2012 in review

It’s been another year of ups and downs (er, pitches an’ yaws?) for the jug band of the damned, and since it’s a list-making time of year, here are a top 10 of highlights from 2012 for the Creaking Planks!

• 10. This was a new one for us — something hard to achieve after seven years! 2011’s new experience was playing in a tattoo parlour, but this was stranger still — a teleperformance between multiple Planks in different locations! Blackbox wasn’t able to join Wyoming Johnny at the Horace Phair party in Portland this year, so the night of October 6th they had to jam together employing unconventional means:
• 9. We were expecting somewhat more diversity in genres representing across Gastown on Make Music Day, June 21st, but set up at our allotted location to find ourselves sandwiched between a dozen noisy, amplified rawk bands of various makes and models hiding behind Marshall stacks. And here we were, in a minimal 3-piece format, on acoustic instruments with our gutless little PA. Was it worth even setting up? The answer: Mais oui! Vive la différence! Turns out that contrast is one effective key to garnering attention, and as naturally there were no other acts remotely like us out on Water Street, we quickly gathered a small but devoted crowd, clinging (tenaciously?) to us like shipwreck survivors to a liferaft. Even the smaller format, which we’d been concerned would be underwhelming, worked to our advantage, each instrument occupying its niche in the pitch spectrum without competing with others and muddying the mix. A new paradigm — doing more with less?
  See you next year, random hoop lady!
• 8. We don’t like to go any smaller than a three-piece ensemble when confirming for a gig (so you don’t book “a band” and end up with “a ukulele player”), but circumstances compelled us to go in as a two-piece for a truly extraordinary show Nov 10th in which we were among the more normal of the acts offered to the crowd. Mixing it up with the new format, we went for broke with unusual, not-played-into-the-ground repertoire for an unusual kind of audience — chamber music-style folks, seated and politely listening attentively. Our new tack wouldn’t have worked in most of the noisy bars, cafes and tattoo parlors where we usually play, but it was absolutely the best fit for that particular room on that specific occasion. Plus, of course, the rest of the strangeness was off the hook, and for once we got to appreciate the spectacle rather than providing it.
  Case in point: note the topless manservants in the mirror. They were on-stage all. night. long.
• 7. Many of the best gigs in town look somewhat humble on paper, like playing a set at the Deer Lake Rhododendron Festival, but what sets them apart is how they manage to both deliver a reasonably-sized audience and a decent payout for hard-working hungry musicians. In this case the premise seems somewhat hand-wavy — here’s an extension cord, go plug in your PA system outside in John Hendry Park and we’ll set up 60 chairs for Trout Lake patrons who may encounter you and decide to hear more. Opening this August 1st set playing to 60 empty chairs was a leap of faith, the set feeling like a gambler’s desperate double-or-nothing gambit, but skipping forward a couple of hours and wrapping the set to a full house demanding encore after encore leaves you feeling like you successfully stole fire from the gods. Where performing in public spaces is concerned, it’s like the magical opposite of busking — people actually pay attention to you, AND you actually get paid… by NOT asking for money! Then we had the great fortune to play that gig again a few weeks later, Aug 22nd! Sometimes (not to name any names) your only reward for a great outdoor set is the beautiful natural stage, but fortunately that’s not the case everywhere.
• 6. So you write a great song, but what do you do with it? A friend helps you make a great recording of it (in exchange for which we say: if you’re of the guitar-playing persuasion, you ought to consider a Tinker guitar) but you’re still ten tracks short of an album. But now in this iTunes microtransaction era, we can just serve up a single song! It’s the greatest of our great original tunes, and someday will serve as the bedrock for a full album — but you don’t have to wait ’til then! That’s the beauty of it.
• 5. Early in 2012 the Heineken beer company ran a fun (if somewhat problematic) ad campaign featuring everyone’s favorite Hindi film sountrack hit, Jaan Pehechaan Ho! Interest in the song mounted and folks out there in Internet-land began seeking out alternate renditions of it. That’s where we came in. A humble, unassuming (and not even synchronized!) performance of it we’d had recorded live off the floor a year earlier suddenly found itself thrust into weird prominence, and when the dust cleared, we found our video had been viewed twenty-two thousand times! We haven’t yet had any invitations to travel to Mumbai to perform our version but we remain hopeful.
