2019-06-01: Anyone Can Play Guitar

It would be ... a little much to expect a full-band concert out of the Creaking Planks at this point. We're hoping to reconstitute ourselves, but baby steps. That said, you can hear three of us playing this Saturday night! Not playing together, mind you, but at the same event at least!

It's a Radiohead tribute night called "Anyone Can Play Guitar" (sadly, Blackbox observes, anyone usually does), and in addition to Blackbox Squeezebeard, Ludwicka LePearl and Daisy Jones-Locher, you can hear Radiohead songs from the likes of A New Craze (Daisy-Jones' new band), Bob Neubauer, Carolyn Neapole with Jocelyn Cameron, Danny Echo and Tania Gosgnach. It's a talented lot, and the songs are good, so please consider joining us... cover is $10, at the old Cottage Bistro, now rebranded "Hood 29". The three-hour show starts at 8 pm!

2019-04-14: The Second Voyage of the Ship of Fools!

Creaking Planks activities have been in a strange limbo these past few years: more than we might reasonably expect, and simultaneously less than we'd like. (And yet, we ourselves are the bottleneck. So... go figure.)

Case in point: this Sunday night, April 12th, our hirsute accordionist Blackbox Squeezebeard will be celebrating turning 40. He was a little down at the prospect, looking back at the amazing show we threw on the occasion of his 30th birthday, but perked up when he realized he could just... put that show on again a second time! Now, not all participants were able to join us this time around on such short notice, but hopefully you, at least, might well be able to.

Starting around 8:30 pm, set sail on the Second Voyage of the Ship of Fools, featuring music by Monsterdinosaur artist and longtime Little Mountain Gallery proprietor Ehren Salazar, magic by the alter-ego of Planks alumnus Dr. Steelhand -- Travis Bernhardt, and poetry insanity by Al Mader, the Minimalist Jug Band! All that plus bare-bones Planking by Blackbox Squeezebeard plus... well, anyone who plays along with the Creaking Planks is deputized as a Creaking Plank, but conversely Planks can never manage to confirm scheduled appearances, so... we are looking forward to being joined by unconfirmed, unscheduled guests, some of whom may be actual historical Creaking Planks, Planking along with us. But due to the x-factor we can't actually bill it as a Creaking Planks appearance. All we know for sure is that there'll be Creaking and Planking.

Suggested donation $10. Be generous with your server at the WISE Lounge bar (downstairs at 1882 Adanac at Victoria), they usually don't have shows there at all on Sunday nights!

2019-02-15: Creaking Planks feature at Beats on Broadway!

At our peak, we were sometimes playing two gigs in a single day.  In our deepest slump, it felt like the pace was closer to two gigs in the same year.  Having just poked our heads out of hibernation (never give a woodchuck on Groundhog Day!), we never expected to have a second gig lined up just a week later, and yet here we are!  A big part of show business success is simply being in the right place at the right time, and as it turned out we were exactly the right shape to fill in for an unexpected cancellation looming on a venue's calendar. The plan always was for 2019 to see a renewal of the Creaking Planks, but I was expecting we'd need to reform the band first!  I'm a little concerned that this pace isn't sustainable, but probably we will have a long break after this to strategize our next move.

But I'm burying the lede. Yes! You can find us -- well, two of us, the primordial, essential skeleture of the ensemble -- featuring this Friday night back at the monthly third-Friday Beats on Broadway acoustic open mic at the Mount Pleasant Neighbourhood House (800 E Broadway) for the first time since our last appearance there eleven years ago! It's an open mic, so if you'd like to share a bit of tunage or your latest poem also, don't hold back! Signup from 7-7:30 pm. See you there!

2019-02-08: A musical evening in support of Wet’suwet’en

Bet you weren't expecting to see anything else come up on the listings here anytime soon, were you? Our big, beautiful band has well and truly scattered -- you can find one member on Vancouver Island, another in California, one unreachable midway up their ascent of the ivory tower, another swamped in local politics. Can we all find the time to come together and play some frivolous songs for a small and confused audience at a coffee shop tomorrow afternoon? Less likely than ever... and to be fair, we were always unlikely!

After a dozen years in show business, you build a reputation, accumulate contacts, and a certain momentum continues ... if not propelling you forward, at least buoying you up. But after enough gig inquiries are declined due to being impossible to fulfill, the invitations will eventually slow to a trickle and then eventually stop indefinitely (at least, until the 20th anniversary reunion tour.)

This isn't to say that we're done as a band! But it is safe to say that our particular most recent configuration of the band is done as a band. 2019 should be a year of rebuilding, because we still have songs in our hearts with no other outlets. If you know of anyone who'd like to casually perform unlikely tunes in a guitarless* acoustic idiom for peanuts, please send them by our way.

