2008-03-27 through 2008-04-05: A Dybbuk

During a 2005 Planks practice in Grandview park, a passer-by observed Squeezebeard's accordion and stopped by to inquire as to whether we were a klezmer band. Blackbox began clarifying that we had in fact been playing Turkish music when Lord Eel, a founding Plank, cut across and established that yessir, ma'am, we here are the Creaking Planks, Vancouver's best pirate klezmer zombie shanty band, and that we play weddings, funerals, bar mitzvahs and brises. He must have more of a killer business instinct to close the deal, for that exchange ended up getting us engaged for a week-long run as a klezmer back-up band in Melinda Gidaly Mayor's Fringe Festival production of "Jew! A Musical". We weren't, at that time, actually a klezmer band, but we had an appetite for learning and an instinct for show business, and eventually got up to speed though sweat and tears. When the run concluded, Lord Eel suggested that for our next engagement we re-invent ourselves as a flamenco band for the hat-shop proprietor's costume party! After all our hard work jumping into a new musical idiom for which we were largely unprepared, at the prospect of taking on another... well, suffice it to say that if our tall ship hadn't been in drydock, there might well have been a mutiny.

Fast-forward a few years. Coming out of musical semiretirement, Lord Eel again calls us together with a strangely familiar pitch: to become a klezmer band in a play about a Jewish wedding! Where have I heard this before? With oodles more experience gigging under our collective belts atop our earlier immersive experience into the klezmer idiom, a crack squad of Planks decided to take on the UBC Theatre production -- Squeezebeard on accordion, Dr. Steelhand on the very traditional klezmer ukulele and steel guitar, percussionist Pawel Piechocki (on Daisy Jones-Locher's lent santur!) and introducing Kat-'o-Nine-Tails on the clarinet. (Really having us play is a natural fit, since as was noted -- Squeezebeard is already the subject of the poster!)

The Fringe Festival gig was a zany, upbeat madcap comedy about wedding planning and reconciling matters of faith with life in the modern world. This play, Pulitzer-winner Tony Kushner's adaptation of A Dybbuk, is considerably more somber and austere in tone, dealing with a harrowing ghost story of love from beyond the grave among an extinguished people. All the same, there is a wedding, and we are a klezmer wedding band; we do get to stretch our roles a bit (not just for the actors anymore!) and also produce all manner of eerie soundscapes one might expect at free jazz night at the Western Front to underscore the workings of supernatural forces man was not meant to know. The intersection of avant-garde and traditional Jewish music: it's not just John Zorn's turf anymore!

Opening night is tonight; the curtains raise at the Freddie Wood at 7:30 pm every night through April 5th, barring Sunday March 30th (giving us a chance to rest up from our two-gig night with the County Fair Saturday night following our Dybbuk performance!) Typically the Creaking Planks will be trying to make audiences laugh or dance, but here you have a chance to catch us in an unprecedented third motivation.

...

Called out in a Courier review (Apr 2, '08)!

Composer Patrick Pennefather's music--drawn, as he writes in his notes, "from existing Yiddish, Klezmer and Hebrew music, prayers and chants"--is beautifully integrated into the story and performed live on a shadowed balcony by The Creaking Planks, a four-piece band featuring accordion, santur, steel guitar, ukulele and clarinet.

In a look back at the project the director David Savoy seemed quite pleased with our work:

November 12, 2007: May have a lead on a band – The Creaking Planks. My posting at Hillel House may have paid off!


Saturday, March 29, 2008: The Creaking Planks are great. I am so glad I stuck to my guns and pushed for live music. The fact that they stay in place is actually working out to be a visual blessing. They are like silent watchers of all the action. If only some of the cast could mirror their discipline!


Chapter 4 – Reflection. I am glad I stuck to my guns and pushed for a live band. The Creaking Planks were amazing, sitting like a ghostly presence above the action, and more than willing to jump in and provide various effects and noises as required.

2008-03-29: 2nd Annual Panty Parade presents a County Fair!

