2011-01-31: Creaking Planks 6th anniversary

Sunday January 30th, 2005, in the auditorium at the Western Front, a room which has seen so many deliberately stranger things, an accordionist with a performance poetry troupe met an outsider acoustic noise duo with slightly more underground musical sensibilities than the Shaggs had, and knew that their two great tastes must go great together. Enter: the Creaking Planks. Six years later, we skip lightly past the endless living rooms, back yards, and festivals, Vancouver’s introduction to the ZombieWalk, a pirate flashmob, two stage musicals, gigs down the US Pacific seaboard (studded with the abandoned hulks of derelict tour vehicles), and memorable mixed bills — following ’50s squeezebox sex symbol Dick Contino at the 20th annual Cotati Accordion Festival, and opening in turn for free software guru Richard Stallman… our two biggest gigs!

Now we actually know how to play our instruments, and our musical sensibilities have matured from “Can we play this?” to “Should we play this?” In honour of our six years we’re putting to bed many of the songs we’ve kept close this whole time, and celebrating onetime contributors whose paths led them through the rotating roster of Planks before settling for other, less strange projects. We may not match our record of 11 Planks on-stage simultaneously, but we should be able to at least cumulatively meet that high-water mark over the course of the night. Joining us will be musical guiding lights Petunia the yodeling cowboy and Al Mader, the Minimalist Jug Band, whose “I’m a Lousy Lay” were the magic words that got us together in the first place.

It’s also a retirement for Dieter Friesen’s tenure booking his Deet Street nights at the Railway Club, a long association between him and us dating back to our first appearance there in April ‘06 sharing a bill with his band Rick Danko’s Ghost under the auspices of Tamara Nile. In short, we have numerous reasons to be celebrating this night, of things changing more the more they stay the same.

Update! Allan reviewed it, in a roundabout fashion, and an American friend came up from Bellingham to enjoy some great music and take a bunch of pictures capturing the night’s wild and wooly energy!