2010-08: Creaking Planks vs. the Bay Area!

Most of the tidbits we’ve been sharing here to reward fan interest and closer scrutiny by people whose support we’re trying to muster up to vote to send us (only ’til noon Tuesday!) on that Tracks on Tracks musical train ride to Toronto for the NXNE festival… well, many of them have been more than a little fallacious. The pictures, especially. A picture is worth a thousand words and most of them are BS. But what follows is a mostly-true account of hidden Planks history punctuated by, well, very sporadic photography. We took lots of pictures, and somewhere in the haze of time lost almost all of them. But when discussing one grand trip, why not finally air the accounts of this epic voyage? So without further ado…

It just goes to show you that you never know where the ripples in a pond will go from its initial splash. In a January 2010 show we covered very cursorily (our website was down, we had no choice!) the folks at Accordion Noir invited Renée de la Prade (of Culann’s Hounds) and Amber Lee Baker (of the Anomalies) to visit Vancouver to promote their fabulous Accordion Babe cheesecake pin-up calendar / CD and put together a squeezy show here — the first of their Pleasing Squeezing series — to help display them in a relevant and exciting context. The supporting acts were grand, but as so often happens, the Planks were provided to headline, to help sweeten the deal with their regular venue and just to take the sometimes unglamorous closing slot. The night had so much entertainment the Planks ended up barely getting a chance to take the stage before we had to shut down, but we made a strong impression on our visitors and when we parted ways they vouched to put in a good word on our behalf back in their stomping grounds.

Fast-forward two months and we found ourselves the recipients of an unsolicited invitation to play at that year’s Cotati Accordion Festival! Clearly this was an offer we could not refuse. And yet clearly, due to the distances and time involved, ultimately it was an offer that many of the Planks couldn’t accept, either. At the last minute the to- and fro- portions of a 10-day journey of gentle drives were axed from the itinerary, replaced by a glamorous rump of an unlikely Planks trio — accordion, cello and bari sax — salvaging the tour through triage, determining to fly down, rent a car (”the Hearse”, the rental folks called it) and play 5 gigs in the Bay Area over 4 nights, making the most of our weekend staging ground.

… for various reasons, incognito:

Basing ourselves out of Berkeley, where friends Ben & Rachel (of Vancouver’s epic but defunct folk combo Tarkin) were temporarily calling home (gosh! land of huge jade plant bushes! sulfured apricots! the Cathaus’ front gate!), we extraordinarily rented some equipment from Oakland’s Best Music Co. (only traveling with one of our three axes for several reasons, not limited to our airline’s sterling reputation for safely transporting instruments) and headed forth to play a test set at the Delta of Venus in Davis Thurs Aug 19th, trying out our rented and borrowed gear with Ben (later issued the impromptu pirate codename Hawknose Stilton) sitting in on banjo and mandolin. We didn’t make a huge impact in the hollowed-out summer-vacation college town, but a good time was had by a few and we worked out some parts for our extraordinary instrumentation… then got some much-needed shuteye after being up for 40 hours.

Friday the 20th had us inadvertently taking a scenic detour (a recurring theme in our generously-scheduled navigation) through the heart of California’s wine country en route to Santa Rosa and an exciting gig at the Toad in the Hole with our Babe-ly friend Amber Lee. The Toad is the kind of neighbourhood pub that you only wish you had down the street in your hometown, a fun and whimsical place where the regulars might decide to mount a parade and re-enact the Sgt. Peppers’ album cover on a lark, later refreshing themselves with a startling array of artisanal beers and what must be the Platonic ideal of pub food, deliciously made with simple and local ingredients. Recovering from the discovery that Blackbox’s borrowed instrument had, following 50 years of survival traveling from Sweden to Canada, lasted precisely one night in his hands before becoming inoperable, we followed up Amber’s adept opening set to her hometown crew and kept their attention through to the end of the night, joined by friendly resident squeeze-weirdo J D Limelight.

Amber put us up that night (with her fabulous snake) so we’d be well-situated for the 20-minute commute to Cotati the following day (she had to leave early that morning for pre-fest rehearsal with the astounding Hubbub Club marching band, but we left her with a very relevant bottle of “Accordeon” wine for her troubles). Then we promptly got lost in Sebastopol, going down the road in precisely the wrong direction.

