2015-01-16: the Creaking Planks’ 10th anniversary extravaganza!

Our first anniversary went entirely unnoticed. Our second, likewise. By the time we had reached our third anniversary, we'd seen fellow traveller acts throw in the towel and several of the vital musical venues who had given us our first struts and frets upon the stage closing their doors, launching under new management or (worst of all) changing format to exclude live music in favour of MMA on numerous big-screen TVs. We felt we had achieved something merely by hanging in there and keeping on keeping on. Our third anniversary was an occasion worth celebrating, and celebrate we did (well, tried our hardest to), with a star-studded cabaret at the Western Front, one of the first posts on our blog here -- before which, we tracked our gigs on MySpace and on a long-extinct bespoke Geocities page. (Geocities? I know, Internet time moves so quickly, it's hard to believe music existed at all back then. We liked to bang rocks together and hit tanned animal skins with Smilodon tusks of different lengths.)

Now we are ten. We have been a going concern for over three times as long as that naive band of three, excited to be invited to play on the radio and basically trying to trick people into giving us opportunities to play for free as many nights a week as possible. We've played individual gigs whose fees have netted us as much dosh as entire years of playing for exposure got us; we have flown on airplanes to perform at festivals in other countries we never even applied to appear at. We have gone into studios to make recordings and then forgot about them. The level of success we have achieved has exceeded any heights we might ever have reasonably expected to reach with our improbable format, and yet, not a single one of our dozen-odd members is able to make a living in Vancouver making music. It's a funny, contradictory existence, to be true.

Whatever other beats we have and haven't been able to hit (gonged off stage: check; provided soundtrack for a live sex show: check; played on the soundtrack to the video game World of Goo: almost, but didn't quite happen), one constant for the last several years has been that we've had at least one show annually where we get to have it our way, on our terms -- to play on a bill stacked with acts we will enjoy, getting to pick our set times to accommodate our numerous twisted schedules. To wit: our anniversary show. Members turn up out of the woodwork to play just this one show all year round. We expect to be playing with 4 Planks and end up performing with 11, thereby kiboshing any chance of performing any material picked up since the previous anniversary show! We know that whatever we earn will end up as bus fare when split a dozen ways, so we ensure that we are paid amply in the only other currency with any weight to the unruly band of loose cannon musicians: fun.

For the first few years we were too scattered in our neurotic attempts to give away all the music as often as possible to worry about occasions on which to have shows that were guaranteed to be good, and for the first five years, that 3rd anniversary was the only one we celebrated. (It gave all anniversary celebrations overall somewhat of a bad aftertaste in our collective mouths, but eventually we learned to love again.) For the second five years, it has been mandatory: we had great, fun shows for our sixth anniversary, our seventh, our eighth, ninth and now, coming up next... the tenth anniversary of our first gig... to be our greatest, most fun anniversary show yet?

And now, apropos of nothing, I'd like to casually drop in a random photograph that assuredly has nothing to do with anything I'm talking about:

Here are the vital details you will need to know:

Accordion Noir presents
the jug band of the damned
Friday, January 16th, 8 pm
THE CREAKING PLANKS
10th anniversary extravaganza

plus Ehren Salazar,
Al Mader, the Minimalist Jug Band,
Der Royshiker Krokves,
magic by Travis
and special guests!

at The Emerald (555 Gore Avenue)
Admission $10 (for ten years!)

Bring at least a $20 bill along, because for the first time anywhere, we will also be selling Creaking Planks T-shirts featuring the poster artwork from our 7th anniversary concert, at very competitive prices.

What more is there to say?

...

