We would have blacked out our site today in honour of the SOPA / PIPA protests, but as Cap’n Jack Spareribs said — here in Vancouver we had a white-out instead. Besides! There’s too much at stake! If we closed our doors today we might lose one last opportunity to remind you about our fabulous concert tonight tonight tonight, celebrating our 7th anniversary as a band, down at the Railway Club.

The West Ender didn’t forget…

(And thanks to Robin Hunt for snapping that shot back during the Steamer Tea Party in Feb 2010)

And we hope that you don’t forget either!

Now you can’t say that nobody reminded you. But wait, there’s more! Of course, our 9 pm show features the Creaking Planks, but also two other grand acts you don’t get many chances to enjoy in these parts — Raghu Lokanathan of Prince George, and Ana Bon-Bon visiting from London, England! If those names don’t mean much to you, perhaps you’d enjoy a refresher while you’re not killing your lunch hour surfing Wikipedia. We took over 4 hours on the air last week in promotion of this show and here’s two and a half of them for you to enjoy, resplendently chock-full of the music of Raghu, Ana, and even some relatively recent recordings by our very own Creaking Planks to bring you up to speed. First we devoted 60 minutes to canned tunes on Accordion Noir Wed the 11th, then on Fri the 13th we did much the same for 90 minutes on Sound Resistance — but this time with SpongeDev SquarePlanks joining in, allowing some spirited, if rump, dual-Plank performing live over the air.

We’ll have many more than two Planks on-stage tonight, with our lovely show running until midnight! Three swell acts will run you only $8 ($6 for Railway Club members!) and we look forward to you helping us with some ridiculous audience interaction antics.

And just like that, it’s that time again: another year, another anniversary show. It almost feels like we’re still recovering from last year’s! But some things, sufficiently repeated, grow into custom — almost tradition. We’ve still got a crack squad of sharp acoustic players with demented musical tastes, and again we’ve managed to bolster them with opening sets from some of our favourite acts: in this case, Prince George’s philosopher-king of the singer-songwriters, Raghu Lokanathan, as well as Vancouver’s accordion-queen-in-absentia, Ana Bon-Bon taking a rare tour of the colonies from her new seat in London, England! And as with last year, this year we also congregate to celebrate with this show at the Railway Club, upstairs at 579 Dunsmuir Street. The show should be rolling by 8:30 pm, and again, admission is $8, or $6 for Railway Club members.

We’re learning some new songs (at least one of which is not only new to us but to the world!) and exhuming other lost and forgotten works from the great 20th century popular songbook… and of course polishing up the favorite of the discriminating Heineken fan, Jaan Pehechaan Ho. It should be a great time (the only thing going downtown on a Wednesday night!) that we won’t see the likes of until, well, January 2013, so we hope to catch you out Wednesday, January 18th, 2012!

Many thanks to Daisy-Jones Locher for the amazing poster artwork; you should be seeing it on some of a new run of buttons, and who knows what other goodies we’re going to come up with for the merch table of the damned?

This performance is a presentation of CFRO 102.7 fm’s Accordion Noir radio show.

Here we are, April 24, 2011, in a strangely unsynchronized video (note Dec 21: we managed to correct it, reflected above!) recording capturing our performance of that eternal Bollywood surf-rock anthem, Jaan Pehechaan Ho. We’ve performed it more than a few times, though usually not in front of a camera. Alan Zisman kindly took video footage of pretty much the entire night, including spirited sets by headliners Maria in the Shower and Jason Webley (basically a perfect bill: maybe we can do it again sometime, guys?) It wasn’t a hugely successful show — we rented space for more bodies than we could draw, and a few parties had to take pay cuts. A friend was even caught after the fact red-handed tweeting “meh” sentiments during our set. But a few months after the fact, we noticed something curious.

Reviewing the video footage of the sets that night, total view counts of most of the performances had plateaued and would only continue to increment slowly thanks to the long tail. But our rendition of this song was pulling out well ahead of our other videos from that concert — even synchronized ones! It was being viewed more than the Maria in the Shower videos. Now, those gents work hard to Put On A Show (going so far as to accidentally drive a tricycle backwards into a table of adoring fans at this particular show) so that shouldn’t be happening. It was being viewed more than the Jason Webley videos! Now, that definitely shouldn’t be happening! (For the record, Jason dug our performance of that tune as well, getting to enjoy it over and over again during our elaborate sound check.)