In the meantime, two of three original Creaking Planks (Hell has not yet quite frozen over, the prerequisite for completing the circle with the third) have managed to arrange to coincide on stage for one night, this Friday, Feb 8th, to do their strange thing for a good cause. We've had to turn down two of these so far due to inevitable conflicts with our impossible schedules, so we're very fortunate that the third time seems to be doing the trick.

Salal and Cedar have set up an all-ages benefit concert to help support legal defense of the Wet’suwet’en struggle against the Coastal Gaslink pipeline under construction in their traditional territory without the consent of their hereditary chiefs. From 7:30 pm on (doors at 7) through likely well past 11 pm, there will be musical performances going on down at LanaLou's (362 Powell St. -- on unceded Coast Salish territory, land of the Squamish, Tsleil Waututh and Musqueam) also featuring:

- the Celtic harp of Clarity,
- 2018 Accordion Noir Fest alumni and Creaking Plank acolytes, the folk-rockers of the Argyle Embargo,
- spoken word from Rudi Krause,
- morally centered pickin' tunes by Paul "Professor Banjo" Silveria,
- ripe fruit falling from Barbara Jackson and Earle Peach's Songtree,
- musical education from Jim Sanyshyn

Suggested minimum donation - $10 (kids free!) ... if you can't make it out, you can still support the cause at https://actionnetwork.org/fundraising/unistoten-camp-legal-fund and https://www.gofundme.com/gitdumt039en-access-point

Hopefully we'll have more to announce soon, even if it's just a practice schedule for the Planks Class of 2019. * Steel guitar and dobro welcome!

2018-09-12: Eat Your Vegetables with the Creaking Planks

OK, if we're going to be coming out of involuntary retirement for a gig at this year's Accordion Noir Festival, why not make it two gigs? In keeping with our final (?) big bash as a full band one year ago, this will also be an appearance at a farmer's market -- the Main Street Station Farmer's Market at 1100 Station Street. We'll be workshopping some new covers, playing there rain or shine, to let everyone know that an accordion wind's a-blowin', and to reinforce that point, weather allowing, half of our 4-6 pm set (Wednesday, Sept 12th) will be turned over to the Squeezebox Circle Orchestra. You've seen the devastation one accordion can unleash -- just try to imagine what a dozen of them are capable of, acting in harmony!

2018-09-13: "Echoes and Ripples" art opening at Creative Coworkers

Because being regular institutions interfered with the festival's (successful, as it turns out) attempts to apply for grants (as it telegraphs a certain nepotistic pipeline from taxpayers into the same private pockets year after year: the idea is that the government doesn't support festivals established solely to further their founders' personal enrichment), we were given an official send-off from the Accordion Noir Festival back in 2014. Nonetheless, our principals are so thoroughly intertwined with its affairs that it's proven impossible to extricate ourselves completely from their dealings even if we genuinely wanted to, and over the past four years we've kept finding ourselves returning in little off-brand festival support roles - leading an accordion parade, promoting the fest at farmer's markets and performing at the pre-fest launch party. And so forth.

Switching tacks for a moment -- ever since we finished our Imaginary Games business with Afterland back in 2015, we've been inviting its lead artist, Elin Jonsson, to mount an art exhibition of her work (long since overdue!) and have us back to perform at its opening. Our two flavours worked excellently together once, obviously they would be a great fit again (and again!) She's been wrapped up since then with professional transitions and a regular gig we matchmade, pairing her with the Accordion Noir Festival where she has produced three amazing on-brand posters three years in a row. Every year we ask her about her inevitable art show, and every year she agrees that it should happen ... eventually, sometime down the line. This year, we cracked the nut: yes, let's do the art show as part of the Accordion Noir Festival this year!

Finally, a legitimate pathway back into the Accordion Noir Festival! Now that it's backslid out of the complicated ties of grant support, there's nothing to stop us from dominating the fest forever, like the evil shadows of Geoff Berner! There's only one problem: while waiting to be let back in, the band had withered on the vine and died in the meantime!

(Here's a narrative high point, let's frustratingly interrupt it for a protracted parenthetical aside!) (I know, this rigorous historical approach (insider baseball is the only kind of baseball we have!) to telling the story of how this event came to happen -- "back when the Earth was young..." -- is as exhausting as it is exhaustive. But we like to believe that it is instructional for musicians to get a better idea of the long tail answer to Where Gigs Come From, and we like to believe that it is genuinely interesting to understand when gigs happen for a reason instead of simply emerging spontaneously and organically, if there is a story behind it.) (I know, everything that elapses happens in some sort of context -- all context is a story, and not all stories are interesting. But look at it this way -- if I get to vent it in the promotional blurb, it greatly lessens the chances that I'll stink up the performance sharing the blow-by-blow account as stage banter mid-set!)