The Creaking Planks are proud to once again return to what is by now almost an unofficial home for them, the Secret Location, to contribute a performance at a Seamrippers fundraiser benefiting the Purple Thistle. Also on the bill are Coral & Emily Rose, AmberDawn, Tricksy and her Next Top Stud Contest, DJs Hi Def, Spook Silo, Pork 'n' Beans, plus our own Lee Shoal... as well as the long-rumoured square dancing, a pie-eating contest, a petting zoo and more! The Planks plan to go on no earlier than 11:30 pm, as a pack of 'em are hustling on over from UBC to play immediately following that evening's production of A Dybbuk! (... and a schizoid change of pace these easy-sleazy country-folk tunes will be, that's fer darn tootin'!)

2008-03-07: Planks at Little Mountain Studios

Courtesy of the illustrious history of the Butchershop Floor gallery that formerly occupied the space, the Creaking Planks have maintained fairly chummy relations with the Little Mountain Studios that assumed its lease... not least due to sporadically guitarrón-slinging Scruffy Bigbass' participation in both organizations. Though it's a tradition that, as recently remarked upon, has been disrupted for a while, we've long been considered the "house band" for exhibition openings, and have enjoyed on-again-off-again "residency" (which is fancy musician jargon for free practice space that the public can drop in on.) In addition to the openings in the front-of-house, with the back vacated by the improv pioneers the staff have been occasionally curating small music shows in the back studio.

This Friday, you get both: "The Danger of Disappearing" opens, featuring new drawings by “This is the story about how everything got ruined” auteur Erik Lyon, plus a concert around back featuring the SSRIs, Russian Words and Emmett Hall. Hymn For Her fell off the bill, and proprietor Ehren Salazar was invited to occupy the vacuum; he in turn invited us to join him in helping to fill that space with glorious sound. We may be playing the opening up front; we may be playing the concert around back; we may be playing both! (but likely not at the same time... unless we straddle the middle and broadcast in both directions simultaneously.) However it goes down, we'll be on relatively early -- think 8 pm -- to give Blackbox Squeezebeard time to hustle down to Natasha Enquist's star turn on the International Women's Day episode of Accordion Noir at 9:30 pm.

Find attached two pictures, one of Erik's new work, and one of the original concert poster before we sinisterly replaced Hymn For Her:

2008-02-22: Pirates of the SeaBus!

Dans le port d'Amsterdam / il y des marins que chantent

(Please note that this post be processed through an automatic English-t'-Buccaneer translator.) Tho th' Creakin' Planks be t' some extent first conceived o' as a sea dog band, as suggested by our very name, an' Squeezebeard definitely brought on board t' further our collective shanty options, since th' anomalous appearances logged at Lowbrow on th' High Seas 3 an' Talk Like A Pirate Day 2006 be goin' largely unrealised. That be, until tonight, when th' Vancou'er Public Space Network presented an extraordinary flashmob-style event (as ZombieWalk fans all somethin' we`re nay strangers t'), riffin' off o' th' success o' the'r Hallowe'en SkyTrain party: a sea dog-themed party on th' SeaBus, Vancouver`s commuter ferry between downtown Vancou'er an' North Vancou'er across th' Burrard Inlet.

How could we pass this up? Ye be correct: we couldna possibly. An' so a rowdy complement o' Planks turned ou', includin' an extraordinary (if unheard) appearance from Rusty Sawbones, along wi' hundreds. An' hundreds. O' would-be piratical scallywags. (An' also a handful o' very confused ninja, jus' t' li'en things up. Me, I always thought th' whole point o' bein' a ninja be nay bein' seen.) Also along fer th' ride be Toot-a-Lute, whose costumes put sea dogs an' land lubbers alike t' shame, an' Empire Alley lurked (as "Empirate Alley") beneath th' PriceWaterhouseCooper dome (an' 'ere pray tell be th' Dreadnoughts?) fer afterparty entertainment followin' a booty hunt in North Vancouver. Some early photos (c/o JMV, Leslie Stripey Hart an' Seitanguy, thanks!) o' Planks in action be havin' turned up on Flickr an' Facebook; keep yer one good eye peeled t' th' relevant tags an' groups fer more pictures (an', nay doubt, youtube movies) t' turn ou'. Ye really did be havin' t' be seein' 't t' b'lieve 't.