Like many of you, I first learned of the song from its strategic placement at the front of Terry Zwigoff’s 2001 film Ghost World, setting an exuberant opening note of wonderful strangeness and strange wonderment that the film couldn’t entirely sustain. I had to know more, and learned of its origin in the 1965 movie Gumnaam, and its performance by Mohammed Rafi (and not, as the film suggests, Ted Lyons.) Maybe you haven’t seen Ghost World or Gumnaam, but you were one of the 8 million people to enjoy watching the Heineken advertisement “the Date.” Either which way, it definitely makes an impression. The impression it made on me was: “gosh, I’d love to learn to play that one! But it’ll take an elaborate arrangement — I’ll never convince the Planks!” Fortunately, I didn’t have to convince them: Phil & Kimla, longtime Plank supporters (what supports a Plank? a Beam?) requested for us to perform it at their Indo-Canadian wedding and finally we had the excuse we’d needed to put in the work needed to pick it up.

Now, we aren’t the only band who have had the great idea to cover this great song, but as far as we can tell, our new interpretation has been the most popular of the pack. Grinder Nova deliver a high-energy rendition, but in a grave injustice it’s been enjoyed under 2000 times.

Mexican Drug Patrol also give it a high-intensity instrumental take, and bafflingly, the Railway Club sign in the background of that footage indicates that we’ve got competition in the Jaan Pehechaan Ho category even in our own hometown! Their version is great, but due to the vagaries of surfers, ours has still been viewed a thousand times more.

Not only has our unsynchronized video performance of this song become the most popular cover version on YouTube (redeeming a complicated show for us — the audience for that particular performance is now a couple degrees of magnitude greater than the people who were in the crowd enjoying our set) but it has also risen to become the most popular video of all of our performances! This is great, because the internet has terrible taste. Our previous MPV (most played video, right?) was one of the very last times we performed our “faithful” version of Nine Inch Nails’ “closer” with its original lyrics before awesome(face)ly infantalizing it — regrettably, the night some of our members decided to experiment with some improvised percussive multitasking for the first time ever. There are better versions of us playing that song on YouTube, but that’s the one that ended up under the microscope on the fan forums at nin.com, where about the kindest thing anyone could say was that they could see that we were aspiring for an interesting re-interpretation. Very diplomatic, sir!

Also rapidly receding into the dust is our former 2nd-most-watched video, now barely on the podium, featuring an impromptu collaboration between us and Free Software guru Richard Stallman of a little Bulgarian ditty in 7/4. Oh, one of those! I’ve got to say, if we’ve got to be chiefly associated with one performance on YouTube, I’m glad it’s Jaan Pehechaan Ho instead of these two.

At this rate, it may soon overshadow all our achievements over the past seven years: its view count has grown by 300 since we discovered its new position as our number one video under a week ago on Twitter! (note Dec 21: and by some 2000 since we first made this blogpost!) We may have missed the golden opportunity for Planking we were born to fulfil, but we’ll just have to earn our virality some other way. We were in on the ground floor of the Zombie Walk “movement”, and I’m pleased to report that performing Jaan Pehechaan Ho requires a lot less sticky cadaver and gore make-up.

Three conclusions are clear: first, Blackbox needs to phonetically learn the third verse instead of just singing the second one twice. Second, we’ll clearly need to track down the owner of the song and get permission to record it on our next album. Third, the Anonymous masses have made their demands clear: we’ll have to get it up to speed in time to perform again at our 7th anniversary party upcoming Wed Jan 18th at the Railway Club, with Ana Bon-Bon and Raghu Lokanathan.

Friday night, Dec 2nd, we’re heading out to the Big Blue House (1624 Salisbury) to help an intimate private residence groove and gyrate to the vibrations only a dedicated crew of folk music misfits can coax out of their infernal contraptions. Also on the bill, we’re crossing paths with Tarran the Tailor again, plus ESL, the Carnival Sized Cinnamon Hearts puppet show, and our friends in Blackberry Wood, singlehandedly buoying up RIM stock this quarter with their infectious energy!

Has it really been almost a year since Memewar magazine invited us back to the Railway Club stage? Well, we’re on our way once again to their comedy night Wednesday, November 30th, starting around 9 pm, with Memewar stalwart Aubyn Rader sitting in again on drums. (Plank codename pending!) Jen Miller will be playing Very Serious music, and improv troupe The Fictionals will be trying to spin comedy cold from the audience’s straw. We will try our level best to be comical, but… well, you saw the joke in that last blog post. Normalize? Chuckanut Drive? Maybe we can play instrumentals and double the humour content…

NB — our next appearance at the Railway, Wed Jan 18th, will be our 7th anniversary party with Raghu Lokanathan and Ana Bon-Bon!

Well, on Sunday, November 6th — the day after our fantastic visit from the Accordion Babes — we had a rump Planks delegation visit the Roseblade house to help celebrate a bonafide 1st birthday party for a 40-year-old, busting out songs from the Planks’ feature set at the Cobalt’s “Ink” open mic five years ago or so.

Then, yesterday, Thurs Nov 24th, we were supposed to join David Roy Parsons (of “Beat Up Old Guitar” fame) for a set in Victoria at the Fort Cafe… but the hoary winter winds of a fierce seasonal storm put the kibosh on that ferry crossing after a very spirited afternoon spent sitting inside a wind-buffetted car. Well, what’s something that CAN go right?

