Captain Tractor marks 25 years of prairie Celtic music
Say the name Captain Tractor and you can almost smell the pitchers of draft vibrating off slick tabletops at pure-party stompers back in the ’90s.
Whether it was at the haunted Horseshoe, Edmonton’s rule-loving Sidetrack or within some random college quad’s embrace of plastic perimeters and too much advertising, this was, especially live, the ultimate no-brainer good-times act: kindly-natured Celtic-infused sorta-punk, draped in local-jersey-style lyrics about familiar places and behaviours, one with their bouncy-castle crowds chugging and singing along to Drunken Sailor.
Anyone was welcome, so long they didn’t mind the odd deafening “sociable!” To quickly understand the band’s overall tone, note their biggest album is named East of Edson, both literary and, well, not. It was our own Prairie bastard child of the Pogues and Great Big Sea, as much an Edmonton institution as slagging Calgary and chasing the dragon of never-again sports championships, which is not to trap Captain Tractor in the past.
But when a local band hits
25, and that sure doesn’t happen often, there is this lifetime achievement/eulogy sort of thing that creeps into the conversation. Captain Tractor is and has been for some time Scott Peters, Chris Wynters, Jules Mounteer, Jon Nordstrom, Jason Kodie and Shannon Johnson. Alumni
include Aimee Hill, Jeff Smook and Brock Skywalker.
All nine will be making music together again for the first time, as the saying goes, during their first proper Canadian tour this millennium.
Wynters, recently 50, looks back at it all with love, awe, good cheer and the easy admission that it was all basically an accident.
Q Take us back to the beginning — you were there.
A There has never been a Captain Tractor show I wasn’t at. Aimee and Scott and a bunch of other theatre people formed this band called Leona Brausen’s Boyfriend’s Band. Julien Arnold — who’s in the Citadel production of A Christmas Carol every year — wrote this song, Pitcairn Island, that ended up as the very first track on our very first record. They started opening with a lot of Irish drinking songs for my band at the time and I watched them and thought, ‘I want to be in that band.’ We realized people were more interested in that band than our actual rock band.
Q Where did the name come from?
A We were doing a Freewill Players fundraiser and we needed a name for the poster. We were a bunch of landlocked Albertans playing music that might be associated with the ocean. I believe there was an evening where we spent a night at the Rosebowl with random words in a hat, but I don’t think it came out of that. We were the Tractor Captains or something like that, and at a Fringe beer tent Neil Grahn from Three Dead Trolls said, ‘You should call it Captain Tractor, like a superhero.’ Six months later we recorded a few songs, and the next thing you know sold a couple thousand copies. And we really wanted a name we could never take seriously. It was about having a party.
Q But you can’t tour and work and write songs unless you take some aspect of it seriously.
A We made this album with Ian Armstrong at Wolf Willow. I was going in like a bomber pilot: let’s get drunk and make a record. But once we got the songs, and once the record came out, we started to take it seriously. I know that when we recorded Celebrity Traffic Jam in 1999, a different sort of album with more of a pop sound, it was harder for people to take us seriously. But I think maybe we’re still here because of the name, because we never could. Hoserista, which we did with Luke Doucet, I love that record, super dark and our fans weren’t into it at all (laughs) — but I’m glad we did it and took that chance artistically. We learned from it and gravitated back towards the songs that are maybe more fun.
Q Personally, what do you think was a peak of this entire experience for you?
A Every time we were in the studio we learned a lot. But I often think, we played our way out of debt. We were really stressed out in 2000, we realized we were a couple hundred grand in debt. We came up with this plan: just pay ourselves $100 each a show no matter what, and we put out a box set. And we paid it all off in a couple years. It doesn’t feel like a really exciting answer, but always figuring our way out was so satisfying. I stuck with my friends, made some great music and came out the other side in the black.
Q And how would you define the peak of the band’s reach?
A We played the Grey Cup, big outdoor events, festivals all over the world. We used to get in a van, play 250 shows in a year. We used to do really well in Portland, we were all thinking about moving there. We’d go from playing Street Scene in San Diego to sleeping in the Target parking lot in Monterrey and then having our own suite at the Embassy Suites hotel. We went from bathrobe gigs to sleeping in the van, night and day. And we used to do Friday, Saturday night at the Horseshoe, sold-out shows, leave the drum kit overnight. Those nights in Toronto, that was success.
Q Are you happy about that era being over?
A We had character-building years, like, the entire time. (Laughs.) We never graduated to a tour bus. I miss it, not having to make any decisions. It was a very simple lifestyle, really: reading lots of books, playing shows every night. We always felt like we were close to the next level.
Q I guess this is just another excuse to hang out with all your friends ...
A When we went into the studio with Nik Kozub and recorded four songs for 25 Years On, it was really hard to schedule between us. But the feeling was also that we should’ve done 10. It was really fun, it’s been a long time. We’ve done this before, but this is the first time we’re heading out again . ... We haven’t played Winnipeg since 1999. We’re playing with the Plaid Tongue Devils again — it’s amazing. It’ll be a bunch of 50-year-olds, just having a great time.