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.

It’s true! Everyone’s favorite anarchist bookstore Spartacus Books is having a small anniversary party down at 684 E. Hastings, and a small number (possibly very small) of Planks will be down there at 6 to play some pseudo-political music. But you don’t have to wait that long — things kick off with a 10 am pancake breakfast, and there’ll be other entertainment in effect over the course of the day including Katie and the Lichen, Anita Sparrow, and our friends in the Gram Partisans.

Sometimes, the opportunities come so close together there just isn’t time to write them all up! Late the night of Apr 5th, a crew of five Planks , perhaps our biggest yet on the radio (including Dr. Stelhand’s debut on the chacharangi and Ludwicka LePearl’s debut on the beverage dispenser), joined Teddy Smooth and E-Roc (and practically a cast of thousands: Andrea Superstein formerly of the Marmaladies, Ligia Oancea, Jane Stanton, Suzy Shameless and Iona Beerwagon from the Terminal City Rollergirls, and Burgundy Brixx & the Purrfessor of Kitty Nights) to celebrate the 2nd anniversary of CabaRadio over at CiTR.

You can hear us here! Our first song, the Volga Boatmen birthday song, begins at 8:41 (CabaRadio enjoys great production values, and it enjoys them at its leisure), which we follow up with Psycho Killer at 9:40, our Kishka Anthem at 13:34, and Kiddie Closer again for kicks at 17:56.

Memories! Sights to rival the sounds from the CiTR lounge:

In promotion of our fabulous 6-year-anniversary show next Monday night, we’ve hit the airwaves! Last night we joined Teddy Smooth and E-Roc at CaBaRadio again over at CiTR in the UBC student union building, where we played tunes and made strange innuendo late into the night. Always good times. We hadn’t confirmed the engagement with enough advance warning to let potential listeners know, but … in all honesty, how many of you would be tuned in to campus radio after midnight? (More than I expect, hopefully!)

We lifted a page from our friend Ryan Fletcher at CJSF’s Melodies in Mind and as guest troubadors took it upon ourselves to musically interpret some public service announcements the show wanted its listeners to know about, including a very special rendition of a song from the Rocky Horror Picture Show, screening this weekend… well, you’ll get all the info in the recording. Also excitingly present, though you have to wait through the whole recording — a world exclusive sneak peek of some recent studio work we’ve been doing on Phaulonious J Knucklebones’ original songs, thanks to new friends made at the Orange Party! Admittedly this recording isn’t done yet, but it’s more than half-baked … and it’s been a very long time since we were committed to any permanent media in any form. A better representation of us, to be sure!

We managed to mine the Plankian portions of the show from its podcast and serve it up to you here; in the meantime, it’s not too late to catch the black wave of our promotional hype, as we’ll be on the air tonight down in the downtown eastside studios of CFRO Co-Op Radio at Accordion Noir, whose audience we haven’t joined since an Accordion Noir Festival promo appearance back in 2008. Excitingly, we’re hoping to take on the challenge to do our own version of their lovely theme song — and would encourage you to do the same!

In the meantime, here’s a log for our truncated CaBaRadio recording:

• Creaking Planks – Dead Man’s Pants (Al Mader) 3:39-5:54 (2m15)
• Creaking Planks Duo – announcements medley – LIVE! 6:56-10:37 (3m41)
• Creaking Planks Duo – The Girl In The Pink Canoe (Big Rude Jake) – LIVE! 16:14-19.25 (3m11)
• Creaking Planks Duo – Womanizer / Toxic medley (Britney Spears) – LIVE! 22.28-28.28 (6m00)
• Creaking Planks – Kishka Anthem (debut!) 32.06-34.57 (2m49)

We’ve also managed to skip the queue usually involved while waiting for the Accordion Noir folks to post their episodes online as a podcast. It’s here, 12 hours later, and though we don’t have a full track listing (edit: the AN folks do, up at their website, with creative song titling), here’s all the places you can hear four mighty Planks playing their hearts out:

• Creaking Planks Quartet – Accordion Noir theme (Andy Fielding) – LIVE! 0:00-2:32 (2m32)
• Creaking Planks Quartet – Insane in the Membrane (Cypress Hill) – LIVE! 11:07-14:30 (3m23)
• Creaking Planks Quartet – Flatbush Waltz (Andy Statman) – LIVE! 15:03-17:14 (2m13)
• Creaking Planks Quartet – Tanz Tanz Yidelehk – LIVE! 23:47-27:33 (3m46)
• Creaking Planks Quartet – Sometimes All Of The People Aren’t Here All Of The Time – LIVE! 29:39-32:49 (3m10)
• Creaking Planks – Kishka Anthem (studio mix) 33:04-35:53 (2m49)
• Creaking Planks Quartet – Vanha Jatsi Station ID – LIVE! 42:52-43:38 (0m46)
• Creaking Planks Quartet – Psycho Killer (Talking Heads) – LIVE! 44:00-47:41 (3m41)
• Creaking Planks Quartet – the Song of the Count / Bones Bones Bones (Sesame Street) – LIVE! 50:20-56:58 (6m38)

Also eminently worth mentioning — us welching on our word! We were going to take all January off to develop new material for our anniversary show, but we did join the cool cats at Bandidas again for their own anniversary back on Jan 6th. We didn’t promote it since it was their own private party of sorts, but we played the heck out of lots of great songs there. Many happy returns and hope to see you again there next January, Bandidas!

Sunday January 30th, 2005, in the auditorium at the Western Front, a room which has seen so many deliberately stranger things, an accordionist with a performance poetry troupe met an outsider acoustic noise duo with slightly more underground musical sensibilities than the Shaggs had, and knew that their two great tastes must go great together. Enter: the Creaking Planks. Six years later, we skip lightly past the endless living rooms, back yards, and festivals, Vancouver’s introduction to the ZombieWalk, a pirate flashmob, two stage musicals, gigs down the US Pacific seaboard (studded with the abandoned hulks of derelict tour vehicles), and memorable mixed bills — following ’50s squeezebox sex symbol Dick Contino at the 20th annual Cotati Accordion Festival, and opening in turn for free software guru Richard Stallman… our two biggest gigs!

Now we actually know how to play our instruments, and our musical sensibilities have matured from “Can we play this?” to “Should we play this?” In honour of our six years we’re putting to bed many of the songs we’ve kept close this whole time, and celebrating onetime contributors whose paths led them through the rotating roster of Planks before settling for other, less strange projects. We may not match our record of 11 Planks on-stage simultaneously, but we should be able to at least cumulatively meet that high-water mark over the course of the night. Joining us will be musical guiding lights Petunia the yodeling cowboy and Al Mader, the Minimalist Jug Band, whose “I’m a Lousy Lay” were the magic words that got us together in the first place.

It’s also a retirement for Dieter Friesen’s tenure booking his Deet Street nights at the Railway Club, a long association between him and us dating back to our first appearance there in April ‘06 sharing a bill with his band Rick Danko’s Ghost under the auspices of Tamara Nile. In short, we have numerous reasons to be celebrating this night, of things changing more the more they stay the same.

Update! Allan reviewed it, in a roundabout fashion, and an American friend came up from Bellingham to enjoy some great music and take a bunch of pictures capturing the night’s wild and wooly energy!

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!

Attendees of early Creaking Planks shows—say, at the first Vancouver Zombiewalk after-party, where Rowan “Blackbox Squeezebeard” Lipkovits (accordion) and Lee Shoal (ukulele, kazoo) did somewhat halting covers of songs like the Kingston Trio’s “Zombie Jamboree”—could be forgiven for thinking the band a joke. A funny joke, and certainly an in-joke, but not a group you might turn to for the pleasures of polished musicianship, even of the jug-band variety. Well, here’s a surprise: as if to illustrate the truth of the saying that a fool who persists in his folly shall become wise, the Planks have benefited from playing innumerable shows locally and throughout the Pacific Northwest. While still richly swathed in irony, the traditionals on this CD (European and/or Yiddish folkie fare like “Tanz Tanz Yidelekh” and “Moscow Nights” and the absurdly deadpan covers—including a new recording of Lipkovits’s delightful arrangement of the Minimalist Jug Band’s “Dead Man’s Pants”—are, in fact, quite beautifully conceived and credibly played.

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!