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!

Please pardon the small bout of time travel — this gig pre-dates (by one day) the most recent one we’ve posted, and there should be another, still earlier one yet coming! A busy week ahead for our intrepid Planks!

In the best Christmas present ever, Blackbox Squeezebeard awoke to a phone call for… “Blackbox Squeezebeard?”, an extraordinary wake-up call informed by the contact info on our press kit page. We have friends in Winnipeg, a good place to have friends, but it wasn’t them who put in a good word for us to our NEW friends in Winnipeg’s country-folk bluegrassy quartet Oh My Darling. (The bird in their ear was someone at the Biltmore — also a good place to have friends — but ah, I digress!)

To make a long story short(er), Thurs March 3rd we’ll continue our spree of appearing at the Railway Club (579 Dunsmuir Street) at more-or-less monthly-by-chance intervals opening for these wonderful winter birds, touring in promotion of their album “Love Shack” — a good place to keep warm and cozy when the drifts get too high on those long, cold prairie winters. Show at 9, $10 at the door! (and save a couple of coins for some of the new Creaking Planks buttons, this season’s outrageous new fashion accessory!

(Now also with Lindsay May!)

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!

Proving that some of their squeezy bills of 2010 were impossible to top, CFRO’s Accordion Noir is proud to present a repeat bill from a show they and us hosted in May, this time at the Railway Club (579 Dunsmuir Street) with the sing-along sensation Fang and Winnipeg’s squeezing siren Ingrid Gatin. Start the year off on a high note and see if we can top it in 2011!

All that plus at midnight we turn over the Railway’s stage to Gold Stars Are For Suckers, who have nothing to do with great accordion music but can still give up a good time. $10 / $8 for Railway members.

The jug band of the damned shows its meagre warm and cuddly festive side as we help to celebrate the launch of the 12th issue of Memewar Magazine. We’re on from 9:30-10:30 pm at the Railway Club, 579 Dunsmuir Street at Seymour (upstairs).

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!

Celebrating the 10th issue of Memewar Magazine (on the theme of “Adaptation”) at the Railway Club (579 Dunsmuir) with the Planks at midnight and other musical acts Wintermitts and MT-40 as well as readings from Neil Rayner and Maria Lénàrt — and the thrilling conclusion to Thor Polukoshko’s multimedia post-modern advertising genre mash-up Cereal Junkies!

Doors at 8:30; $10 admission includes a copy of the magazine.