Greetings to the Plank Nation! The time is nigh upon us! Tomorrow night, Friday, January 15th, we celebrate the 10th anniversary of our first meeting at the inaugural performance of the Creaking Planks at the Western Front's "raw and cooked" showcase curated by Sarah Macdougall, along with Chrystalene Buhler, Joanna Chapman-Smith, and the freak performance poetry revue "That's My Brain... And You're KILLING It!" There the Planking of Ole and Heather -- "a droney song, a noisy song, a short improv; all with a touch of pirate" -- met Rowan's arrangement of Al Mader's "I'm A Lousy Lay" ... and the rest was, if not exactly history, ten years of occasionally-inspired obscurity. We celebrated the decade-long musical experiment on the Accordion Noir radio program last night, featuring a series of rare recordings and concert bootlegs from various nadirs and zeniths of our varied history, and you can enjoy them as well... by following that link. We'll be breaking into the vault of time and playing a few similar selections from our vast back catalogue Friday night. So, you know that it's all going down at the Emerald, right? 555 Gore, upstairs at the site of the old dim sum restaurant the New Diamond? Here, perhaps the poster that Ehren Salazar designed will help to cement the details in your memory:

That's right: not just the Creaking Planks, but also their Jewish wedding band klezmorim alter egos Der Royshiker Krokves opening! The prime mover Al Mader, the Minimalist Jug Band! New tunes from Victoria's newly electrified improvised genius, Ehren Salazar! Plus a set of magical tricks from Travis, gosh wow! Ten dollars (for ten years) -- two dollars per act -- is basically a criminally undercharged rate, and audience members will be getting away with, well, a very good deal. Speaking of good deals... do you like accordions? Of course you do! Do you like octopuses? Duh! Why not both at the same time! "You got your octopus in my accordion!" "You got your accordion in my octopus!" "Heey...."

"...NOT BAD!" But wait, this is a pointless digression!

That's more like it. That's right, ladies and gentlemen, for the low, low price of another ten dollars, you could go home wearing this -- the first in what will assuredly be a long, long line of Creaking Planks fashions. This t-shirt is from the fabulous 7th anniversary poster design by Daisy Jones-Locher. No longer need you wear the tattered poster! Spare yourself the paper cuts! But that's not all... for further whimsical and otherwise-unavailable goods that will be sold at our concert, read on!

That's right, it's the 2015 edition of Renee de la Prade's long-running Accordion Babes cheesecake pin-up calendar/album. We're not represented therein, as the "Accordion Dudes" beefcake calendar has had a long and bumpy trip getting off the ground, but we are great friends with the Babes and run on similar wavelengths as their strange sensibilities. Each month's babe is represented by a track on the accompanying CD album, so you can buy it to listen to and then later on you can pull out the magnifying glass to better examine which make and model of squeezebox each babe is rocking. A handful of these will be for sale for $20 a piece, and we can guarantee you won't find them in any store in town. Only in the strange chaos bubble surrounding the Planks do these bizarre alternate worlds manifest. See you there!

2013-10-25: SpookEasy HallowSwing Cabaret

September has been a blast! The Accordion Noir fest was a winner (isn't it always, though?) -- in promotions it was nice hearing ourselves described as "festival favorites" on the CBC's North by Northwest, and if you like you can find a link to (and, ahem, extensive analysis of) the debut of our interactive choose-your-own-adventure song suite performed over here. (Note: performance recording is not interactive.) Then we played a special dance set for Planks alumnus Venus Soberanes at the local reception for her wedding with Jeremy at the Little Mountain Studio, rounding out a variety show spiked with Al Mader himself! Hopefully we will be manifesting at the Horace Phair party this Columbus Day, but we're getting a bit beyond the scope of this post -- which is about our next public local gig you can enjoy!

You are cordially invited to the Spookeasy HallowSwing Cabaret party on Friday Oct. 25th, a Prohibition era-themed Halloween Party!

It’s time to heed the bell's toll for ghastly, ghoulish and grim Halloween partying with Vancouver's Electro Swing Clubr.

Come in your best retro-horror garb: top hat & tails, flapper, Victorian asylum lunatics, boudoir, silent horror film characters, Carnivale freaks, steampunk, horror circus, Satanic burlesque, Voodoo, Day of the Dead, hospital horror, haunted forest animals, evil clowns, Halloween masks... etc.

