2008-06-07: 6⋅7⋅8 ⋅ a night of musical numbers

We played tag for a year and a half trying to get Eryn Holbrook (occasionally aka Daisy Jones-Locher) a gig at the Butchershop Floor, and then when we finally had it clinched, the space closed down.  But because it is the only way for us to get a chance to hear her compositions on voice and keyboard, we put together another show for her (and us) at the Annex for last year's Music Waste festival -- also the first Plankian appearance of (ir)regular Peg-Leg Right-Eye Ryan!  A year later we had a hankering to hear her stuff again, and so we bring it full circle back to the Little Mountain Studios, on the site of the old Butchershop, at 195 E. 26th (at Main), for a night of musical numbers. Hosting the proceedings is LMS proprietor Ehren "Monsterdinosaur" Salazar, doubtlessly regaling us with tales and tunes of ages so bygone they haven't happened yet.  Also on deck is a magic show from our own Dr. Steelhand of the slide guitar!  Doors at 8, $3 cover.  Sure to be one of our most charming summer evenings yet!

2008-06-05: Music Waste trad showcase with Dyad, Ora Cogan, and Hank & Lily

The Music Waste festival is a longstanding hipster tradition in Vancouver, an indie Salon des Refusés in response to the apparently corporatized Music West (and now New Music West); in keeping with its bohemian name, often the acts it hosts are more Metal Machine Music than Top-40, not necessarily the friendliest or most accessible performances but (rest assured) more than cool enough to make up for any unpolished auditory abrasiveness: it's raw and fresh, like sushi, and like sushi only carries with it a slight chance of making you ill.

Last year, never considering ourselves quite cool enough for main festival inclusion, the Planks put on a musical sideshow in association with it as part of their "Go Your Own Waste" (essentially Bring Your Own Venue) initiative; we descended upon the little underutilized Gastown stage at the back of the Annex (no longer with us) and presented recent musics from Adri Lake and Eryn Holbrook (aka sometimes-Plank Daisy Jones-Locher) at a charming sold-out venue. But you'll be hearing more about that one soon.

Keen on revisiting a smashing June show, we applied to the festival again in the hopes of mounting a similar show and much to our delighted surprise found ourselves curated right into the main festival program with a stellar program of similar acts we might never have otherwise appeared with: the resolute traditionalists of Dyad, Victorian comic-vaudevillains Hank & Lilly, and Ora Cogan, recently returned from Northwest Folklife! Icing the cake (let us leave that sushi metaphor behind us), we get to all take the stage in the charming heritage room of Radha Yoga & Eatery, above the Brickhouse at 728 Main Street. A far cry from the excesses suggested by the festival name: folk music in a yoga studio? Don't get too settled, though, as we will find a way to move you.  Planks are slated to start playing at 8:30 pm!

Festival passes (a saving if you want to see more than three shows, and there are plenty of hum-dinger line-ups to pick from) can be purchased for $15 at Zulu Records (1972 W 4th Ave), Scratch Records (726 Richards Street), Limelight Video (2505 Alma Street), Redcat Records (4307 Main Street), and Audiophile Records (2016 Commercial Drive).

2008-05-30: Velofusion party at the ANZA Club!

In the run-up to Bike Month, aka "June" to the uninitiated, the month of May in these parts always features a pirate-themed Critical Mass ("Critical Mast") group bicycle ride (-- they're not blocking traffic, they ARRRR traffic!) ... And who better to play its monthly "Velofusion" afterparty than Vancouver's pre-eminent pirate band?

Further contributing to our "good fit" for this long-considered show, proceeds raised through tonight's celebrations will go to benefit Free Geek Vancouver, the Portland-emigrated free software e-waste solution who we're considered the "house band" of (experts, after all, in the field of salvaging further use from old trash.) Though the particulars are still technically up in the air, if this month's installment is anything like its predecessors, there is likely a $10 admission ($5 for Critical Mass participants) and the bill is very likely to contain some DJ-fueled dancing madness (oho, Timothy Wisdom!) spilling out on to the ANZA Club floor... so get ready to strap on your pegs and patches and prepare to shiver timbers and discover booty as we make you walk the Plank!

(As a special bonus, click on the thumbnail for the general Critical Mass poster. It's really quite charmingly whimsical!  Also on tap now: FreeGeek's own poster for the event!  A bit more explicit and inclusive than ours -- but they knew more than we did 8)

Also a special greeting and thanks to our friends in Portland for a thrilling moustache party weekend! Cheers also to the folks at Bex's crashed BBQ -- two kegs of homebrew and a Balkan band make up for any license taken with the +1s.

2008-05-09: Katie GoGo, Clare Love and the Creaking Planks

Without a doubt, Hoko's booker and impresario par excellence Katie GoGo has led us into good times. But we have good times all over the place. Back last fall we had good times at Café Montmartre alone three times over a three week period! But now, finally, the time has come for these two great tastes to be enjoyed together: flexing her production muscles, Katie is trying out a new night at Café Montmartre (4362 Main at 28th Ave.) And who is she inviting to help her show her best face at her inaugural show there? That's right -- itinerant songwriter Clare Love. Who is awesome. And also us. Who are also awesome. (At least, our webmaster thinks so.)

Performances should be underway by 8 pm; entrance is by donation (please direct your tips to the hat!) and do make sure to enjoy the kitchen specialty of hot crepes on these cool evenings.

A surprise addition to the splendid bill was a brave individual who took to the stage after the rest of the performances and played a haunting rendition mashing up the chord transition from Portishead's "Glory Box" with the lyrics to Will Smith's theme song to The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air -- truly a performance to remember.

