2017-04-19: RIP Dick Contino

As you may recall, back in 2010 Renee de la Prade made good on our Accordion Noir networking with her and the Squeezebox Babes Calendar crew and secured for us an invitation to the 2010 Cotati Accordion Festival, a magical land that could be all things for all people -- an accordion festival celebrating the best of the old and the new, the traditional and the punk, the folk and the avant-garde. In all these ways it has informed our own programming philosophy for the Accordion Noir Festival, but of course just within the state of California it has the resources of an entire Canadian population to draw on, both to provide performers and audience members. But I digress.

This ... I won't say schizoid, but multi-faceted programming ethos led us to the following slice of mainstage schedule during our appearance there: the Alex Meixner Band, Dick Contino, the Creaking Planks, Duckmandu... bang bang all lined up in a row just like that. Now the first and second pairs have some internal consistency in terms of tone, but the gulf between the two pairs seems insurmountable. Emerging from the Italian community around Fresno, a young Dick rose to prominence winning the Horace Heidt variety shows and spinning it into charismatic stardom on radio and TV, appearing on the Ed Sullivan show a record 48 times. His trademark number "Lady of Spain", performed with his distinctive bellows shake technique, became a solid gold accordion old guard cliche. (Our solution to bridge the gap was to poach half of Alex's band -- hello out there to Matt Tolentino!)

As a scholar of accordion history, I owned several of his albums on vinyl -- presenting him as what he was, the difficult-to-parse-today bona fide accordion sex symbol that he was -- and gingerly packed them along on the airplane south in strange hopes of somehow getting him to autograph them backstage at Cotati when our paths crossed. Instead, my time before our set was spent desperately sniffing around the festival grounds in search of an accordion to borrow, as the kindly Tarkin-lent antique I'd taken custody of two nights before had crumbled in my hands the previous night in Santa Rosa, forcing me to temporarily squeeze myself into Amber Lee's heart-bellowed squeezebox.

Fortunately for the Creaking Planks, our Victoria-based friends at Tempo Trend were improbably vending at this festival, and were willing to lend Blackbox Squeezebeard an instrument on indefinite loan for that afternoon's set, another that night at the Revolution Cafe in San Francisco and the following night at Peri's in Fairfax. Just bring it back to us next time you're in Victoria, they said. I guess when you're made of accordions, the fate of one particular instrument is ultimately of little import. They got mad props from my profuse on-stage thanks, and the whole fest got a set it wouldn't soon forget.

And I never did get those albums autographed by Dick Contino. (There he is, sandwiched between the cello and mandolin! Thanks for the photo, Rachel!)

2016-12: Jingle Bellows

Our friends and colleagues at the Accordion Noir Festival are currently fundraising for a charitable status application needed to put them on sustainable financial footing for their 10th installment coming up in 2017. Consequently, they need to raise $3000, mostly for lawyer fees, by the end of the month. They have come up with a somewhat creative fundraising strategy: give away a collection of alt-accordion ringtones by luminaries from the festival's storied history. So naturally, we are represented with this ringtone version of the intro to our cover of Nine Inch Nails' "Closer"! You can get them all for one low price of -- whatever you want to pay! Ringtones are formatted for compatibility with iPhones, Android and Blackberry devices, so however you roll, you should be able to cram us into your phone for any special occasion.

For further information or to donate directly, point your web browser to www.accordionnoirfest.com! And now, the demonstration clip:

Today's "Jingle Bellows" fundraiser ringtone preview is how the jug band of the damned - The Creaking Planks - open their "play sad songs like they're happy" cover of Nine Inch Nails' "Closer". You can raise a few eyebrows by getting it put on your smartphone or mobile device - along with a dozen more! - in exchange for any financial donation to our festival at accordionnoirfest.com !

A video posted by Accordion Noir Fest (@accordionnoirfest) on Dec 19, 2016 at 7:46am PST

(And a mazel tov to Ana Grace for her November bat mitzvah! Der Royshiker Krokves helped her celebrate with an earful of heavy shtetl!)

2016-11-17: The Future

In honour of last week's passing of the late, great Leonard Cohen, we exhumed our sunsetted arrangement of his apocalyptic ballad "The Future" for your viewing enjoyment via another installment of our sporadic video series. (Hey, while we weren't paying attention, our take on "Born Slippy" popped, with over a thousand views! Thank you everybody, we agree: it is most excellent. But it is not what we are here to discuss today.)

This was one of the very first (the kazoo is a dead giveaway... originally scat, but that attempt was better left unshared) song arrangements the Planks made (as opposed to simply printing out such tabs as could be found online and hoping that they were semi-legit) and its pacing shifts were inspired by the various klezmer rhythms we were formally exposed to while learning the songs for Melinda Gidaly's "Jew! A Musical" at the Fringe Festival (gulp) eleven years ago.

What with the morose synths and the somber female vocal section intoning "doo doo doo!" soulfully, we felt that the original was elegiac... but what the world needed at that moment was a barn-burner, with the feel that "if the world is coming to an end, let's see it out with one hell of a party!"

Whether we were successful or not is up for some debate, with one friend perplexedly inquiring after witnessing an early set if my musical aspirations really were set on doing Leonard Cohen covers as Cookie Monster? Well... that sounds at least as viable as Macaulay Culkin's Pizza Underground!

