybe all of Vancouver is now down for the count, as it keeps losing more Sugar Refineries and Press Clubs and Black Sheep Books than it gains.  (We'll just say that Lana Lou's has a lot of weight resting on its shoulders at the moment.)  Or perhaps the era of live performance is simply behind us... or maybe we have just gotten old and fallen out of touch regarding where the youth are congregating!  But I prefer to believe that people are still partying hard and having a hell of a time and getting in touch with the true selves they were meant to be, on stage, having a blast... somewhere that rent is cheaper and real estate is less the tail wagging the dog.  (Somewhere in an unfashionable slum in eastern Europe, perhaps.  Tell us where the party is and we will bring the sausages!)  Vancouver, please keep this theory in mind as you cast your votes in the municipal election.
 

But don't let me get you all gloomy.  AwesomeFace aimed to combat SADS by encouraging everyone to attend in beachware, and it is thus bedecked that we will remember our time at Cafe Deux.  As notable partyman Leonard Cohen (seriously, for a time he was called Captain Quaalude!) put it in "The Music Crept By Us": 

However since it is
New Year's Eve
and I have lip cancer
I will place my
paper hat on my
concussion and dance.

(Possibly most disappointing of all, we must resign ourselves to never finding out the specific relation between Cafe Deux Soleils and Cafe Du Soleil just down the street.  It's a boring mystery.)