• 4. If you trace the history of mass entertainment back far enough, you find an exciting and intriguing post-vaudeville moment in time when movies and cartoons had been invented but not yet synchronized with soundtracks, leaving live musicians (typically on a piano or Wurlitzer organ) to fill in the blanks, sonically. April 7th, we got to deliver a fun and funny live soundtrack to a great piece of black & white animation featuring the great surreal feline of the Depression era, Felix the Cat! Coming up with different riffs to suit the cartoon’s disparate weird moods was a slice and drafting our instruments for double duty doing foley work for sound effects was also a big thrill. Then getting to make it happen on-stage in a theatre in front of a packed house was the icing on the cake, and all the other great soundtracks from the other performers the cherry on that icing. Hopefully we’ll be revisiting this format annually!
• 3. On a good year, we’ll play one wedding reception. In a great year, we’ll play two. But in 2012, we got to play two receptions for the same wedding, in two different cities! (On two separate dates.) Canadian folk music royalty (well, at least the court jester) Bob Bossin of Stringband tied the knot with artist Sima Elizabeth Shefrin, first on May 20th at the Peretz Centre where we provided musical bookends for the occasion as the band from Chelm (with the best old-world village food on the reception dinner menu — cabbage rolls and kugel! — our inspired suggestion) and then later, on June 30th, on Gabriola Island at the amazing Net Loft, our first ferry-assisted gig that didn’t involve our taking a bath. 2013 is already on deck to be a good year — Cumberland, we’re coming to your wedding celebrants this upcoming July! Just as well, we need to share our inspired genius with the BC Ferries musical ecologist (presentation pictured) who teaches passengers about seaweed through song. “Kelp! I need somebody! Kelp! Not just anybody! Kelp! You know I need someone! Ke-ellp!”
  (We landed this gig because of our great .GIF animation, in honour of which this post is framed by two more, anachronistically from our Nov 2011 show with the Accordion Babes.)
• 2. Bob and Sima were concerned when Blackbox mentioned that his partner was in the third trimester and there was a remote possibility he might need to duck out of their wedding in order to attend to the birth of his firstborn child. No need to worry, they still had a week left until the due date — and as it turned out, things didn’t really get rolling until two weeks later… causing us to cancel an entirely different gig on very short notice. (They were warned!) We don’t like to cancel gigs — we’ve withdrawn less than a handful of times over 8 years — but if you’ve got to do it, this is an excellent excuse.
• 1. Tracks on Tracks. Long story short, we accidentally entered a musical popularity contest, and inadvertently made it through several qualifying rounds. We don’t involve ourselves with these hyping exercises often because they’re very energy-intensive and always a let-down to not win. Since Kickstarter emerged, everyone knows a dozen musicians, rotating in a game of musical chairs, continually clamouring for votes, likes, and dollars. There’s so much focus on pre-selling the art, there’s no time for the art. (Admittedly anything that gets the artists paid is good, but it makes for an irritating baseline buzz of tedious hype at all times.) But this time, because the stakes were high (you know how much it takes to ship a band across the country?) and because our initial accidental success in advancing to the second round was so invigourating, we campaigned. It compelled us to better ourselves. It drove us to give people more ways to appreciate us. (See #6, above.) It inspired us to get organized. And, mostly, drunk on unprecedented reach as measured by Facebook Insights, it pushed us to produce an extremely silly series of doctored photographs of the Creaking Planks insensitively performing at the sites of great train wrecks. When we proceeded to round 3, leaving behind bands we knew darned well were more popular than us (though we knew that we of course were far, far nerdier than them, always a factor in online campaigning) and caught people we hadn’t seen for years boosting us to their friends, our hearts were fit to burst, not least because we knew secretly that even if we somehow won, we wouldn’t be able to go (because, well, see #2, above.) In this business you spend a lot of time feeling like you write your name in water, giving people a good time but not for a long time. It was very heartening given our increasing long-in-the-tooth-ness to find that some of that goodness we’d spent years pumping out into the world was coming back to us. Ultimately, a good investment! Definitely one of our top 3 didn’t-happens, along with not-opening for Nina Hagen and not-playing on the World of Goo soundtrack.
• 0. Monkeying with time, is it possible for us to include last year’s anniversary show? We put two astounding out-of-town acts to great use and were much entertained ourselves, to boot! Truth be known, it probably does fit — heck, the poster artwork alone qualifies it, and someday we’ll have to sell something with that on its cover — but right out of the calculations would be this year’s anniversary show, coming up in three weeks! Well, so be it. If we have to break time itself (using polyrhythms!) to include it in our list, that’s just what we’ll have to do. Heck, certain unnamed cultures mark their New Year celebrations by the annual Planks anniversary show, until which it will still be considered 2012. So there you go. It hasn’t even happened yet and already it’s among our favorite memories of last year. The best part was when you came and joined us!

