I bet you thought you'd seen the last of our video series! Sure, there's been eight months of radio silence, interrupted only by one blip halfway through. Four months' wait is nothing to us -- our band is nearly 12 years old! We have songs that have been in progress longer than Presidential administrations! (Even longer than election campaigns!)
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Anyway, here we are. By which I mean, here I am -- Daisy-Jones and Ludwika wouldn't fit in the hammock, so I believe they were "huh, huh"ing along while packing up their instruments at this point in the set. I don't know how many of the annual Horace Phair parties in Portland we've managed to play -- I like to think that we've at least hit as many as we've missed, but it's hard to prove as they're often not terribly well-documented in the interest of maintaining our ability to freely cross the US border.
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It was Daisy-Jones Locher's first visit in capacity as a Creaking Plank to Portland, Oregon (or "Disneyland for grown-ups" as we like to call it) for our longstanding annual engagement at the Horace Phair party and it was a humdinger! Not only did we have RoJo(tm) the Therapy Llama as our opener, but this performance was just the second act to a will-our-set-happen-won't-it-happen (turns out, it would!) wedding the previous day up at the Kiwanis Camp on nearby Mount Hood. (And a Mazel Tov to Samantha & Chase!) But as much splendid amenity infrastructure as was present at the wedding (zip lines, board games, pizza and yurts), it lacked a hammock in the basement. Happily, the Saluthaus basement addressed that omission, and so our Portland experience managed to be a complete one! Will performing in a hammock become a thing that we revisit endlessly on-stage? I doubt it, but wouldn't that be nice! Supposing we can't perform in a hot tub (I can think of a few obstacles to making that happen) it's a nice compromise. (Nowhere to sling a hammock? How about beanbag chairs? Wait, could anything be less ergonomic?)
We missed our chance at our anniversary show a couple of years ago, when Rod Matheson set up to record us playing "Music Music Music" and had the shot ruined by overenthusiastic dancers enjoying themselves at the cost of posterity. But we had a standing arrangement to set up another video shoot of a live music performance in an unconventional situation, and after only two and a half years, we managed to make good on it! Finally, a good YouTube clip (we already have a popular one, now we need a good one) of our band looking and sounding more like it does today, a complete take of a song we actually know how to play, more or less.
Also, a bit of catchup: congratulations to Loren & Marisol whose wedding reception at 5 International we performed at in late April; hats off to the folks at the 6th annual Stainsbury Block Party we entertained Sept 7th while a real fire truck dazzled all, and greetings to all our old friends in Portland we partied with this Columbus Day weekend as well as the new ones from the Low Tide Drifters and Girls' Rock Camp we made in Eugene at Plank Town! (And thanks to Rachael & Ben for setting us up there, again!) Did you know we have a Google+ page?
Tom Waits night at the Rio has come and gone. The Wednesday morning before the show Blackbox got an excited phone call from his mother about the Planks' newspaper appearance and he had to raise his eyebrows and scratch his chin, then (as those are both inaudible) profess his bafflement verbally. It seems that though there were several higher-profile and bigger-drawing acts on the bill that night, none of them had as sufficiently Tom Waits-ian photos in their press kit, as with this proven winner Robin Hunt took of us at the Steamer Tea party back in '09.
We knew the show had good buzz on Facebook, but you always know when you appear in the paper because someone's parent will catch it. We never had an inkling! Conventional media: it hasn't quite gone away entirely, yet!
We got in early on in the show to make our mark and then make way for broader strokes. Time and again over our musical voyage people have suggested we lift up Tom's substantial mantle and promenade around beneath its considerable shade. But in tone and intention we are already similar enough to Mr. Waits' work that engaging him leaves us essentially imitators parading around in bad Tom Waits drag -- since you can't out-Tom-Waits Tom Waits and we have so far to travel to escape his iconic renditions in order to hash out a truly novel presentation. You can't just strap on the Cookie Monster voice and expect it to work. (We have a bit about the Tom Waits voice: that it's the wet sound remaining of the bark of the enraged dog after hours of baying, after the bark is gone but the evil intent remains. In human terms it's simpler, vocal chords reduced to two sticks of beef jerky slapping crudely against each other.) It had been several years since we participated, in any form, at a Tom Waits night -- Blackbox and Pavel making Misery Is The River Of The World substantially different by backing up Katie Go-Go on lead vocals, the very opposite (impatients?) of Waits.