Ultimately we made it to Cotati and managed to unload, whereupon Blackbox had to take off on a quixotic quest. Ironically, following the disintegration of the loaner instrument in his hands, he had found himself committing the egregious faux pas of headlining at an accordion festival without an accordion. Fortunately, if there was one place in the world he could be reasonably assured of being able to borrow a squeezebox, it was here. And lo, the clouds parted, and the sun shone down on a dealer’s tent… revealing the kindly gents from Victoria’s Tempo Trend music store, filling their RV with surplus squeezeboxes and taking to the summer festival circuit in an attempt to offload some of them. Just bring it back to Victoria in good shape, they told him, after attending to a long line-up of prospective customers. Meanwhile, he was missing a great line-up and a chance to have Dick Contino autograph the record sleeves he’d brought down carefully packed away in his luggage!

Backstage, things were gloomy. To have come all this way, to this, the largest crowd we’d ever played to… and have so few Planks to show for it… fortunately, someone flipped the “festival magic” switch, and suddenly Alex Meixner’s drummer was sitting in with us. (Why not? After all, he came here to drum, and drumming is what he loves to do!) Matt Tolentino asked if we could use a clarinet, and finally Alex Meixner concluded that while we were poaching nearly his entire crack band, he may as well join us also. Hats off to the Cotati tech crew who was able to accommodate a more than doubling of our band size with about 20 minutes’ notice. The Great Morgani suddenly wrapped, and then there we were, on stage, blinking in the sunlight (and holding on to our charts for dear life, as galing gusts threatened to whip them away at every turn!)

Click to enlarge

The advantage of playing simple arrangements of well-known songs is that talented musicians can parachute in on literally less than an hour’s notice and grandstand all the way home. (Also for members of an act who play to crowds who may leave the room if a Polish polka is followed by a Slovenian polka, we represent a chance to play the songs we love to play, not necessarily the songs we have to play 8) With Meixner’s band providing a new heart for us, we gave up the gusto and were well-received. Also, we had a blast on-stage.

Cotati being an alt-accordion fest, it represents all kinds of traditions as well as having a strong strain of the bizarre from the Bay Area punks. So you get polka, zydeco and cojunto along with Dick Contino, but sometimes the crowd is really ready for some Gogol Bordello and Nine Inch Nails without knowing that it’s even on the table, and then they get it served up to them. (Polkacide was prepared to bridge the gap, piercing implants shined up and faux sausage links dangling out of leiderhosen leg holes, but not for a little longer yet.) Duckmandu relieved us on the side stage, and there was a lot of outrage backstage when they found that by “we have four CDs to sell” what we meant is that our total stock of CDs was four, not that a selection of four different albums were up for sale. We had a blast with Alex Meixner (I crashed an interview he was conducting backstage and some version of our story ended up in the final account 8) and his crew, and they were dismayed to hear that instead of jamming all night in the party suite nearby we had to scoot on along to San Francisco in order to make our gig later that night at the Revolution Cafe.

But first, you can get a great eyefull of the festival milieu and us in it courtesy of Rachel, who posted a whole gallery of shots from this impossible and wonderful event. Someday we hope to return, and we hope to have our act a lot more together when that time comes 8)

You can also hear a terrible live recording of our entire set. Killer playing at very low levels, buried beneath the incessant blowing of the wind over the mic. If you crank it, you can hear our great performances clearly and imagine you’re hearing us playing an exclusive engagement in the eye of a tornado.

Creaking Planks At Cotati 2010 (feat. guest players Hawknose Stilton, Shirley Temple, Razorneck Chowder, Bones McGrew, and introducing Eurus, the East Wind!) set list:
01:20 — Insane in the Membrane
05:45 — Womanizer / Toxic
12:28 — Fight For Your Right to Plunder
16:59 — Dead Man’s Pants
19:10 — Psycho Killer
24:01 — the Song of the Count
28:20 — Kishka Anthem
31:09 — Kiddie Closer
35:31 — American Wedding
44:09 — Snazzy Portland