A moment of silence for two Vancouver venues

A moment of silence, please. You, you in the back… yes, with the alpenhorn. Just for a minute, please. Well, okay, but take it outside. Man, than thing is huge. Now, where was I? Ah yes, a chance to pay our respects to two local music venues who played key roles in the development of the Creaking Planks, both of which closed their doors to live music performance in October.

The narrow confines of Cafe Montmartre always seemed more like an alley between buildings where someone had hung sheet metal roofing and a few tricycles than a building of its own; unbearably hot in the summer, it played host to the long-running Thundering Word open mic series long after its founder passed on. We featured at the open mic twice, and played there on numerous occasions — a room we had access to book when other venues didn’t necessarily believe in our locally-unproven support acts such as the Accordion Babes from California, and of course, we’ll never forget the riot (well, the police came and my mother was standing on a table) when Mezamazing played with us there at the Accordion Noir Festival.

Two blocks away, the Little Mountain Studios have completed their conversion into a theatre, after what must be nearly a decade of struggles with the city inching incrementally toward venue legitimacy since its early days as the Butchershop Floor Gallery, where a young Lord Eel, Lee Shoal, and Blackbox Squeezebeard managed to clear a full house shortly after meeting just by pulling their instruments out. Later, we managed to play a haunting set to an empty room while accidentally burning a hole in a banjo. After the changeover we took on an official status as the venue’s “house band”, playing many an opening, and for a time enjoyed a weekly residency there. There, also, we put on gigs that quite simply couldn’t have happened anywhere else — the Cabaret of Wonders! Err on the Side of Caution! (And of course, hosting Mezamazing after their Montmartre show.) And of course, we had many, many RAV line nights.

We don’t strictly speaking need them now, but the bands who are, now, in the position we were in, then, do need rooms like these. (Venues that will pay you are also nice, to be sure, but even before your band is at that level, you need a place outside your living room to develop your skills to a point where you can go semi-pro.) Where will they be found? These rooms are survived in the neighbourhood by the Main and the Cottage Bistro; more widely, the Safe Amplification Society is keeping its finger on the pulse of accessible venues for eg. all-ages shows that can’t always promise the massive paying patrons many venues demand (in lieu of rent; of course, if you have capital, anything is possible… but that’s not a reason to make everything impossible to those without capital if all they have to trade on is talent!)

So hats off to the rooms for keeping on keeping on; it’s always a surprise when the totally anarchic band perseveres and manages to hang on for longer than legitimate businesses (well, and the LMS, which just seemed unkillable, despite its years of seemingly perpetually teetering on the brink.) We would have liked to give you one last set, but timing isn’t only the secret to great comedy, but also sometimes its inverse. Many regards to Ali and Ehren; letting your art lead you through life is one folly, but then running a business predicated on daily dealings with those fools is a whole other flavour of foolishness. We wish you great success in your next adventures and look forward to our paths crossing then!

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: 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.)