2008-05-07: J.R. Hill and the Creaking Planks

Fame and/or notoriety is a funny thing; venture out into the public and do your thing and one way or another word will spread, the curious fruit tumbling well past beyond where the seeds were sown. One afternoon we were culling the spammers and number-collectors from our MySpace page when we found a friend invite from some stranger in Winnipeg. Did any of us know anyone in Winnipeg? Had any of us ever been to Winnipeg? Could this be anything other than crackling static background noise emitting from the black hole at the heart of the online universe? Naturally, in the bitbucket it went. Not long after, we received a curious message inquiring as to whether we were interested in playing on a bill with them at the Little Mountain Studios. The asker looked familiar... oh! it was that person we'd denied and rejected! How embarrassing. I can proudly say that we now have one friend in Winnipeg.

Come out Wednesday and maybe you could, too! J.R. Hill is touring the great Canadian West and we are proudly presenting him to you at, oh, let's say 8 pm this Wednesday evening (May 7th); the LMS remains at 195 E. 26th Avenue (at Main) and after our most recent engagement there last month we are pleased to report that following renovations its acoustical properties are still quite simply beautiful. We'll really be putting it through its paces a month later, on a night of musical numbers... but one thing at a time!

Squeezebeard is pleased as punch to have moved on from using a word processor as a poster design tool; if you're on a Windows XP box with the .NET framework installed, can't afford Photoshop (an' what kind 'o pirate be ye precisely ta be's worried by such a problem?) and can't grok The Gimp, he endorses Paint.NET, used here to synthesize a lively doodle straight out of Mr. Hill's sketchbook with a flipped panel from Gustave Dore's illustrations for Coleridge's Rime of the Ancient Mariner (really it's a marvel the two hadn't collaborated earlier!):

Due to a lack of confirmation, Lise Monique of Wintermitts was not ultimately billed as appearing on tonight's bill, but appear she did -- and thank goodness, as despite the split in our promotions, I think most of the crowd turned up just to see her (and her skilled French glockenspiel player). We had a blast and now have one friend in Winnipeg... and if we're lucky we may someday get to play the George the Cat song with him again!

2008-04-28: Creaking Planks in North Van, at Beans!

Due to the vagaries of city planners and zoning bylaws, there are some neighborhoods in which live music is performed publicly on a regular basis and others in which it rarely is. (See: the whole south-east quarter of Vancouver, in which we haven't had a single engagement in our three years. We invite you to help us overturn that awful record!) Compound this with a tendency to stick to the tried and true on top of a certain gravitating toward familiar venues near the abodes of band members. If you live just off of Commercial Drive, as many Planks do, this is a tendency that works in your favor. If, conversely, you live in North Vancouver, this means a godawful haul just to get to practice!

This has been the case for stalwart Planks percussionist Felonious P, who has tirelessly crossed bridges and bodies of water time and again, hauling his ironing board and rhythmic rummage sale on countless occasions for what are often only minor gigs and never complaining even once. While technically we performed in North Vancouver back in February while waiting for pirates to return on the SeaBus, we have never enjoyed the extravagant cachet of a show there in, say, an indoor venue. This time, he turns the tables, having arranged for us to come play a show on his home turf: this Monday night, Creaking Planks descend upon North Van to tirelessly bombard the denizens of Beans on Lonsdale (1804 Lonsdale Ave., to be precise!) with our unique brand of, well, damnable jug band musicmaking from eight through ten pm.

And presenting: our first use as intended of Daisy Jones-Locher's outstanding Planks poster template, reworked by her to include the vital details!

2008-04-24: open mic feature at the Little Mountain Neighbourhood House

April's been a busy month of catch-up for us! In the aftermath of A Dybbuk, we enjoyed a fragmentary turnout at two after-parties (Squeezebeard keeps losing the addresses; he says, just gimme a treasure map an' I'se kin find X well enough!), played two great shows back in our goofy element, the first (Apr 11th) back at Trees (to which we will be returning again in early September) and the next (April 14th) a homecoming show of sorts, acoustic with friends sitting on the floor in the gallery of the Little Mountain Studios, where we're the house band, site of so many practices, rehearsals and residencies... as well as a big noisy party celebrating Squeezebeard's birthday. On top of the shows, a swell arrangement with some charming PAVI students had a couple of us recording some backbone tracks at Blue Wave Studios, drawing on the next-door-recorders Company B to provide some zombie gang groans with improbably professional equipment. We'll let you know how those turn out as we put down some overdubs on top. All that plus Lee Shoal and Planks pal Allan Macinnis got us a mention in the current issue (edit: huh! and an earful on the website) of the UK music magazine The Wire. Not bad for a couple of weeks getting back into the swing of things!

There are of course more shows coming up. Some of them are quite imminent, in fact. Tonight, Planks will be taking to the stage as features at the Little Mountain Neighbourhood House's (3981 Main Street at 24th Ave.) weekly Thursday night open mic, hosted by the man who put the cur in curmudgeon, Rick Keating! Our fiddler Johnny Wyoming, a regular at the series, recounts that the evening tends to unfold with socialising around 7:30 pm, the open mic rolling on at 8 through 8:45 for a brief intermission before an hour of feature performance starting around 9 pm.

More is coming up quick -- Planks should be playing at Beans (1804 Lonsdale Ave.) in North Vancouver next Monday (April 28th) 8-10 pm, then we have a special Tuesday morning engagement with FreeGeek, our other "house band" engagement, and new shows cropping up in May and beyond... but one thing at a time. First let's get through tonight and see what remains when Rick's done with us!