OK, so the band's not completely dead ("I'm getting better!") -- we still Tweet a couple of times per month, and optimists still look us up periodically to offer us paying gigs which, in supreme frustration, we have to keep demurring after conferring with the membership and establishing that no, we can't make quorum. (13 years is a long time to build up a band to be in the position of declining paying gigs! However, if you say "no" enough times, they will eventually stop knocking at your door.) But what ails us is more than mere hibernation -- more a species of torpor. What we have before us is a pre-festival gig, eerily resonant with the last time we managed to successfully get together to play a complete set as a band -- at a pre-festival gig slightly over a year ago. If your band goes more than a year between successfully pulling off gigs, you can definitively consider it to be In Poor Health.

But we'd been pushing Elin to put on this show for years, and here at the threshold of its realization, it would be a betrayal of the dream to back out -- just because of a little thing like dying. Pish tosh! So "we" signed on for what might reasonably be expected to be the last time the Creaking Planks brand appears on a poster -- the only guarantee is an accordion rather than a band, but at an accordion festival at least that's the one context where that bait-and-switch wouldn't be a bit of a letdown. It's looking like we're going to be back to basics with our founding ukulele as well, and it may well be as though the past 12 years were nought but a species of very weird fever dream.

So here are the details:

On the eve of the 11th annual Accordion Noir Festival, “Echoes and Ripples” is a celebration of visual art concerned with and inspired by live music, ranging from concert and festival poster designs to more profound meditations on the internal experience of performing or listening to music. In addition to paintings by multi-Accordion-Noir-Festival poster artist Elin Jonsson, this show will be featuring visual artwork by Mister Fire-Man, Jenny Ritter, Pinguino Kolb and Darren Williams, among others. Because art imitates life, stay for live accordion music by The Creaking Planks, Teapot in the Tuba, and the Legion of Flying Monkeys Horn Orchestra. The opening begins at 6 pm and runs until midnight. This exhibition is taking place at Creative Coworkers (343 Railway Street, Vancouver) and will be up for two weeks; admission to the opening is by donation ($10 suggested donation includes a drink ticket) and pre-sale tickets are available online at Eventbrite.

After all that, what's the take-home? Consider this -- the three following nights at the Accordion Noir Festival's run at the WISE Hall cost $20 admission. This show gives you three accordion bands, PLUS lots of interesting art to look at, PLUS a free drink... for half that! But I jest -- you should be attending all of these concerts.

And who knows -- will this be the final missive in the Planks logbook? (Speaking of which, thanks again to the Wooden Boat Society for having the rumpest configuration of Planks there is filling in an emergency opening last weekend!) We look forward to undertaking some restructuring after the Accordion Noir Festival wraps, and hopefully 2019 may see us gigging again, hopefully with some new hands on board.

2018-04-01: April Fool's with Aaron J. Shay

Briefly emerging from a long hiatus to revisit the very same venue as our most recent gig, way back last September, some small (that means tight, right?) configuration of the Creaking Planks plans on staying out at least long enough to see its shadow and try to tell it a terrible joke. ("Honestly I think shadow jokes are kind of dark.") It's curious, given our humorous (well, absurd at least) bent why we haven't made more of an annual celebration out of April Fool's -- our "Ship of Fools" cabaret (gulp) nine years ago was great fun but maybe we opted not to dilute the joke in the retelling. (If so, we we have apparently re-evaluated that position, as the gloves are off!)

We'll be at the WISE Lounge from 8-11 pm Sunday, April 1st (don't fear the Monday morning -- it's the Easter long weekend!) supporting a touring folk-punk musician. Suggested donation $10, 19+. Facebook really wants to know that you're attending.

Seattle's Aaron J. Shay (The Mongrel Jews) is a folk-punk singer-songwriter and inter-dimensional traveler, documenting his experiences in story and song while accompanying himself on banjo and ukulele. A longtime enthusiast of both literature and science, he has participated in several quantum-poetic experiments, including Project [REDACTED] and Operation [REDACTED]. Shay's performances are highly interactive, encouraging the civilians in the audience to stomp along and sing along to further study rhythm and melody deviations between universes. Be prepared to smile and ponder!

East Vancouver's "jug band of the damned" the Creaking Planks has made its name as purveyors of musical cognitive dissonance, performing sad songs like they're happy, elevating the profane to the sacred, and playing Nine Inch Nails covers for children. As one does. On this most Puckish of occasions they will be walking the metaphorical tightrope and angling to represent both the most foolish fun and the funniest folly in their repertoire. Now, more damned than ever!

Laugh until you cry or, in contrarian Planks fashion, vice versa! We'll be hooting it up downstairs at the WISE Lounge (1882 Adanac Street at Victoria) from 8 to 11 pm. $10 suggested donation, 19+.