(As per usual we over-prepared, but perhaps this will serve as early groundwork fer a sea dog weddin' we`ve been invited t' play in th' Fall! Th' arrays o' shanties we unearthed be deemed insufficiently rude by Orange-eye Sabertooth Skipper, fer whom I recommend Salty Dick's Uncensored Sailor Songs, a great nautical find unearthed c/o thar hard-workin' fools o'er at Accordion Noir. An' now here's a comic from Sticks and Stones!)

...

Name-checked in the Ubyssey's SeaBus piracy coverage (March 4, '08)!

2008-02-14: The Blue Letter Vaudeville Show

The Planks have worked with Team Satan in the past -- in addition to the Hallowe'en show we can likely never tell you about, last year's Valentine's Day event granted us a once-in-a-lifetime chance to join both Burcu of Something About Reptiles AND host Ana Bon-bon in a rousing rendition of Bosvermisim Dünyaya. This year, we've been diligently practicing to offer up a whole course of further special Planks features for an evening themed around the secret code designating especially lewd cabaret performances. (Despite all this, I fear we still have an opening for un Pétomane. That's probably green-letter.)

Of course, there's a host of other worthwhile talent on the bill: Master of Ceremonies Speechless will set the stage for BYO, the East Side Boys, Dolly the Dollar Store Clown, Blunder the Knife, Laura Boo (the silent underwriter of so many of the Planks' 2007 successes), Gina Gash, Blue Q, and DJs Borscht Belt Karnaval, Ghost Taco and Brutal Village. The show opens at 10 pm and runs until L.A.T.E. (so late that even People's Prom attendees can take in both shows!) though the Planks will likely be on relatively early -- also due to limited capacity in the Secret Location (I can't tell you here in public: It's A Secret!) for assured admission you are recommended to turn up early.

Sooner or later, everyone gets to sell out, but you should only be so lucky as to get a chance to make a deal with this Devil.

2008-02-01: The Solstice Series presents... the Creaking Planks!

The invitation to perform at the BC:Clettes' Rouge et Noir cabaret in July '07 represented the CPs turning a corner in all sorts of wonderful ways; most charmingly, after each of the three nights' performances, a comely lass would inquire as to whether the band had any openings. Our fan from the first night has remained too busy with the Her Jazz noise collective to make good on the query, while our fan from the last night is now our very own (ir)regular Orange-Eye Sabretooth Skipper, holding down the crucial (I am very serious about this) kazoo-and-slide-whistle end of things. The second night was exciting, however, because the lady who asked us then turned up for our refresher practice on the back steps prior to the third and last night's performance. While many of the Planks on tap that final night had never met each other before, this new player enjoyed the distinction of not only never having met any of us before, but also not being familiar with any of the repertoire. (And yet when the crowd was called upon to guess which of us was rudely thrust into the spotlight cold, they guessed our eternal x-factor Scruffy Bigbass, on account of his casual man-off-the-street clothing style.)

We have never since played another show with the fearsome Skulltits McGee, a onetime VeloVixen, but she did plant the seed of us sallying forth to her hometown to play a set for upright Victorian citizens. This was clearly a good idea whose time has come, and so tomorrow we board a ferry to cross a body of water and bear some fruit!

