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!

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.

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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!)

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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.