Barring one or two wrong turns, there we were pulling up to the Revolution Cafe, where we discovered resident weirdo Count Z Bop defending his territory by insisting that we let him accompany us on bongos. No problem, we needed percussion anyhow! The crowd was pleasantly baffled by our set, by the end of which Blackbeard was singing with the Tom Waits voice (the gurgle of a dog that has barked until it cannot bark any longer, and tries to continue nonetheless; the sound of two pieces of beef jerky rubbing against each other) from overuse. But our musical cold-call there was well-received, profitable and got us an invitation to a Hungarian picnic the following day (which we couldn’t find, another side-story.) Sunday was our day off and our pay was getting to see the sights of San Francisco, the platonic ideal that Vancouver tries, stuntedly, to emulate. To Taqueria Farolito where we quaffed off-menu horchata and consumed burritos the size of babies (and discussed with Ludwika the doula dressing them up in baby clothes) and compared technique with the notorious donair vampire of the Outlaw Band. Off to gawk at wild parrots in the neighbourhood trees and the sea lions delivering the oceanic equivalent of Hastings & Main! The mechanical amusements museum provided plenty of quarter-powered diversions (including a mechanical accordion-playing device demonstrating the horrors of automation and a kinematoscope revealing just what exactly the belly dancer does on her day off.) Then we briefly dipped our toes in the Pacific (though there was no real need to, as we have plenty of it up here), and then we were off to our final gig: at Peri’s Saloon in Fairfax, a venue with the longest contract we’d ever seen (admittedly, much of it codifying common sense).

There we posed for a photo (since lost) of us under our name on the marquee, and deeply entertained our barmaid Denise, who enjoyed our set so much she got on the phone and brought all her friends in to enjoy our performing our set a second time, at the end of which Blackbox’s voice was really done, for reals. Rachel sat in with us on mandolin, tipping us off to the someone-beat-us-to-it pirate codename Amanda Lynn Peg. As the hour got later the venue mysteriously filled leaving us to wonder exactly who goes out to drink at midnight on a Sunday night? The answer is: plenty of wonderful weirdos, one of whom got to enjoy a moment of XKCD t-shirt solidarity with Cap’n Jack Spare-ribs for the second time that day.

That wraps the whirlwind visit! We managed to get the Hearse back to the airport car rental office essentially by coasting it into the parking lot in neutral gear. The flight back north was uneventful (though an observation: many more settled, illuminated areas are passed continuously when flying north-south than east-west) and to avoid a repeat of the World’s Most Expensive Cab Ride fiasco which we started the tour with, saved money by chartering an airport limousine to return us to our domiciles.

A year and a half later, we told you about it. The statute of limitations has got to be up on that one, right?

In conclusion: can’t wait to do it again! Even this hypothetical trip to Toronto won’t top it, but maybe we can shoot for a close second. Big thanks to Renee and Amber Lee.

2012-04: An entirely un-rail-related milestone

Sometime over the past few days our ticker quietly slipped past 20 thousand views on that notorious unsynchronized performance video of us playing Jaan Pehechaan Ho last Easter, making it not only our most-viewed YouTube performance, but somewhat difficult to imagine surpassing.

(If only we could get every one of those 20 thousand to vote for us at cbc.polldaddy.com/s/new-survey-4 , our position on this train ride would be secured!)

It’s perhaps worth comparing to the tremendously viral pre-Plank-video YT clip of Blackbox (hm, pre-blackbox, even — it’s red!) playing an incomplete take on Britney Spears’ “(Hit Me Baby) One More Time” solo at a party, one-handed, and its eventual accruing of some 27 thousand views. Now, that video is apparently potent, but the newer one is catching up. Let’s investigate the factors that separate them:

Age. That Britney Spears video has been up for almost six years, meaning it only averages 4500 views per year. The Plankian Jaan Pehechaan Ho has garnered all 20 thousand views in a single year.

Performance weight. There are many factors here — full band of eight vs. soloist, full song vs. an excerpt, competent two-handed use of instrument vs. a clumsy single-handed rendition. Assuming that all of these naive handicaps worked in the earlier video’s favour (as it’s hard to see what else was going its way), we can use New Math to calculate that if our rendition of Jaan Pehechaan Ho had been done differently according to the formula of the earlier video it would have achieved still further popularity by this point in time.

