Tractors’ Singer Not Rich, But He’S Got A Nice Truck

Four years, a hit single, 2.7 million album sales and a world tour later, Steve Ripley of The Tractors says he is broke again but reports that he’s better off than the first time.

Instead of the Ford Escort with the busted window and the 120,000-mile odometer that he was driving when he and his fellow Oklahoma musicians made their first Tractors album in 1994, the 49-year-old lead singer-songwriter-guitarist-producer now drives a newer vehicle, has just seen the release of the third Tractors album and is projecting plans for two more as well as another tour.

“I have no riches, but I’m driving a nice pickup truck, and I fill up both tanks and stick it on my credit card,” he reflects. “I hadn’t had a credit card in forever. So that little change of life was good for all of us.”

Despite having had a bona fide hit and a 1995 Country Music Association Video of the Year in the zany single “Baby Likes to Rock It,” Ripley again faces financial challenge, and a primary reason is that the new Tractors CD, “Farmers In a Changing World,” has taken two years to finish.

Paradoxically, Tractors music is the most spontaneous-sounding stuff around. A quartet vocal mixture of boogie, swing, R&B and country, it is primarily instigated by Ripley, whose pre-Tractors credits include work with Bob Dylan, Leon Russell and J.J. Cale.

His partners - keyboardist, fellow producer and bass singer Walt Richmond, multi-string virtuoso and harmony vocalist Ron Getman, bassist and harmony vocalist Casey Van Beek and drummer Jamie Oldaker - are similarly experienced, having worked with performers as diverse as Eric Clapton, Bonnie Raitt and Ronnie Dunn.

The predominant Tractors “sound,” which includes studio happenings before the songs formally begin, is up tempo and gashed deeply with groove, a good-time romp waxing joyous while offering lyrics that are realistic and sometimes even broodingly blue-collar. A new song called the “Poor Boy Shuffle” contains the lines:

“Banker got the money/Farmer put it in the ground/Banker goin’ uptown/Farmer goin’ down.”

Yet it’s fun stuff, especially alongside such other corkers as “The Elvis Thing,” “I Wouldn’t Tell You No Lie,” “Linda Lou,” and the current single, a Tractor reincarnation of “Shortenin’ Bread,” which Ripley describes as “ultimate roots music,” deriving from “back before everybody”: the cotton fields.

With his 50th birthday coming up Jan. 1, 2000, Ripley says he is hoping to have another all-new Tractors album out around then - despite other plans to tour the group again this year for the first time since ‘95 and to record a “live” album early in the tour.