For a season, from mid-December to mid-April, we temporarily lost control of our domain name (in fact, it switched off while I was in the middle of composing a promotional draft here!) and information about the Planks was unavailable from this site. We still played lots of great shows, however, and this is just an attempt to keep the historical record in order. Just because nothing turned up on the website didn’t mean that we weren’t busy little buccaneers!

2009-12-26 – the Maclean’s Boxing Day party in Deep Cove.
2010-01-06 – at Bandidas’ anniversary party.

2010-01-12 – Blackbox Squeezebeard on Melodies in Mind.
2010-01-14 – at Trees Organic Coffee.
2010-01-15 – featured at Beats on Broadway.

2010-01-16 – at One Two One Studios‘ launch.

2010-01-22 – A Night of Pleasing Squeezing with Renee de la Prade and Amber Lee Baker (the Accordion Babes), Gerry O’Brien, and Jack Garton of Maria in the Shower at Cafe Montmartre.

2010-02-26 – Dollhouse Tea Party.

2010-02-28 – Another Night of Pleasing Squeezing with Jeff Andrew, Marie-Josee Houle, Jason Webley at the LMG.

2010-03-28 – with Convertible Kids at the LMG.

2010-04-08 – with Raghu Lokanathan trio at the LMG.

2010-04-15 – Can You Hear Me Now? F*Word fundraiser at the Railway Club.

2010-04-21 – at Ubuntu LoCo at the HD Lab.

We’ve enjoyed a couple of shows since that we’ve mostly been able to keep you abreast about here, and are on the verge of splitting for the summer (one more — set aside noon, June 13th!), but before we go we can tie some Plankian threads together with a Go-Your-Own-Waste presentation of the Music Waste festival featuring frequent CP collaborators Erin Graves and Ehren Salazar with bonafide Plank Eryn Holbrook (aka Daisy Jones-Locher of the santur) and marvelous improv outsider weirdo Aaron Read at the traditional Plank venue of the Little Mountain Gallery (195 E. 26th at Main). This Friday, June 4th! Only $5, and free for festival passholders! 8 pm ’til we’re done! The most homophonic bill of the year: Erin, Ehren, Eryn and Aaron in Err On: the Side of Caution. It’ll be a slice. (Actually, imagine a pizza divided into four slices, all of which are different flavours, and at least one slice of which isn’t even pizza… but maybe apple pie.)

The morning of the Cabaret of Wonders! we awoke to strange and marvelous news: the recording which we had debuted last June had garnered a positive review in Vancouver’s free weekly arts paper of record, the Georgia Straight!

That night, at the gobsmacking Cabaret of Wonders!, we sold our last two remaining copies of the suddenly-in-demand disc. Perhaps a reprinting will be in order — though we may have seen the last of the limited-edition stylish metal containers.

But enough resting on our laurels! Moving on from past glories, an increasingly rump Planks (blasted summer travels — and I’m up next!) will be wigglin’ and groovin’ tonight at the Railway Club (579 Dunsmuir Street) from 9:15 on with our Deet Street friends, including the slam poetry of Lara, the “folk/rock/blues stylings of the Dennis Pimm Jamtacular Experience”, and our favorite — a puppet show entitled “The Tragic Tale of Pierrot” presented by Carnival Sized Cinnamon Hearts. $7/5 for Railway members!

Bonus! A doodle from Chloe Ziner of the Mind of a Snail puppet troupe!

The jug band of the damned finally has some copies of its longago-recorded CD (”Flogged Round the Fleet”) together in its swell limited-edition, first-run deluxe packaging edition, and by gum, we aim to seed the entire periphery of the Georgia Strait with them! One gig suggested a circumnavigation and so we’re spending a long long weekend making a round trip to introduce some sleepy island-dwellers to our unique brand of demented traditional music new and old.

