North, south, east, west, we're the jug band that's the best... at tightly scheduling in the most performances into one evening.
Southwest, we start off playing to your corner at the Sidney & Gertrude Zack Gallery of the Jewish Community Centre (950 W. 41st), sounding off like a shofar for a half-hour at 7 pm to ring in the latest instalment of the Pandora's Collective's Word Whips, wherein local poets share works written in response to the photos of Judi Angel's Cambodian journey in the exhibition up there TIKUN OLOM: HEALING THE WORLD.
AN EVENING OF MUSIC, ART & POETRY IN THE GALLERY Tuesday, April 10th, 2012, 7-9 pm Sidney & Gertrude Zack Gallery, JCC of Greater Vancouver, 950 West 41st Avenue Free Admission, Everyone is welcome.
This event features THE CREAKING PLANKS as well as Pandora’s Collective poets inspired by the photographs in TIKUN OLOM: HEALING THE WORLD, a photography exhibit of ‘people and places’ in S. E. Asia. The photos were taken by JUDI ANGEL, while on a three month AJWS volunteer placement in Cambodia.
Co-hosts, BONNIE NISH and PAMELA BENTLEY, ROWAN LIPKOVITS and THE CREAKING PLANKS along with poets, FRAN BOURASSA, MAUREEN EGAN, TIMOTHY SHAY, CHRISTY HILL and DIANE TUCKER will dish up an inspiring & entertaining potpourri of sounds, rhythms, poetry and prose.
There will be time for the audience to participate by writing to the exhibit and reciting their poems during the ‘open mic’ portion of the evening. This event is presented by the Sidney & Gertrude Zack Gallery with Pandora’s Collective and the Isaac Waldman Jewish Public Library and made possible by the Yosef Wosk Poetry Initiative Grant. For more information, contact Reisa Schneider reisa@jccgv.bc.ca or 604 638 7277
Then we're off to the northeast -- into the Prophouse (1636 Venables at Commercial Drive) to take our belated spin as the features of this month's occurrence of the Vancouver DIstrict Labour Council cabaret. Rumour has it we'll be teaching attendees a folk song after our set there starts at 8 pm!
Don't feel that you have to slavishly adhere to your neighbourhood -- maybe the crosstown trip would be good for you! And maybe you'll enjoy one set by us so much, you'll wish you could have had twice as much! Well, on this one night, you can.
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.
Well, we must all do our part. Perhaps remorseful at their petrochemical contributions to our carcinogenic milieu, the hotly-disputed Enbridge corporation has, since 2008, also presented the annual Ride to Conquer Cancer, a fundraising bike ride. The Lunchgroup Heavy Industries consortium, including our own Daisy Jones-Locher, is participating in that ride and in the fundraising. To, er, fundraise for the fundraising, we are performing two sets of our best whimsical music at a benefit dinner at Amber Jack’s Tap House & Grill in Surrey (at 9850 King George Highway, or just next to the King George SkyTrain station.) Tickets are only $20, and include dinner! (You can also donate to their cause even if you aren't able to attend.)
(Fans of Daisy-Jones in her other musical incarnations are also invited to the 7:30 pm supper show at the Railway Club this Wednesday, Mar 14, to hear her latest project, The Inference.)
In celebration of our Jaan Pehechaan Ho video breaking 15 thousand views (and the Heineken campaign fuelling its accidental virality showing no sign of slowing), here's a low-fi video -- an animated .GIF made out of snapshots virtuous band photographer Jonathan Dytook of usthe same night as that viral video was made, three-quarters of a year ago. We have listened to the masses, tightened up our arrangement, and even learned the words to the second verse! There's a round of recording coming up and this tune is definitely on our hit list.
(Haven't you always wanted to have a little band in your desk, to take out and put on the shelf to caper and cavort for your amusement at the drop of a hat? I'm of half a mind to violate every design tenet on the book () and put this little animation on the top of our website, for viewers to enjoy on every page.)
Two items of further note: we missed telling you about a gig we played Tues, Jan 31st, fundraising for the Federation for the Organization of Open Desire at the Little Mountain Gallery (where we'll be back Thurs March 1st presenting you a re-match with Portland's Underscore Orkestra -- but I get ahead of myself) and this Saturday night, Feb 18th, we'll be joining Blackberry Wood at the Big Blue House again for another jam-packed album fundraiser show there, shuffled among such luminaries as Geoff Berner, Carolyn Mark, and the Orkestar Slivovica. Just keep your ears open as you walk along Salisbury Street, there's no way you'll miss it.
We would have blacked out our site today in honour of the SOPA / PIPA protests, but as Cap'n Jack Spareribs said -- here in Vancouver we had a white-out instead. Besides! There's too much at stake! If we closed our doors today we might lose one last opportunity to remind you about our fabulous concert tonight tonight tonight, celebrating our 7th anniversary as a band, down at the Railway Club.
The West Ender didn't forget...
(And thanks to Robin Hunt for snapping that shot back during the Steamer Tea Party in Feb 2010)
And we hope that you don't forget either!
Now you can't say that nobody reminded you. But wait, there's more! Of course, our 9 pm show features the Creaking Planks, but also two other grand acts you don't get many chances to enjoy in these parts -- Raghu Lokanathan of Prince George, and Ana Bon-Bon visiting from London, England! If those names don't mean much to you, perhaps you'd enjoy a refresher while you're not killing your lunch hour surfing Wikipedia. We took over 4 hours on the air last week in promotion of this show and here's two and a half of them for you to enjoy, resplendently chock-full of the music of Raghu, Ana, and even some relatively recent recordings by our very own Creaking Planks to bring you up to speed. First we devoted 60 minutes to canned tunes on Accordion Noir Wed the 11th, then on Fri the 13th we did much the same for 90 minutes on Sound Resistance -- but this time with SpongeDev SquarePlanks joining in, allowing some spirited, if rump, dual-Plank performing live over the air.
We'll have many more than two Planks on-stage tonight, with our lovely show running until midnight! Three swell acts will run you only $8 ($6 for Railway Club members!) and we look forward to you helping us with some ridiculous audience interaction antics.
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.