In the Cabaret room:
* Every time the Tim Sars Band plays a show, they know it might be their last. While the band is swingin' hot, the lyrics always seem to go to the dark side. The very talented Brendan Krieg on drums and vocals, Roisin Adams on piano and vocals, and Russell Sholberg on bass are complicit in Tim's evil musical plot, and those on the dance floor shall be the victims. During their set we'll have a Hot Beat Swing Dance and Black Bottom Stomp performances.

* Burlesque retro ghost number by Riannaconda

* Sword-swallowing sideshow by Kata Sita, Human BlockHead, Bug eating and more... If this performance doesn't give you goosebumps nothing will!!!

* Haunted Go-Go Flapper Girls

* VooDoo DJs: From Montreal, Speakeasy Electro Swing gang Eliazar Hason. From the Island - AppleCat and local crew Rudy.

* In the Hideaway Room we'll have 3 bands: The Creaking Planks, Meg A Tron and Sound Architecture:

The jug band of the damned, the Creaking Planks, salvage festering songs from the mass grave of popular music, binding their festering choruses together with a thread spun from extinct instruments, making them move once again by perversely introducing the strange spark of life.

* In the Tiki room, we'll have the bad boys SideShow, Doe Ran and DJ Spaz. They're guaranteed to rattle your bones… and reanimate your zombie hearts It won’t mean a thing until the zombies start to swing!

Also expect the visuals to captivate and twist your mind with images from the past and future blended together in one cocktail.

Advance tickets are $15, $20 at the door. Here's the Facebook event announcement.

2011-04-02: Planks play at the Peculiar Poetry Cabaret!

You probably missed us March 12 playing an intimate acoustic living room set to celebrate a new line of Venus' vintage jewellery. That was too bad, but her works live on and you can find them online! Performances are ephemeral however, none more than poetry performances -- even the loudest among them often fly under the radar just outside the front door, while a jerk with a car stereo can be belt blocks away. Musicians, though, we straddle the line between poet and jerk, and tomorrow night we will be making a spirited ruckus on behalf of the quiet poets of page and slam, making our sound and fury to benefit the upcoming 1st annual Vancouver International Poetry Festival.

Joining us will be such mouthy titans as Al Mader, the minimalist jug band, as well as Barbara Adler of Fang and elder statesman of the harmonica beatbox C. R. Avery. Also on the bill are Lucia Misch, our friends in High Society, and even a very literary turn by our own Travis the Magician. (A wizard of words, perhaps?)

Admission runs on a sliding scale from $10-15.

2011-01-31: Creaking Planks 6th anniversary

Sunday January 30th, 2005, in the auditorium at the Western Front, a room which has seen so many deliberately stranger things, an accordionist with a performance poetry troupe met an outsider acoustic noise duo with slightly more underground musical sensibilities than the Shaggs had, and knew that their two great tastes must go great together. Enter: the Creaking Planks. Six years later, we skip lightly past the endless living rooms, back yards, and festivals, Vancouver's introduction to the ZombieWalk, a pirate flashmob, two stage musicals, gigs down the US Pacific seaboard (studded with the abandoned hulks of derelict tour vehicles), and memorable mixed bills -- following '50s squeezebox sex symbol Dick Contino at the 20th annual Cotati Accordion Festival, and opening in turn for free software guru Richard Stallman... our two biggest gigs!

Now we actually know how to play our instruments, and our musical sensibilities have matured from "Can we play this?" to "Should we play this?" In honour of our six years we're putting to bed many of the songs we've kept close this whole time, and celebrating onetime contributors whose paths led them through the rotating roster of Planks before settling for other, less strange projects. We may not match our record of 11 Planks on-stage simultaneously, but we should be able to at least cumulatively meet that high-water mark over the course of the night. Joining us will be musical guiding lights Petunia the yodeling cowboy and Al Mader, the Minimalist Jug Band, whose "I'm a Lousy Lay" were the magic words that got us together in the first place.