• Friday, June 26th, Victoria, Solstice Festival for the Folk
• Saturday, June 27th, TBA
• Sunday, June 28th – an afternoon show at the Duncan Garage Showroom, then an evening show following the B:C:Clettes at Rathtrevor Beach Provincial Park
• Monday, June 29th – an afternoon show at the Gumboot Cafe in Roberts Creek, then an evening show at the Wild Bistro in Gibsons
• Tuesday, June 30th – a return home at Cafe Montmartre in Vancouver

The first stop is a return to the Solstice Cafe (529 Pandora Ave, Victoria), the site of our standing-room-only Island debut last Spring, sandwiched (with David Simard and Free Range, aka Danielle LP, Meg O’mally Iredale, Marly Iredale and Shanti Bremer) in the middle of three smashing nights of splendiferous Festival performances — and just the start of a long weekend of Vancouver Island wanderings for us!

Saturday is necessarily under wraps until we finalise the remaining brass tacks, but keep posted for updates!

Sunday Longevity John squeezes us in to his Duncan Garage Showroom (330 Duncan Street, Duncan) for an afternoon show running 2-4 pm, $10, and I promise we will squeeze back. Later that evening, around 8 pm, we follow the B:C:Clettes, our red and black sistren of the bike dance community, for a third encounter for the benefit of the patrons of the Rathtrevor Beach Provincial Park campground (near Parksville) at the amphitheatre there. Unplugged! Wheels will roll. Helmets will shake!

Monday, we make good on a longstanding threat to descend upon Roberts Creek’s Gumboot Cafe (1057 Roberts Creek Rd), logging an afternoon set there from 4-6 pm, then we mosey along to the Wild Bistro (682 Gibsons Way) in Gibsons to play out the evening from 8-10.

Tuesday night we shake the last of the sand off our saltwater-stained sleeves and take to the Cafe Montmartre (4362 Main Street) stage back in Vancouver to play late into the night (as the following day is a statutory holiday – Canada Day!) and celebrate the 25th wedding anniversary of Blackbox Squeezebeard’s parents.

Sarah MacDougall presided over the “raw & cooked” series of new work at the Western Front that was the Creaking Planks’ first public performance back on January 20th, 2005, so when accordionist Blackbox Squeezebeard (who first met Lee Shoal + Lord Eel that night while promoting the performance poetry cabaret “That’s My Brain… And You’re Killing It!”) somehow got invited to host an alt-country concert she was running in that same space (with her band, the Heroes — a truly heroic Shawn Killaly, Tim Tweedale, Russell Sholberg, Joanna Chapman-Smith, and “Sexy Pierre”) and at that magical time of year, he immediately got on board and brought along as many Plankian stowaways as he could hide under his coat. Also on the bill is AC Fields (once stopped in her tracks dropping off flyers at a CP practice session in the LMS gallery and compelled to sing along) and her Dark Blue Horse (Pierre Lumoncel, Larissa Ardis, Elise Boeur, and Christine Allen), giving the fabulous multimedia (courtesy, presumably, of Aleah Dunfield) cabaret its name. Rounding things off are Roger Dean Young and the Tin Cup, who none of us have ever heard but who we all agree have a most intriguing name.

This show runs the night of Friday, January 25th from 8 pm through midnight at the Western Front (303 E. 8th Ave at Scotia), with Planks shaking things up before, after and between sets, but if you’re not yet convinced ($15? But you get four bands!) you can get a sampling for what the evening has to offer Friday, January 18th at Trees Organic Coffee (450 Granville Street) from 8 pm on (possibly to be broadcast the morning of Monday, January 21st on CJSF 90.1) courtesy of John Pippus as well as by tuning back in to CJSF at 8 pm on Tuesday, January 22nd where the frontmen of the respective ensembles will be playing in a song circle on the Melodies in Mind show.

Originally posted Jan 17th, 2008 @ 17:42

How’d it turn out? Well, we made enough of a splash at Trees to be invited back for a longer set, likely April 11th… but you’ll hear more about that closer to the date. Melodies in Mind was a fun regular hootnanny, with members of all three ensembles jamming together to croon out soulful renditions of… public service announcements. That’s right. As for the main attraction… well, due to delays (ah, cabarets!) there wasn’t quite as much Plank performance as we’d anticipated (apologies to anyone who came out hoping for a big, fat slice of us!) but between the three headliners a full, satisfying concert was nonetheless delivered. Happy third birthday us, and as bonus content here you get the joke I’m contractually obligated to open every Western Front engagement with — Q: What do you get when you cross a mafioso with a performance artist? A: (ahem) Yuz gets sumwun whos makes yuz an offa ya can’t unnastand!