If you like, you can hear us perform this song live tomorrow night (!) at the Accordion Noir 10th anniversary cabaret!

2016-11-18: Accordion Noir Radio turns 10 with the Creaking Planks!

Many times over the years we've enjoyed good times courtesy of the folks over at Accordion Noir, be it their weekly radio program, their annual festival, or their onetime "Pleasing Squeezing" performance series for which we served a role as unofficial "house band". Now the radio program is turning ten -- representing over 500 episodes of their weekly program -- and we are on the packed bill to help celebrate their eminently improbable milestone. Please join us at Spartacus Books this Friday, November 18th, as part of a star-studded line-up including Dawn Zoe, Ana Bon-Bon, Barbara Adler, Alison Jenkins, Katheryn Petersen, Joana Reis from Portugal, and the Vancouver Squeezebox Circle Orchestra!

2016-10-09: O Superman

I bet you thought you'd seen the last of our video series! Sure, there's been eight months of radio silence, interrupted only by one blip halfway through. Four months' wait is nothing to us -- our band is nearly 12 years old! We have songs that have been in progress longer than Presidential administrations! (Even longer than election campaigns!)

Tonight's venue, a distinguished and sophisticated room.

A photo posted by Creaking Planks (@creakingplanks) on Oct 9, 2016 at 7:55pm PDT

Anyway, here we are. By which I mean, here I am -- Daisy-Jones and Ludwika wouldn't fit in the hammock, so I believe they were "huh, huh"ing along while packing up their instruments at this point in the set. I don't know how many of the annual Horace Phair parties in Portland we've managed to play -- I like to think that we've at least hit as many as we've missed, but it's hard to prove as they're often not terribly well-documented in the interest of maintaining our ability to freely cross the US border.

Everyone, once more, with feeling - death is not the end! Portland is always privy to a few "we only play these once a year here" songs. If you want to hear them... come on down to next year's Horace Phair!

A photo posted by Creaking Planks (@creakingplanks) on Oct 10, 2016 at 4:54pm PDT

It was Daisy-Jones Locher's first visit in capacity as a Creaking Plank to Portland, Oregon (or "Disneyland for grown-ups" as we like to call it) for our longstanding annual engagement at the Horace Phair party and it was a humdinger! Not only did we have RoJo(tm) the Therapy Llama as our opener, but this performance was just the second act to a will-our-set-happen-won't-it-happen (turns out, it would!) wedding the previous day up at the Kiwanis Camp on nearby Mount Hood. (And a Mazel Tov to Samantha & Chase!) But as much splendid amenity infrastructure as was present at the wedding (zip lines, board games, pizza and yurts), it lacked a hammock in the basement. Happily, the Saluthaus basement addressed that omission, and so our Portland experience managed to be a complete one! Will performing in a hammock become a thing that we revisit endlessly on-stage? I doubt it, but wouldn't that be nice! Supposing we can't perform in a hot tub (I can think of a few obstacles to making that happen) it's a nice compromise. (Nowhere to sling a hammock? How about beanbag chairs? Wait, could anything be less ergonomic?)

Our "Inception" moment comes up on the wedding slideshow. Not pictured - the next photo, of me standing up, photographing this slide. Truly the Panopticon Singularity is upon us.

A photo posted by Creaking Planks (@creakingplanks) on Oct 8, 2016 at 10:31pm PDT

(And a big thanks to Josh for capturing (most of) the performance on his phone!)

2016-09-04, 11: Planks give voice to the Squeezebox Circle Orchestra

The renowned vocal harmonizers of the Creaking Planks have a lot of experience singing on top of a single accordion, but what about an entire orchestra of them?

(Vancouver Squeezebox Circle: 1931 edition.)

The Squeezebox Circle Orchestra is an outreach project of the long-running Vancouver Squeezebox Circle (a slow-fruiting part of Blackbox Squeezebeard's plan for total world domination) and this year they wanted to go Noir in honour of the Accordion Noir Festival's 9th anniversary! But it turns out that it's hard to keep things edgy and noir while playing purely instrumental repertoire on the instrument of champagne music. Often the twist of the lyrics are what makes a song noir, and they're hard to replace in instrumental arrangements. But sadly, no one in the orchestra is a confident public singer. If only they knew of someone who might rise to the occasion...

You can probably see how this one turns out! Happily, the Creaking Planks volunteered four vocalists for nearly a half-dozen songs in their set! It feels almost indulgent and lazy to be singing without also playing our instruments, but sometimes it's just not all about us, y'know? 

Anyhow, we'll be joining the Squeezebox Circle Orchestra for two performance dates coming up (hopefully more in the future), first at Artful Sundays (where we recently performed) up this week, Sunday September 4th, somewhere between 2:30 and 5 pm at the Napier Greenway just off of Commercial Drive... and then again a week later, at the closing event of the Accordion Noir Festival at Spartacus Books, "Accordion Crimes", from 2-6 pm. The first performance is free, the second is by donation (and boasts a ton of other entertainment to boot), so please don't hesitate to come get an earful!

A teaser from #Vancouver #squeezeboxcircle warming up for this week's #artfulsundays on Commercial Drive. (Yes, it is an accordion orchestra playing what you think they're playing. And that's just the tip of the iceberg...there are @creakingplanks guest singers...and many more songs to boot...)

A video posted by Heather Jean McDermid (@leeshoal) on Sep 2, 2016 at 2:01pm PDT

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.