Imagine, if you will, that posting a fragment of the song doubles its appeal, and that performing it one-handed doubles it again in minimalist virtuosity. Then that minimalism is diluted fully in half with every supplementary player. According to this airtight formula, we can calculate that a solo player performing a chunk of Jaan Pehechaan Ho one-handed would in one year have garnered … 646 752 views. (And hot damn, would he or she have earned it!) Over six years that would have risen to 3 880 512.

Aaaand… carry the two.

Thus, we can calculate that objectively, this flawless heuristic also reveals that Jaan Pehechaan Ho is 143.7 times better a song than (Hit Me) Baby One More Time.

2012-04: A new track for Tracks on Tracks

You heard it before, but now we have re-recorded a new, exuberant version on which its author is actually present! The previous version was good, but this one is great! Our hit single, the Kishka Anthem, can now be heard at our new bandcamp page (and, well, here — see the sidebar! or below! or even on CBC Radio 3! — but you can tip us there!)

(Generally elsewhere it is accompanied with a similar but different photograph from our Prophouse gig last May, but this one splendidly emphasizes the constipated look on Blackbox’s face while Pavel sings. Cosmic truths revealed through photography! And maybe it really will steal our souls.)

2012-04: Round 3!

Surprise! It couldn’t have surprised anyone more than us to determine that we’d gotten into the top 25 bands out of the initial 300 competing to travel on that Tracks on Tracks contest to ride the musical rails into Toronto and the NXNE festival, but unpredictable is our middle name. (Named after our great-uncle, whose exploits in Central Asia… well, but I digress.)

But there we were, tuned in to the podcast on Wednesday, when there we heard it:

It was brief, but then they repeated it a few times, confused by how alphabetizing names beginning with “The” puts bands with “Creaking” in their names after “Shred Kelly”. (Pro tip: often the “the” is omitted. Sorry.)

And here we were, all ready to blog about The Little Engine That Could and how we thought we could and put out our best effort and thanks to all our supporters for believing anyway and now we could get back to business just scraping by, but no — the campaigning continues! We have until noon PST on Tuesday, May 1st, to garner enough votes to place us among the top 10, now at cbc.polldaddy.com/s/new-survey-4. The results will be out by late Wednesday morning, and we can assure you we’ll be making a big stink either way.

Our campaigning will continue apace, with more goodies to be shared over the coming week — with this new revelation that people actually care what we’re up to, we’re definitely more inspired to give our best! And superfans subscribed to our Twitter feed at twitter.com/creakingplanks or our Facebook group (and the new event there created just to gracefully court voters across multiple rounds without endlessly bugging them) will likely get the inside scoop on these goodies! Only here will they be discussed and analysed endlessly, but if you want the announcements without the insight and lousy jokes, check there first!

2012-04: Tracks on Tracks — the ever-lovin’ end!

Warning: this post is not suitable for children, and the image contained herein may require a long time to explain to them (and years of expensive therapy to fully get over.) The precise circumstances remain infuriatingly vague, but it was universally admitted to be a calamity the likes of which the Children’s Festival had never anticipated when they booked us. You start singing the Happy Birthday dirge with its line “children crying in despair” and never realise just where it leads. Well this is it, the end of the line, folks. Everybody off! We warned you to keep your hands inside the moving vehicle!

It’s true, this is our final imaginary photo-post campaigning for round 2 of the CBC’s “Tracks on Tracks” contest — you have until noon Tuesday to submit your vote in support of the jug band of the damned (down in the “T” section at cbc.polldaddy.com/s/new-survey-3) to try to clear us for participation in the third and final round. The winner gets to ride with Green Couch Productions (heh, if their Indiegogo campaign picks up) and some other bands on a musical train trip to Toronto and the NxNE festival in June. We like to think we’d be admirable candidates for the job, and thanks for asking!

This week of strange photocollages has been an attempt to psychically associate us with a rail travel context, a little bit askew (in conjunction with spectacular and historic disasters — modern ones are just too horrific) but all the more appropriate for our somewhat bent take on the music biz. Of course, we hope not to bring on any bad juju to whoever ends up winning the contest and riding the gravy train east — but, y’know, even if disaster strikes you can keep your camera handy and own the disaster as best you can. Rocking out, loudly, can be a form of grieving!

(We also had an unfortunate run-in with Big Bird backstage, but those photos are entirely unprintable.)