The Creaking Planks’ 8th anniversary extravaganza with guests The Myrtle Family Band and The Legion Of Flying Monkeys Horn Orchestra
Doors at 8:30 pm. Cover: $8
For eight years now the jug band of the damned has been celebrated for its consummate deception, pulling out old-timey instruments and using them to improve on the most indispensibly disposable tunes of the 20th century. Steady on, lads! The Creaking Planks bring the sour mash to the mash-up at the down-home hoe-down. Now say that three times fast!
Two fellow acts join us on this august occasion:
Fire-Man puts the wind in the wood, and the fire in that wind. Sculpting an orchestra of demented Dr. Seuss horns wasn’t enough for him; he had to also reproduce — and then exceed! — the sound of what that looks like. Thus, the Legion of Flying Monkeys Horn Orchestra.
The members of the Myrtle Family Band are bound by a tie thicker than blood. Those mysterious Myrtle Sisters boil down a thick, juicy slice of Americana to a potent syrup both sweet and salty, then apply it judiciously.
It’s that special time of the year when our Kishka Anthem makes sense! (from a sausage point of view at least).
The Planks will be celebrating Oktoberfest in not quite Oktober at the Railway Club this coming Thursday, September 27 with chamber squawk trio The End Tree, and well-heeled accordion rock weirdos Fang.
The Railway Club (579 Dunsmuir St., Vancouver)
$8 – 8:30pm
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.
Bonus!
We got to play with Raghu at the show, on his anthemic “theme song”, and here’s proof:
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!
Our good times have been scattered as of late, few and far between but all big, fun times (as in, occasions of large enjoyment.) Some of them have been in unorthodox formats (and for us, that’s saying something), and others have just crept up on us while we were consumed with other details (ask Airbeard about his musical Choose-Your-Own-Adventure, for instance!)
Case in point, we had a lot of fun at the Gastown Tattoo Parlour’s grand opening Sat, May 28 — one of the very, very few kinds of rooms we’d never played before. But you never found out about it until now. Well, do go check them out — even when they don’t host damnable jug bands, their ink is something quite special.
We’re not going to let tonight quite squeak on by — at the Railway Club (579 Dunsmuir, upstairs) from likely 9 on we’ll be opening for another of our new Manitoban friends, Winnipeg’s wholly decently-named F-Holes, delivering a heady mix of gypsy jazz, zippy dixieland, and viper blues. We’ve never played a gig east of BC, but at this rate we’ll never need to — they keep on coming to us!
Now, get your mind out of the gutter — F-holes are the resonating sound holes in stringed instruments, artily summarized in this old Man Ray 1924 print Le Violon d’Ingres:
But we threw together a poster that includes a few more details:
In short, come on down tonight and join us for an evening of getting completely F’d up!