Here’s something difficult to ruin (worse than it already is, at least) — a visual gag a long time in the conceptualising:

Editing some outrageous Creaking Planks live audio in Audacity…

okay, let’s clean this up a little bit…

and… voila. Wait — what?!

Thank heavens for the “undo” function, that’s all I can say. (”Accordion Insanity” photo by Jonathan Dy, and that “normal” band is Clyde Stacy and the Nightcaps. They probably sound all right!)

Update: more normal than normal, and more abnormal than, well, than pretty much anything!

PS: Creaking Planks 7th anniversary show coming up Wednesday, January 18th at the Railway Club with Ana Bon-Bon and Raghu Lokanathan!

We first crossed paths with them during the Great Website Outage of early 2010 and we were all so blown away we nearly neglected to leave ourselves time to play a set! Then they did us a good turn, bringing three of us into their home turf later that summer (a tale still to be told). Renee de la Prade of Culann’s Hounds and Amber Lee Baker are the two roving ambassadors of the Bay Area’s thriving accordion community, championing the underdog instrument with their annual pin-up cheesecake calendar / album, presenting sights and sounds of a bakers’ dozen of awesome lady accordionists, and thanks to our ties with them through the weekly Accordion Noir radio show / podcast, they will be playing two shows in Vancouver this weekend.

Ours is the latter of the two: Saturday, November 5th, from 8 to 10 pm, the Little Mountain Gallery (195 E. 26th Avenue at Main) will be huffing and puffing with an intense and intimate acoustic squeezebox session, when the Accordion Babes Renee and Amber Lee are joined by the jug band of the damned (that’s us!) and, for a $10 admission fee, you as well. This could well be your only opportunity to get your hands on the 2012 calendar without having to resort to the hassle of mail order, and they can autograph and dedicate the calendar in person to whichever fan of kick-ass female-fronted bands is on your holiday gift list!

(If you can’t make it out Saturday night, the Accordion Babes are also performing in town the night before, Friday, Nov 4th, at Spartacus Books (684 E. Hastings), also from 8-10 pm, with a babelier line-up of our friend Natasha Enquist from Victoria and Katheryn Petersen (with Trumpet Babe Melissa Hammer in tow). And, of course, there is nothing keeping you from attending both performances!)

One further omission: typically the Creaking Planks send a serious (well, as serious as we get) posse to Portland over Canadian Thanksgiving / American Columbus Day for the annual Horace Phair house party, to fill its basement with a raucous ruckus. This year, despite much gnashing of teeth and rending of garments, all we could manage to field was our fiddler, Wyoming Johnny. Still, he came equipped with his axe and a copy of favorite Planks singalongs, so “we” could still represent on some level.

creakingplanks Rumour (and, well, @mwkelley) has it “7 drunks + 1 banjo + 1 trombone” could not replace us. But were they too drunk, or not enough?

mwkelley @UnwashedMass It occurs to me that our caterwauling of the Planks songbook last night may’ve amounted to actual character defamation.

Anyhow, naught to commemorate our absence with, but we can re-share our Planks live bootleg mix for @horacephair ‘08

At least he cut a sharp figure! The camera never lies: that set was one for the ages.

The Organizing Centre for Social and Economic Justice (a mouthful, but you try saying “OCSEJ” — actually, usually we call it just “the O.C.”) is an eminently worthwhile local umbrella organization perhaps better known for its projects such as Food Security FACTS, Bitter Melons, People’s Health Radio and the Vancouver chapter of the Bus Riders’ Union. They aren’t all for-profit ventures, and neither are we all of the time, so we’re lending our strange musical taste to help fortify a fundraiser dinner they’re throwing at the Heritage Hall Sunday, October 30th. We’ll be sharing the stage with the female chorus The Larks, and everyone will be enjoying a North African dinner. Doors at 6, dinner at 7, music at 8:30. Individual tickets are $20 and costumes are encouraged! Further details over here on their site.

Because Hallowe’en comes but once a year (but Hallowe’en weekend is three nights long) it’s the profound pleasure of the jug band of the damned to present our spooky show for a second night in a row, next up Saturday, October 29th at Cafe Deux Soleils (2096 Commercial Drive) from 8-11 pm with our ominous pals Tarran the Tailor and Jeff Andrew, who we did this same gig with this time last year. (This time, though, he’ll actually get to play!) $10 for the funnest unofficial Parade of Lost Souls afterparty ever!

(Turn up early and you get to ring in Daisy Jones-Locher’s birthday from 6:30 on!)

Bonus! It was a heck of a show, and here’s a gallery of photos from it! Thanks to Graham Ballantyne for snapping the shutter again…