The Creaking Planks
THE JUG BAND OF THE DAMNED!

The Creaking Planks are a well-heeled crew of folk music misfits, scouring the wide world of music for songs we can bring close and make our own, regardless of source, genre or era. We haven’t much original material of our own, but the entire set is quite novel, where you may hear hilarious songs by never-heard-of-thems like Bob Uker and Al Mader the Minimalist Jug Band side by side with well-considered selections from the canonical songbooks of, for instance, Britney Spears, the Talking Heads, Nine Inch Nails and Sesame Street.


We strive to achieve a species of cognitive dissonance through re-interpreting new music in old styles and on old-timey instruments (eg. accordion, ukulele, washtub bass, steel guitar) while peppering the stew with some actual traditional music from the old country to keep you on your toes. Everything new is made old, and everything old is new again.

Members (Currently active)
Blackbox Squeezebeard (accordion, vocals)
Lee Shoal (banjo, ukulele, harmonium, kazoo, bass)
Dr. Steelhand (steel slide guitar, ukulele, percussion, legerdemain)
Phaulonious J Knucklebones (improvised percussion, ironing board)
Johnny Wyoming (fiddle, banjo, vocals)
Cap’n Jack Spareribs (baritone saxophone)
Daisy Jones-Locher (santur, vocals, glockenspiel)
the Rev. Lucian Rumblebucket (washtub bass, percussion, theremin)
Ludwicka lePearl (cello, flute)

In January 2005, two members of “The Creaking Planks”, made their first public performance at Raw and Cooked. On this happy occasion they met the accordion player from “That’s My Brain And You’re Killing It!” and knew immediately that they had found what they needed to perform piratical sea shanties.

In the following year, the trio performed relentlessly, playing such venues as Blim, Video In and The Butchershop (now the “house band” of its successor, the Little Mountain Gallery) as well as numerous open mics, parks and parties, klezmerizing the BBQ Pit at the 2005 Vancouver Fringe Festival, terrorizing the 2005 Vancouver ZombieWalk afterparty, and touring to Portland three consecutive Columbus Days, destroying two cars playing very few, if any, sea shanties.


In the summer of 2006 the tides shifted and the musical core adjusted, permitting the more wholesale incorporation of contributions by occasional collaborators and other new (old) sounds, expanding the ensemble to nine (with no theoretical upper limit).


Today the Creaking Planks strap on forgotten and dismissed instruments of simpler times, preemptively gathering the tunes and jingles of today from the ashbins of tomorrow and re-presenting them in a novel anachronistic setting and style.

Drawing on numerous and disparate naive, folk and outsider musical traditions, the common thread running through the performers in this ensemble is that individually, none of them belong in a contemporary musical context – while together, their sum suggests nothing stranger than the iPod of 1906.


Keep yr eyes open for more demented nautical circus orchestration from this versatile crew o’ musical miscreants