2012-04: A new track for Tracks on Tracks

You heard it before, but now we have re-recorded a new, exuberant version on which its author is actually present! The previous version was good, but this one is great! Our hit single, the Kishka Anthem, can now be heard at our new bandcamp page (and on CBC Radio 3! -- but you can tip us there!)



(Generally elsewhere it is accompanied with a similar but different photograph from our Prophouse gig last May, but this one splendidly emphasizes the constipated look on Blackbox's face while Pavel sings. Cosmic truths revealed through photography! And maybe it really will steal our souls.)

2012-04: Round 3!

Surprise! It couldn't have surprised anyone more than us to determine that we'd gotten into the top 25 bands out of the initial 300 competing to travel on that Tracks on Tracks contest to ride the musical rails into Toronto and the NXNE festival, but unpredictable is our middle name. (Named after our great-uncle, whose exploits in Central Asia... well, but I digress.)

But there we were, tuned in to the podcast on Wednesday, when there we heard it. It was brief, but then they repeated it a few times, confused by how alphabetizing names beginning with "The" puts bands with "Creaking" in their names after "Shred Kelly". (Pro tip: often the "the" is omitted. Sorry.)

And here we were, all ready to blog about The Little Engine That Could and how we thought we could and put out our best effort and thanks to all our supporters for believing anyway and now we could get back to business just scraping by, but no -- the campaigning continues! We have until noon PST on Tuesday, May 1st, to garner enough votes to place us among the top 10, now at cbc.polldaddy.com/s/new-survey-4. The results will be out by late Wednesday morning, and we can assure you we'll be making a big stink either way.

Our campaigning will continue apace, with more goodies to be shared over the coming week -- with this new revelation that people actually care what we're up to, we're definitely more inspired to give our best! And superfans subscribed to our Twitter feed at twitter.com/creakingplanks or our Facebook group (and the new event there created just to gracefully court voters across multiple rounds without endlessly bugging them) will likely get the inside scoop on these goodies! Only here will they be discussed and analysed endlessly, but if you want the announcements without the insight and lousy jokes, check there first!

2012-04: Tracks on Tracks -- the ever-lovin' end!

Warning: this post is not suitable for children, and the image contained herein may require a long time to explain to them (and years of expensive therapy to fully get over.) The precise circumstances remain infuriatingly vague, but it was universally admitted to be a calamity the likes of which the Children's Festival had never anticipated when they booked us. You start singing the Happy Birthday dirge with its line "children crying in despair" and never realise just where it leads. Well this is it, the end of the line, folks. Everybody off! We warned you to keep your hands inside the moving vehicle!

It's true, this is our final imaginary photo-post campaigning for round 2 of the CBC's "Tracks on Tracks" contest -- you have until noon Tuesday to submit your vote in support of the jug band of the damned (down in the "T" section at cbc.polldaddy.com/s/new-survey-3) to try to clear us for participation in the third and final round. The winner gets to ride with Green Couch Productions (heh, if their Indiegogo campaign picks up) and some other bands on a musical train trip to Toronto and the NxNE festival in June. We like to think we'd be admirable candidates for the job, and thanks for asking!

This week of strange photocollages has been an attempt to psychically associate us with a rail travel context, a little bit askew (in conjunction with spectacular and historic disasters -- modern ones are just too horrific) but all the more appropriate for our somewhat bent take on the music biz. Of course, we hope not to bring on any bad juju to whoever ends up winning the contest and riding the gravy train east -- but, y'know, even if disaster strikes you can keep your camera handy and own the disaster as best you can. Rocking out, loudly, can be a form of grieving!

(We also had an unfortunate run-in with Big Bird backstage, but those photos are entirely unprintable.)

2012-04: Tracks on Tracks -- Hardcore!

Who knew that our stint as a supporting act on Jason Webley's Monsters of Accordion tour would lead to our landing an opening spot at OzzFest? This particular image captures perfectly a moment in the set as we transition from Patsy Cline's "Crazy" to Gnarls Barkley's "Crazy" to Ozzy's "Crazy Train" to Elizabeth Cotten's "Freight Train". Our cross-genre sensibilities have always engendered "train wrecks" (startling, jarring sudden transitions between genre and mood) and so why not our stage shows also? This train may not have crashed yet, but it's so badass it leaves a shipwreck in its wake -- in the sky. (The conductor is actually a really nice guy but too many years in green rooms has done a number on his face. As for the angel, she just missed her entrance cue.)

To be sure -- this scene never happened. But remember -- pictures never lie. And art is the thing that uses fiction to tell greater truths -- just ask Mike Daisey. Are you confused yet? Here's what you really need to take home from these bewildering blog posts: as a band, we really like trains and rail travel, which all these demented imaginary photocollages are, in a sense, celebrating. And you could help us to experience some this June as part of the Tracks on Tracks tour to Toronto, by voting for us at cbc.polldaddy.com/s/new-survey-3 ! Now don't forget to stop by tomorrow for the final stop on our tour of the locomotive collective subconscious!

PS, unrelated, but make sure to check out the new video of our live classic cartoon soundtrack accompaniment from two weeks ago!

2012-04: Tracks on Tracks -- miniaturized!