It's also a retirement for Dieter Friesen's tenure booking his Deet Street nights at the Railway Club, a long association between him and us dating back to our first appearance there in April '06 sharing a bill with his band Rick Danko's Ghost under the auspices of Tamara Nile. In short, we have numerous reasons to be celebrating this night, of things changing more the more they stay the same.

Update! Allan reviewed it, in a roundabout fashion, and an American friend came up from Bellingham to enjoy some great music and take a bunch of pictures capturing the night's wild and woolly energy!

2009-10-26: a Deet Street Hallowe'en party at the Railway Club

It’s that spooky time of year again and in the run up to All Hallow’s Eve, the Deet Street is getting psyched to bring a couple sets from some Railway veterans to get you movin’ your ghostly feet. The Creaking Planks, Vancouver’s own pirate jug band of the damned is back to bring you a musical experience unlike anything you’ve ever heard, the perfect accompaniment to your haunted pre-hallow’s Monday evening.

But before their spooky set, be sure to check out Gadjo’s Django Reinhardt-inspired gypsy swing; jazzy virtuosic mellowness at its best.

But wait, there’s more: be sure to get there early so you don’t miss a very special set from Al Mader, The Minimalist Jug Band. Al’s inimitable brand of beatnik punkabilly is something you won’t find anywhere on this earth.

Furthermore, being as we’re approaching Halloween, the Deet Street invites all of you to dress up as your favourite dead (ie: Michael Jackson, but he’s still merchandising his ass off), almost dead (ie: Amy Winehouse, poor girl needs to chill out) or should be dead (ie: Keith Richards, PS: WTF how the hell is he still going) musician. As always the beers will be cold, the music rocking, the company excellent and the times great. It’s the spookiest Monday night this side of a Scooby Doo Halloween Special.

The Railway Club is at 579 Dunsmuir Street (at Seymour, upstairs). Doors at 8:30PM, show at 9. Admission is $7 / $5 for Railway members.

...

Even if we were on too late for the photographer to catch us, Lauren Eldridge of Backstage Vancouver soundly enjoyed this show, and wasn't afraid to tell everyone -- on its blog and on its Twitter feed! She came back for more the next night and got a very different beast at Blackstrap Sadie's 8)

2009-04-04: Blackbox Squeezebeard's April Ship of Fools birthday celebration at Cafe Montmartre

As an experiment into filling a whole night at Cafe Montmartre (4362 Main Street at 28th Avenue) with varied textures of performance from members of our multifarious crew and extended family, the Creaking Planks celebrate Blackbox Squeezebeard entering into his fourth decade with the April (Ship of) Fools Variety Show from 8 pm through "late" (past midnight!) Saturday, April 4th. Performances will include magic from Travis, interstitial improvisation and ukulele from Ehren Salazar and John Barbour, new music from familiar faces Paul Hendriks (aka the Rev. Lucian Rumblebucket), possibly demonstrating his banjo aptitude, and Eryn Holbrook (aka Daisy Jones-Locher -- who worked a wonderful whimsical adaptation of Hieronymus Bosch's "Ship of Fools" into the show's poster!) contributing a solo set a couple of months earlier than usual, sharing her voice-and-keys songwriting not much heard since the days of her Perpetual Dream Theory project. Also joining us will be a very special set from washtub bass outsider Al Mader, the Minimalist Jug Band, and of course a couple of sets of Creaking Planks creaking and planking.

At Montmartre we play for tips, but we anticipate your generosity in support of this jam-packed night and its auspicious occasion.

Edit: phew! What a night! Check out VanCityMike's gallery of shots from the variety show up on Flickr!

2009-01-11: Planks and Petunia at Montmartre, redux!

The Jug Band of the Damned revisits Main Street's little slice of Paris, Cafe Montmartre (4362 Main at 28th) courtesy once again of the western swingingest flower in the whole dagblamed garden, Petunia, sandwiching us between two sets of him playing with a small combo and featuring scattered smatterings from Al Mader, the Minimalist Jug Band -- the visionary behind "Lousy Lover" and "Dead Man's Pants". Not to be missed!

We'll be back there later in the week with Rick Keating, so stay tuned!