2016-09-08: afternoon Planking at the Downtown Farmers Market

As part of the veritable invasion of accordion music descending upon Vancouver for the 9th annual Accordion Noir Festival this September (you remember, the one that said we'd played our final set there), we're performing at a "way off Broadway" side stage helping to whip things up into a frenzy at the recently-relocated Downtown Farmers Market -- now in the plaza at Queen Elizabeth Theatre (650 Hamilton Street) -- busking from 4-6 pm with a rump Planks ensemble on the festival's opening night, Thursday September 8th, along with touring fest performer Jet Black Pearl from France (by way of Portland!)

What can I say? It should be fun.

2016-08-14: Artful Sundays

Ploughing right through our schedule of summer performances, the next is ahead of us on the afternoon of Sunday, August 14th. We'll be playing from 2:30-5 pm in the open area at Commercial and Napier as part of the Britannia Community Centre's Artful Sundays, so please consider joining us for an afternoon of outdoor acoustic music just off Commercial Drive!

2016-07-23: In This Together

Every three years or so, the Creaking Planks have a great, strange gig at the Gallery Gachet -- for decades, a critical hub of art therapy active in the heart of the Downtown Eastside. (And even at satellite venues, the Gachet has helped us to have some of our most memorable performance experiences off-site!)

They have recently had half of their funding cut -- the entirety that was provided by VCH -- and consequently we volunteered our services for a fundraiser concert to benefit their operations. There has been a whole schedule of fundraiser benefits scheduled, and our number has come up Saturday July 23rd, from 7-10 pm, at the Lost and Found Cafe (at 33 W Hastings St.) We're on the bill with K!mmortal and Mourning Coup, so it's a hot line-up and an extremely good cause, so show up early and be prepared to give 'til it hurts at the silent auction and cash bar. Admission is $10-25 sliding scale but, in true East Van style, "no one turned away for lack of funds, we give what we can!" This is just us, giving what we can. Please come join us!

2016-06-11: Major Tom (Coming Home)

As quickly as our campaign of video clip world domination began, one mere month later it found itself on indefinite hiatus. The reasons why are difficult to articulate (and if we can't do it, who else do you think is more qualified to do so?) but the good news is that, at some perhaps more moderate pace, it has resumed, and for the first time in half a year we present the next video in our YouTube series! This one is our take on transhumanist anthem "Major Tom (Coming Home)", originally by West German Peter Schilling waaaay back in 1983. The song makes use of the "Major Tom" character who was the subject of David Bowie's 1969 song Space Oddity (and indeed, when we announce we'll be playing "Major Tom", a lot of people expect that we'll be playing Space Oddity. No dice! Bowie is a well we simply haven't yet managed to drink from... an omission we should perhaps look into addressing. But I digress!)

Here's this week's video! Enjoy! Planks trivia: our "bellows-shake" arrangement of Major Tom was first conceived and envisioned for our 2009 performance at the art opening for Bryce Rasmussen's "Gutter-Punk Space Opera" show at the Gallery Gachet. Now we're still bumbling along like, well, the fool who persists in his folly, while the Gachet has found its core funding cut after 21 years of providing art therapy to people with mental health issues, so we're pledging five cents for every view this video gets... just kidding, that won't ever amount to a hill of beans! But we will be strapping our instruments on in support of the troubled (yet essential) institution next month, so stay tuned!

(PS, Mazel Tov to the group of freshly minted adults we got to klez up at a B'nai Mitzvah at the Peretz Centre!)

2016-06-25: Accordion Noir presents -- Button-String Solidarity!

Vancouver's radical bookstore Spartacus Books plays host to community events that simply could never occur anywhere else. Its monthly Squeezebox Circle and Fiddle Jams have joined forces to present you three ensembles for a memorable night of acoustic music!

Like a force of nature sweeping up from the wilds of Washington State (and then showering the trembling victims with an assortment of delicious bonbons), Tsunami Piñata brings in its accordion-and-banjo wake a formidable array of high-energy songs from dozens of folk traditions from Chilean to Celtic to Czech. (And that's just the "C"s!)

With fire and precision, the feisty fiddlers of the Violent Violins soak up only the most slippery of folk melodies and then let them wriggle loose on the floor before you, taming drunken melodies and the extraneous beats so beloved of dancers with a lock of horsehair and a raised foot.

(and of course you already know and love the Creaking Planks!)

(PS, congrats to Chihiro and Todd!)

2016-06-19: Creaking Planks headline the Britannia Summer Solstice Coffeehouse

So. It's been quite a while since our last public gig. Opportunities have arisen and been retracted due to complications, renovations, and other problems. We didn't think it'd be quite this long before announcing our next concert, but here we are: we were unavailable to perform at the Britannia Community Centre's Spring Equinox coffeehouse, so they asked if we might be able to make plans to feature at their Summer Solstice coffeehouse. Sure thing! (And not a bad general approach: if not now, then how about one season from now?)

There you have it. The poster has all the details: it runs from 7-10 pm, Sunday June 19th, with us taking up the final hour. We'll be sharing the stage with Backspin, the Solidarity Notes Labour Choir, and Lori Weidenhammer. The fun all happens down in the Al Mattison Lounge, and admission is free. What more could you want to know?