Logan's is renowned as the blue-chip Victoria venue but our friends in Trike whose paths we keep crossing, them always a step ahead of us, made plans to travel to the same town the same night as us and deny us its stage! Actually no, but in retrospect, things amounted to the same. In truth, I hoped to call in a favour from old friend and onetime 57 Varieties regular (a big fan of my old staple Shakespeare's Got a Gun by Dan Bern) shaggy Shayne, now Solstice booker. Early on problems arose when it became apparent that the venue is primarily engaged by that caliber of semi-pro performers (us, we're virtuous amateurs) who know what they're doing nine months in advance. Many of our gigs we find out about less than nine days in advance! All the same, it looked like we secured a booking, lost it, then finally... re-secured it. Now we're in and, by jingo, we're going to have an adventure!

I did not have to think twice about an opener: recent Victorian Raghu Lokanathan from Prince George's the Cottonweeds (and the man who taught me Osasa before the fabulous Artswells 2007 Accordion workshop! I, in turn, taught him Styx's Mister Roboto. I think I came out ahead in that transaction.) A versatile instrumentalist and accomplished songwriter, he pens dark and serious songs that I, in moments of doubt, envy while putting a clown nose on the hit parade. Between the two of us, I think we complete both sides of the same coin. A wholly original and unique poster design by MeiCom (with layout assistance from Scott "strong cottonwoods" Towson) completes things. If nothing else results from this performance, the commission of this poster alone will leave me vindicated and satisfied at our efforts. Raghu takes the Solstice stage at 8 pm, with the Planks maybe relieving him some 30-45 minutes following. Admission is on a $7-10 sliding scale.

As a preview for locals, Craig of UVic's radio station CFUV (101.0 fm) will be previewing the concert with some Planks recordings and a telephone interview he conducted chez Squeezebeard last night on his Friday morning (6:30-8 am) comedy show What The?

While we're on that side of the water, we may be mounting a performance the following night (Sat, Feb 2nd) at the laid-back Ministry of Casual Living (1442 Haultain Street -- I hope we are, since we're also hoping to crash on their floor!) but as of press time, details remain too hazy to confirm.

...

In the end, the second performance did not happen, and all we got out of day 2 was a breakfast with Trike chez Lady Marmalade and a tired demonstration at the magic store. But we did return with a few action pictures courtesy of Natasha Enquist! Merci buckets!

2008-01-28: Closing party at the Gaff Gallery

Gaff proprietor Gabriel Deerman's opening "All in the Deck" was the most recent LMS function we'd performed at as "house band", making a sufficient impression that he invited us to play a rent party in his space in early October, with nos amis Trike. I don't know that it was a commercial success, and we discovered an advantage of a conventional stage where personal space issues are concerned, but we got an invitation to return and by gum we intended to honour it. And here was our last chance! Because Vancouver venues are always, for various unfair reasons, closing, it's difficult to establish a "scene" around even something people can agree they enjoy! There tonight we were gleefully received by the Jacques Brel fan we met at Betty Kracker's annual August backyard Pirate picnic via Betty Kracker (through the Joey Only Outlaw Band show at the Cobalt with Gertrude -- what a tangled tale! See what kind of supreme historical grasp you need to maintain in order to try to figure out where gigs and fans come from?), cutting a rug, and the bemused ladies from the LIVE Biennale Cabaret in November who unusefully retained only the semantic content of our name, which got them 90% of the way there but still unable to find us again because our name is the Creaking Planks and not the Slanting Floorboards. (Still, that's a keeper for names to tour under incognito.) And having found us again here, it's not like they can find us there again -- since the space was closing up three days later! It's a real quandary. I guess we just have to go everywhere and hope to randomly encounter repeat customers. (Oh wait, we've been doing that anyhow!) And so we busted our hump (and our voice, cough cough) singing everything we knew from heart in a savage blitz to a motivated audience of four (and one cellphone) in a crowded room. (I'm sure we made a secondhand impression on everyone else around; they may just have needed to appear and act oblivious and disaffected so as to maintain their art scene credibility.)

For the time being, Gabe is now doing sound at the Astoria, and the Planks ought to return (?!) there sometime soon to join him some night for some improbable karaoke/open mic jamming. In the meantime, however, we've got an island to storm.