But here we had an opportunity to indulge our penchant for the impish and perverse: as with the surreally-presented works of Al Mader, the lyrics to the ominous monologue "What's He Building" revealed a quite-conventional metered and stanza'd song structure lurking just beneath the surface, obfuscated beneath a smoky, noisy layer of free jazz. Here we could scratch that goofy Spike Jones Western Swing itch and give up the arrangement of this song that it was originally written for before going down the path less traveled. Instead of making an arrangement by distressing and tormenting the original tune, we could overcome expectations and buck the trend by cleaning it up and sending it out in its Sunday best! Detourne the creepy by making it banal!
Tom has spoken of his inspiration from the song mills of Tin Pan Alley; if not 100% achieving that evocation, we like to believe that here we at least managed to bring listeners for a foray down Aluminum Pot Lane. With, yes, a couple of obligatory nods to the standard version. For lack of an actual innocuous "thing he was building in there" (a cuckoo clock?) to produce at the end of the song, we contemplated performing with this curious construction footage rolling behind us on-screen, but ultimately we went full-bore for the musical presentation on its own:
Nearly three years after our stint at the first installment of this series, the Rio Theatre (1660 E. Broadway at Commercial Drive) swings back into action with another night of East Van bands playing its stage, this time all providing soundtracks to silent film screenings behind them. All the major players are back from last time, plus more more more!
Instead of working in tandem with the magic of Dr. T as we did before, this time we'll be doing music and foley for a black and white animated classic on the theme of responsible libation, which will this time be possible at the Rio! Your $10 (in advance from brownpapertickets, $12 at the door) doesn't just get you these filmic interpretations from some of East Van's most delightfully twisted musical minds, but also an electro-swing dance party at the end!
Depending on how things go, we may have to get together an expanded set to allow us to provide soundtrack to a whole film festival at some point! And speaking of how things went, congrats to the Lunchgroup Heavy Industries' raising of over $1100 at last week's fundraiser show.
Bonus! For your enjoyment, a picture-in-picture presentation of the Creaking Planks providing a soundtrack and foley effects for the 1928 Felix the Cat short Woos Whoopee, performed at this event to great acclaim.
And just like that, it's that time again: another year, another anniversary show. It almost feels like we're still recovering from last year's! But some things, sufficiently repeated, grow into custom -- almost tradition. We've still got a crack squad of sharp acoustic players with demented musical tastes, and again we've managed to bolster them with opening sets from some of our favourite acts: in this case, Prince George's philosopher-king of the singer-songwriters, Raghu Lokanathan, as well as Vancouver's accordion-queen-in-absentia, Ana Bon-Bon taking a rare tour of the colonies from her new seat in London, England! And as with last year, this year we also congregate to celebrate with this show at the Railway Club, upstairs at 579 Dunsmuir Street. The show should be rolling by 8:30 pm, and again, admission is $8, or $6 for Railway Club members.
We're learning some new songs (at least one of which is not only new to us but to the world!) and exhuming other lost and forgotten works from the great 20th century popular songbook... and of course polishing up the favorite of the discriminating Heineken fan, Jaan Pehechaan Ho. It should be a great time (the only thing going downtown on a Wednesday night!) that we won't see the likes of until, well, January 2013, so we hope to catch you out Wednesday, January 18th, 2012!
Many thanks to Daisy-Jones Locher for the amazing poster artwork; you should be seeing it on some of a new run of buttons, and who knows what other goodies we're going to come up with for the merch table of the damned?
This performance is a presentation of CFRO 102.7 fm's Accordion Noir radio show.
Bonus!