When will it end? Why, when we're in Toronto. Until then, we are campaigning this week to get you to send us there by voting for us in the second round of the Tracks on Tracks popularity contest, at cbc.polldaddy.com/s/new-survey-3

This campaigning takes the form, this week, of demonstrating pictorially what a great fit we are for the rail medium featuring so prominently in the contest by sharing great imaginary photographs from the Creaking Planks Album of Gig Photos That Never Were But Maybe Should Have Been... surprisingly many of which feature calamitous rail voyages of one kind or another.

For this next photo, for instance, we not only traveled back in time to 1964 but also into a wholly fictitious universe -- and then shrunk down to model train size! Because, y'know, if you're going to do one impossible thing, why not three? So here we are, celebrating Hallowe'en with Gomez Addams by playing a spirited set at the bandstand in his model railway set. And because Gomez plays by his own rules, his toy trains aren't always arranged optimally so as to get everyone where they're going on time -- unless their destination is the afterlife! Of course, model railroad figures don't have an afterlife, do they? (Hm, the theological implications are staggering!)

In conclusion... please vote for us!

2012-04: Stupid Tricks for Tracks on Tracks

To demonstrate our tremendous suitability as candidates for inclusion on the CBC's "Tracks on Tracks" musical train tour to Toronto in June, (and specifically, our eminent "good fit" as parties deserving of your vote to progress through the second round of crowd polling -- which you can, ahem, corroborate at http://cbc.polldaddy.com/s/new-survey-3 ) we've been going on a whirlwind blitz through the albums of imaginary photos of rail-related gigs the Creaking Planks never played -- but might have.

Don't think we didn't hear you snickering behind our back at how safe and conservative our last two rail visit photos were. Those horrific disasters were done with and we were just ambulance-chasing, you claimed, visiting the site of tragedy after the fact to safely mug at the camera like Langley teens taking Instagram shots of each other in front of a previously burned-out cop car at Vancouver's Stanley Cup Riots! (Yes, that was oddly specific.) Well, we fired up our Creaking Time Machine again to see about pushing the boundaries and came up with something a little more "extreme" for you:

One of our coldest gigs, to be sure, and the sound check was hellacious -- we had the hardest time achieving a balanced stage mix in the monitors. And the green room was, as you can see, quite draughty. But at the end of the night we each took home a cool fifty dollars in cold cash, so it evened out.

2012-04: Creaking Planks for Tracks on Tracks -- Time Tracks!

Not content with our previous travel through time, in search of grand historical train trips from which to draw inspiration for our upcoming prospective rail voyage, we visited Paris' grand Gare de l'Ouest in 1895. Wacky hijinks ensued. I don't know how this happened, I guess we're just not well-trained.

What a ruckus... it sure was hard to hear ourselves in the monitors! Why all the trains on the brain, anyhow? Well, you may have heard that we're in the running to participate in a little contest which might send us on a musical voyage by rail to the sunny shores of Toronto! This prospect has us so excited, well, to be honest, it's short-circuited our brains a little bit. Anyhow -- would you consider voting for us? (We're down in the "T" section, for "T"he Creaking Planks.)

2012-04: Tracks on Tracks contest -- second round!

It's true, folks, somehow we garnered enough votes to ascend through the ranks of the 300 applicant bands and ended up among the top 50 in the second round. What this means is that we need for you to vote for us -- again! -- over at cbc.polldaddy.com/s/new-survey-3 !! Thanks a lot for voting us in the first round, and we hope for your return electoral business.

If we'd realised that we'd need to be campaigning for a second round, we probably wouldn't have exhausted all of our colour Planks-on-trains photos in the last post. However, tipped off to the new, ongoing nature of the business, we hopped in the ol' Creaking Time Machine (did you know that drummers kept time?), and snapped off a few more.

You can't tell, but Pavel is actually incorporating the fallen locomotive here into part of his kit. What can we say, we brought the house down.

Creaking Planks... on a train? Tracks on Tracks contest!

As you can see, the Creaking Planks have been on a train before:



... that was back in '09, outside Longevity John's Duncan Garage Showroom on the Flogged 'Round the Fleet tour. We look good in a locomotion context! (These glamour shots were snapped by Wyoming Johnny's pappy, who knows his way around a camera!)



We had fun hanging out with Raghu Lokanathan on a chock-blocked train car in Valemount the following summer, but since then our days have been disappointingly rail-free. Individual Planks have more than a little train experience, both cross-Canada and south along the West Coast (and let's not bring Euro-rail into this particular conversation) but never since have we all been on a train together. (Maybe a SkyTrain, which isn't quite as glamourous.)

Well, the "Tracks On Tracks" contest the CBC and VIA Rail are presenting is here to change all that! If we're one of the three winners, as determined by... profuse fan-voting! ... we could be sent on a multi-stop trip to Toronto, playing music and being filmed all the way. Comparisons abound to the 2003 documentary about the 1970 Festival Express train trip, except that this edition would have significantly more Canadian content... and of course rail travel wasn't strictly for the rich back then. (And BC Rail... well, don't get me started.)

TL;DR? Click here to vote for us and up to two other bands that you think would make this train trip one for the ages. Then cross your fingers, knock on wood and see if you can get your friends to do the same! If the chips fall in our corner, we might well be posting new photos of Creaking Planks On A Train in July!