2017-06-18: Creaking Planks at the Accordion Noir stage at Car-Free Main Street!

Hey wow, so it's been a while, Vancouver! We've been making music videos and participating in fundraising and community-building, reflecting on human mortality and... just like that, whap zam!, we haven't played any gigs in town since last November! Well, we're here to shake that up a bit: both us and our eerily familiar friends in the Balkan / klezmer instrumental ensemble Der Royshiker Krokves are scheduled to be turning in hour-long sets (ours, 4-5 pm; theirs, 1-2 pm) at the Accordion Noir stage at this year's Car-Free Main Street festival, running from noon to 7 pm on Sunday June 18th at 21st and Main. But don't come out just to see only us -- the stage features a veritable catalogue of local alt-accordion, including Robyn Carrigan, Barbara Adler, Katheryn Petersen, the Vancouver Squeezebox Circle Orchestra (who we may be lending some guest vocals to!) and closing with a headlining set by our spiritual guide and mentor Geoff Berner. You can find a complete schedule over here. Cheers & squeeze on!

2007-05-04: the Creaking Planks joined Accordion Noir Radio in their "new" time-slot!

Well, friends, nothing new to report (but stay tuned for June), however... as part of the celebrations of their own decaversary (decade anniversary, see how that works?) our colleagues at Accordion Noir Radio have been going way back into their archives and re-releasing a "back episode" from more or less ten years ago. We've arrived at their 23rd episode, the first in their then-new time slot on the daywalker side of midnight at long last, and we were the first live guests to perform in that spot! This spot of primordial Planking predates even the earliest postings to our own website, so for the first time here we can announce the old, old recording which you can now go to enjoy, featuring... a much younger, far creakier incarnation of this musical ensemble. Cheers and creak on!

Creaking Planks on Swamp Rabbit Squeezebox Festival fundraising compilation CD

The Creaking Planks are proud to announce their appearance on a new compilation CD to benefit the inaugural Swamp Rabbit Squeezebox Festival in South Carolina this September (when we will be celebrating our own 10th annual Accordion Noir Festival.) Your friend and ours T.C. Costello is spearheading the venture after one too many late nights listening to back episodes of Accordion Noir Radio and wondering to himself: "how come THEY get to have all the fun?" Consequently the other performers on the fundraiser compilation include a great number of our past and present Accordion Noir Fest co-stars from the general vicinity of the Pacific Northwest -- Miss Natasha Enquist, Barbara Adler, Jet Black Pearl and even the great Geoff Berner! We probably will not be making the grand hike down from Vancouver to South Carolina -- at least, not in the fest's first year -- but if you support the festival with a financial contribution, you can purchase our appearance on the compilation (it's our fabulous and wholesome Pie song!) for either a virtual, digital copy ($10) or a physical disk to hold close in the middle of the night and warm with your hot little hands ($15). And of course, if you wish to support the festival with a still-higher financial donation... it's a free country! There are T-shirts, posters and more up for grabs... but we are not on them, this time around.

So's you know what you're getting into, here's a complete listing of all the tracks included on the compilation:

Crystal Bright and the Silver Hands - The End
T.C. Costello - How to Have a Good Time in the Afterlife
Miss Mousie and the Rigamarole - Dumpsters and Diverbars
Jet Black Pearl - Slug Song
The Brandy Theives - The Muse of Molly Malloy
Geoff Berner- Condos
Cascabel - Time & Road
Wasted Wine - The House
Tower of Dudes - We're Allright
Creaking Planks - Pie Song
Esmerelda Strange - Que Viva La Chava
Apathy Wizards - The Girl who touched the Moon
Barbara Adler - Moon
Miss Natasha Enquist - Golden Planet

PS, don't despair -- we do have live performances and more video recordings coming up, but all in good time.

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!