We got to play with Raghu at the show, on his anthemic "theme song", and here's proof:
Here we are, April 24, 2011, in a strangely unsynchronized video (note Dec 21: we managed to correct it, reflected above!) recording capturing our performance of that eternal Bollywood surf-rock anthem, Jaan Pehechaan Ho. We've performed it more than a few times, though usually not in front of a camera. Alan Zisman kindly took video footage of pretty much the entire night, including spirited sets by headliners Maria in the Shower and Jason Webley (basically a perfect bill: maybe we can do it again sometime, guys?) It wasn't a hugely successful show -- we rented space for more bodies than we could draw, and a few parties had to take pay cuts. A friend was even caught after the fact red-handed tweeting "meh" sentiments during our set. But a few months after the fact, we noticed something curious.
Reviewing the video footage of the sets that night, total view counts of most of the performances had plateaued and would only continue to increment slowly thanks to the long tail. But our rendition of this song was pulling out well ahead of our other videos from that concert -- even synchronized ones! It was being viewed more than the Maria in the Shower videos. Now, those gents work hard to Put On A Show (going so far as to accidentally drive a tricycle backwards into a table of adoring fans at this particular show) so that shouldn't be happening. It was being viewed more than the Jason Webley videos! Now, that definitely shouldn't be happening! (For the record, Jason dug our performance of that tune as well, getting to enjoy it over and over again during our elaborate sound check.)
Like many of you, I first learned of the song from its strategic placement at the front of Terry Zwigoff's 2001 film Ghost World, setting an exuberant opening note of wonderful strangeness and strange wonderment that the film couldn't entirely sustain. I had to know more, and learned of its origin in the 1965 movie Gumnaam, and its performance by Mohammed Rafi (and not, as the film suggests, Ted Lyons.) Maybe you haven't seen Ghost World or Gumnaam, but you were one of the 8 million people to enjoy watching the Heineken advertisement "the Date." Either which way, it definitely makes an impression. The impression it made on me was: "gosh, I'd love to learn to play that one! But it'll take an elaborate arrangement -- I'll never convince the Planks!" Fortunately, I didn't have to convince them: Phil & Kimla, longtime Plank supporters (what supports a Plank? a Beam?) requested for us to perform it at their Indo-Canadian wedding and finally we had the excuse we'd needed to put in the work needed to pick it up.
Now, we aren't the only band who have had the great idea to cover this great song, but as far as we can tell, our new interpretation has been the most popular of the pack. Grinder Nova deliver a high-energy rendition, but in a grave injustice it's been enjoyed under 2000 times.
Mexican Drug Patrol also give it a high-intensity instrumental take, and bafflingly, the Railway Club sign in the background of that footage indicates that we've got competition in the Jaan Pehechaan Ho category even in our own hometown! Their version is great, but due to the vagaries of surfers, ours has still been viewed a thousand times more.
Not only has our unsynchronized video performance of this song become the most popular cover version on YouTube (redeeming a complicated show for us -- the audience for that particular performance is now a couple degrees of magnitude greater than the people who were in the crowd enjoying our set) but it has also risen to become the most popular video of all of our performances! This is great, because the internet has terrible taste. Our previous MPV (most played video, right?) was one of the very last times we performed our "faithful" version of Nine Inch Nails' "closer" with its original lyrics before awesome(face)lyinfantalizing it -- regrettably, the night some of our members decided to experiment with some improvised percussive multitasking for the first time ever. There are betterversions of us playing that song on YouTube, but that's the one that ended up under the microscope on the fan forums at nin.com, where about the kindest thing anyone could say was that they could see that we were aspiring for an interesting re-interpretation. Very diplomatic, sir!
Also rapidly receding into the dust is our former 2nd-most-watched video, now barely on the podium, featuring an impromptu collaboration between us and Free Software guru Richard Stallman of a little Bulgarian ditty in 7/4. Oh, one of those! I've got to say, if we've got to be chiefly associated with one performance on YouTube, I'm glad it's Jaan Pehechaan Ho instead of these two.
At this rate, it may soon overshadow all our achievements over the past seven years: its view count has grown by 300 since we discovered its new position as our number one video under a week ago on Twitter! (note Dec 21: and by some 2000 since we first made this blogpost!) We may have missed the golden opportunity for Planking we were born to fulfil, but we'll just have to earn our virality some other way. We were in on the ground floor of the Zombie Walk "movement", and I'm pleased to report that performing Jaan Pehechaan Ho requires a lot less sticky cadaver and gore make-up.
