Captain Tractor sails into classic rock waters
The lingering question of why on Earth an Edmonton band would channel sea-faring hootenannies 700 miles from the nearest ocean has a simple answer.
“I’m probably mostly to blame for a lot of it,” admits Scott Peters, a charter member of Captain Tractor who was “born and raised” in Nova Scotia. He came to Edmonton with his family at the age of 13 (in Dartmouth long enough to have formed his psyche) and has been “pining for the fjords” ever since. Well, “sometimes,” he says. Then he got into the Pogues – and that was it. In Edmonton, the singer-mandolinist fell in with a gang of theatre types who played drinking songs for fun – or maybe it was the other way around – and Captain Tractor set sail in 1993!
The band is celebrating their 25th anniversary this weekend with a pair of gigs at the Station on Jasper, Friday and Saturday. They’re marking the occasion with the release of a double retrospective album called 25 Years On, on both vinyl and CD, that features four new recordings, including two new originals. The title track is particularly wistful: “I tried to stay, but I had to roam. Now it’s 25 years on, will I find my home?” Short answer: Yes.
There will also be a limited edition “Captain Tractor Spiced Rye Whiskey” by Hansen Distillery that Peters says “tastes like Christmas.” They already had a beer, Alley Kat’s “Captain Tractor’s Yellowhead Wheat Ale” released in 2005. They’ve made 10 albums (including the latest) and toured around the world – making them one of the most successful Edmonton bands of all time.
Truth be told: Success was a fluke, as often happens in the music business.
“It was a fun thing,” Peters says. “We’d all been in serious bands and made serious music, and this was a different thing we were doing to have some fun.”
Ironically, the Captain Tractor song that made the earliest and greatest impact on fans isn’t even their own: The Last Saskatchewan Pirate by the comedy troupe the Arrogant Worms. It’s like an anthem (one province removed) for this landlocked Celtic-pop band. Fans demand to hear it to this day, at least in North America. No one disputes it’s a silly song: “And it’s a heave ho! Hi ho! Coming down the plains, stealing wheat and barley and all the other grains. And it’s a ho! Hey! Hi! Hey! Farmers bar your doors when you see the Jolly Roger on Regina’s mighty shores!”
This may be one those cases where a hit is so big it becomes a de facto and particularly difficult member of the band – so sometimes you have to put it in its place. “That song took on a life of its own, for good or bad, and that’s great,” Peters says. “But yeah, it’s a song by a comedy troupe. When we played Europe we didn’t have to play Last Saskatchewan Pirate because the Europeans had never heard of it.”
This needs some explaining. This all started with a band called Leona Brausen’s Boyfriend’s Band in the early 1990s. Brausen was and remains a fixture of the Edmonton theatre community (award winning actor, costume designer and artistic associate of Teatro La Quindicina). Her boyfriend at the time was James Morrissey, who (as advertised) played in Leona Brausen’s Boyfriend’s Band. While he never boarded Captain Tractor proper, he wrote three of the songs on their first album. Other associates of the early Tractor include Wes Borg and Joe Bird of Three Dead Trolls in a Baggie, who didn’t write The Last Saskatchewan Pirate, though it fit their style perfectly. (They did write the satirical Toronto Song, which everyone thinks was written by the Arrogant Worms, which is actually from Toronto. So you can understand the confusion.)
When a band becomes old enough to qualify for nomination to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, one has to note the former members – not quite enough here to merit one of these timelines in the Encyclopedia of Rock. “Ours would be a stub,” Peters says. “We only have three former members.”
One is the colourful co-frontman Brock Skywalker (the last name was chosen as he and his then-wife’s married name), who at a gig in Montreal quit in the middle of the show, leaving the stage with the immortal words, “Fuck this!” The band “hastened a break,” Peters says. “Of course we made up,” and finished the gig. To be fair, he recalls that singer-guitarist Chris Wynters did the same thing in Edmonton once – “I imagine alcohol has a lot to do with it,” Peters explains. Again they made up and were back together by the end of the night. The rule in bands as with marriage: never go to bed mad.
Brock would leave the band under more amicable circumstances just before the North of the Yellowhead album (and the beer) came out in 2005. Bassist Jeff Smook had departed eight years before. Last but not least and first to leave was singer Aimee Hill, who now runs a PR company and works for Six Shooter Records, producers of the Interstellar Rodeo, as does Wynters. The newest band members include accordionsmith Jason Kodie (friend of the Trolls), singer-fiddler Shannon Johnson of the local folk legends The McDades, and Jon Nordstrom on bass. Jules Mounteer remains as the founding drummer. All nine former and current members of Captain Tractor will be on stage this weekend – and you can bet they’re going to have to do The Last Saskatchewan Pirate. Quite the crew we have here, eh?
So you could say Captain Tractor started as a novelty, a joke – but according to the laws of the Irony Event Horizon, the longer a “joke” goes on, the less of a joke it becomes until not even comedy can escape its intense gravitational pull. And then voila! It’s real. From the beer-for-fun sea shanties of their youth, Captain Tractor indeed got serious and became professional full-time recording artists and road warriors from 1995-2005, give or take – which always takes its toll. And while they took breaks for family since, they never broke up.
Peters says, “Because we stopped doing it so hard is probably the reason we’re still friends and still together and still playing music together and still enjoying it 25 years later.”
He goes on, “As for the status of the band now, I liken it to family dinners. When we get together to do a show or record something, it’s just hanging out with friends.”
