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.)

2012-04: Tracks on Tracks — Hardcore!

Who knew that our stint as a supporting act on Jason Webley’s Monsters of Accordion tour would lead to our landing an opening spot at OzzFest? This particular image captures perfectly a moment in the set as we transition from Patsy Cline’s “Crazy” to Gnarls Barkley’s “Crazy” to Ozzy’s “Crazy Train” to Elizabeth Cotten’s “Freight Train”. Our cross-genre sensibilities have always engendered “train wrecks” (startling, jarring sudden transitions between genre and mood) and so why not our stage shows also? This train may not have crashed yet, but it’s so badass it leaves a shipwreck in its wake — in the sky. (The conductor is actually a really nice guy but too many years in green rooms has done a number on his face. As for the angel, she just missed her entrance cue.)

To be sure — this scene never happened. But remember — pictures never lie. And art is the thing that uses fiction to tell greater truths — just ask Mike Daisey. Are you confused yet? Here’s what you really need to take home from these bewildering blog posts: as a band, we really like trains and rail travel, which all these demented imaginary photocollages are, in a sense, celebrating. And you could help us to experience some this June as part of the Tracks on Tracks tour to Toronto, by voting for us at cbc.polldaddy.com/s/new-survey-3 ! Now don’t forget to stop by tomorrow for the final stop on our tour of the locomotive collective subconscious!

PS, unrelated, but make sure to check out the new video of our live classic cartoon soundtrack accompaniment from two weeks ago!

2012-04: Tracks on Tracks — miniaturized!

When will it end? Why, when we’re in Toronto. Until then, we are campaigning this week to get you to send us there by voting for us in the second round of the Tracks on Tracks popularity contest, at cbc.polldaddy.com/s/new-survey-3

This campaigning takes the form, this week, of demonstrating pictorially what a great fit we are for the rail medium featuring so prominently in the contest by sharing great imaginary photographs from the Creaking Planks Album of Gig Photos That Never Were But Maybe Should Have Been… surprisingly many of which feature calamitous rail voyages of one kind or another.

For this next photo, for instance, we not only traveled back in time to 1964 but also into a wholly fictitious universe — and then shrunk down to model train size! Because, y’know, if you’re going to do one impossible thing, why not three? So here we are, celebrating Hallowe’en with Gomez Addams by playing a spirited set at the bandstand in his model railway set. And because Gomez plays by his own rules, his toy trains aren’t always arranged optimally so as to get everyone where they’re going on time — unless their destination is the afterlife! Of course, model railroad figures don’t have an afterlife, do they? (Hm, the theological implications are staggering!)

In conclusion… please vote for us!