Three conclusions are clear: first, Blackbox needs to phonetically learn the third verse instead of just singing the second one twice. Second, we'll clearly need to track down the owner of the song and get permission to record it on our next album. Third, the Anonymous masses have made their demands clear: we'll have to get it up to speed in time to perform again at our 7th anniversary party upcoming Wed Jan 18th at the Railway Club, with Ana Bon-Bon and Raghu Lokanathan.
On Friday February 6th, Free Geek Vancouver (one of our now three "house band" arrangements, though admittedly they don't have incredibly frequent occasions on which to call on us) invited us to do a brief set opening for a speech on copyright and freedom by renowned hacker Richard Stallman at the Maritime Labour Centre. We rolled out a couple of technological standards (Korobeiniki aka "the Tetris song", Kraftwerk's "Computer Love") as well as a new piece for the occasion (Flanders and Swann's "the GNU song" -- enjoy this rendition by the Muppets!) Most harrowingly, however, the organizers hoped for us to join the evening's main speaker for a stirring rendition of his Free Software Song, in the unorthodox time signature of 7/4. Due to complications, we were unable to secure either a sound check or a moment's rehearsal with the main attraction, so what follows is a raw document (c/o Alan Zisman, who recorded our whole set -- perhaps to be exposed here once it's recovered) of us bucking up and boldly plunging once more unto the breach.
(The Feb 19th, 2009 episode of Each For All at Co-op Radio used a recording of our Korobeinki rendition to open the episode before discussing Free Software and rebroadcasting Stallman's lecture.)
Also, cheers to Julie Peters who threw our new, "kid-friendly" rendition of Closer (straight from our CJSF apperance, from one campus station to the next) on the Feb 11th episode of her radio show Audio Text (on CiTR, 101.9 fm) alongside passionate appearances from RC Weslowski, Magpie Ulysses, and Duncan Shields. If you like, you can download a podcast recording of the episode here -- though we only turn up with the one song. The rest of the crew do their bit to make it a charged, erotic recording that meets its holiday occasion head-on.
Unrelatedly, If anyone out there (I'm looking at you, Portland) has ended up with any early Creaking Planks demo material, would it be possible for you to send us a digital photo of the design and packaging (such as it is)? We're perversely interested in putting up a gallery here of merchandise that is essentially unobtainable. See what you missed?
We haven't played a show with our Victorian friend Natasha Enquist since the Accordion Noir festival four months ago, but her luscious leiderhosen made a compelling case for welcoming her back to town. Besides, she sat in the front row when we played the Solstice, so we owe it to her to make her feel welcome. Similarly, with some false alarms accounted for it's been a while since we last played the Little Mountain Studios (almost seven months! can it truly be? unprecedented!), but perhaps the absence will make our return to our first "house band" assignment all the sweeter. And how better to cinch the deal than draw on our renaissance man of the arts, Ehren Salazar, improvisatory master of every medium he sets himself to. (Need we remind you of the thrilling account of the reverse zamboni?) All that plus we hope to fool Dr. Steelhand into bringing out the cards and coins again for some legerdemain and fine trickery, and it can be yours for a suggested five dollar donation to help us float Natasha out with her squeezebox. (For a sneak preview, catch her the night of Friday the 2nd from 9:30-10:30 pm on Accordion Noir at CFRO 102.7 fm!)
Nice photo, eh? It's by Samantha King!
Edit: arguably our best LMS performance ever, despite virtually no PA and the bitter end of Vancouver's surprise winter weather (the LMS formerly being a butcher's shop, the back area is actually designed precisely for making meat cold; in any case, the hoary frost kept Daisy Jones-Locher away, but otherwise it was a nice Planks reunion to get the year off to a good start) -- we filled every chair in the place and all the acts were well-received, with special audience guests the Mezamazing crew who we hope to join us on stage there in a few months.
Calgary visitor Sean handily took a photo of the proceedings, the space still decked up for the holidays. Can you spot the new member?
Sean took a photo of the Planks in full array
What's more, Cap'n Jack Spareribs posted a live video from the concert of Natasha playing the old Russian standard "Dark Eyes" or Ochi chyornye ... and Planks Lee Shoal and Wyoming Johnny cutting a rug to it!