Bring your Dad, 'cause it's also Father's Day. If you don't like crowds, don't come early -- because it's also Car Free Day on Commercial Drive! But our 7 pm start time should give the milling ravers ample time to pack up the turntables and fun fur and clear out.

More details on further performances this year (we're not quite ready to start hyping our 12th anniversary show, though plans are in the works) coming up soon! (And, hopefully: more videos! We haven't forgotten!)

R.I.P. the Railway Club (1931-2016)

Opening for Oh My Darling, March 3, 2011. (Photo by Mark Donovan.)

We were basically a generation too late to appreciate the apex of Vancouver's live music nightlife, with the Town Pump merely a distant, hazy memory by the time we hit the scene, and even the Starfish Room and Richard's on Richard's left by the wayside by the time we started making plans to take the stage. The somewhat stranger territory left for us to claim was in splendidly marginal rooms such as The Sugar Refinery and Ms. T's Cabaret. (Also other since-departed venues that briefly played host to the magic, like Cafe Montmartre and the Little Mountain Gallery.) But there was one room we could name that wouldn't make our parents scratch (or shake, more likely) their head.

At Memewar issue 8 launch, Feb 19, 2009.

We just celebrated our 11th anniversary; our first appearance at the Railway was a month shy of a decade ago, one of T. Nile's Connect nights April 24, 2006, meaning it had taken us a little bit more than a year to go from freshly-formed to semi-legitimate. (Many people's recollections are of playing their bands' first shows at the Railway, which makes me wonder if booking standards weren't a little slacker back in the Golden Age.) We were back again for the Family Stump Xmas Extravaganza Dec 10th of that year, and were rather getting used to the idea of becoming regulars. That never quite ended up happening, but we did gather momentum even as the venue itself shed it, peaking with a series of appearances there through 2008 and 2009 as the Memewar magazine house band.

The gig-by-gig analysis would put you all to sleep (and then we played Creep, and THEN, we played Dead Man's Pants... again! and THEN...) but you can enjoy this partial tapestry, in reverse order, of some of our numerous appearances at the Railway Club:

(Dieter caught us missing out on one: we hadn't gotten our hands on a copy of the poster, but it turns out he still had the original hanging on his wall. If anyone else has any more missing ones, I would happily throw them in the mix here.)

We didn't know how good we had it when the sun set on Janet Forsyth's tenure over the club's booking and administration. Her successor Steve demonstrated a keener concern for the bottom line -- could we put a band with more draw on the bill? Thanks, now we can draw a big enough crowd for our paid admissions to cover the salary of a staff member working at the door! -- but the irritating nickle-and-diming was in retrospect more understandable upon learning that the venue was paying $10 000 in rent, monthly, back in 2008. (Our "aha" moment was when our band pulled in more money playing to a dozen friends for an hour at a field house in a Vancouver park than we did performing for three hours to a crowd of over 50 at the Railway. You can make money and you can live out rockstar fantasies, but not always at the same place and time.) Over the course of his era the Railway Club suffered a hollowing-out, as regular and long-time staff, especially those on the organized labour side of things, disappeared as regular fixtures of the cozy space. The Railway provided a fertile ground for us to revisit our stalled ambitions to host annual birthday concerts for ourselves, starting there in our sixth year and continuing through years seven, eight and nine (indeed a tradition that continues on today -- elsewhere, as the more birthday visits we had there, the less like home it felt, our friends in the peanut gallery of regulars having found friendlier haunts.)

All the same, things manage to sour but still persist every day, as we continue along our separate paths and grow apart, like estranged adults who still exist, just not in each others' everyday lives. I feel much the same way about Downtown Vancouver (indeed, playing at the Railway was one of my very few reasons to ever venture in there at night) and indeed it's not hard to imagine that I'll feel this way about Vancouver proper before too long. But I digress. An institution is easy to take for granted, and despite the relatively recent announcement of the business being up for sale, it was impossible to expect that it might cease to be. But here we are.

Before I go off on any more tangents, let me introduce this post's true function: an excellent excuse to dig up and share some photos of Good Times being had with Creaking Planks at the Railway Club. I believe these are from our 8th anniversary concert with T. Nile and Raghu Lokanathan, a Deet Street blowout with perhaps the most Planks ever on-stage at the same time and a series of encores demanded by an audience who simply would not allow us to leave. (Taking a page from the "That's My Brain... And You're Killing It!" playbook, escape was finally achieved only by leading the band off the stage, through the crowd, and into the bathroom.)

This room is heating up... quick, deploy the secret chord!

All right, that's enough fun. Lucy, settle them down with the moo tube!

No good, it's backfired, they're dancing harder than ever! We're going to have to warp out of here! Hold on to your music stands everyone... in 3... 2... 1... BLAST OFF!

After opening for us (he headlined, but playing last interferes with his libation schedule) at the First Annual Accordion Noir Festival Of Squeeze, our patron saint Geoff Berner staggered over to us and sagely proclaimed that on any given night, somewhere on the planet, some band is the best band in the world... and that on that night, with that crowd (going down the infamous Railway stairs and out around the corner!) suitably warmed up by Geoff's best antics, that band was us. So let's remember those good times and rage (rage!) against the dying of the light. Good luck, Vancouver -- you're going to need it filling the Railway's boots!