Not too many people know about the Last Resort Old Time Tall Grass Prairie Music Festival (LAROTTGPMUF), held every summer right here in Kansas, and in fact, this was the first time I ever went to it, even though I live here. But there was this couple that we used to know in New York City that was on their way to Colorado in a U-Haul truck and even though they had tried pretty hard to figure out how to drive around the good old Sunflower State, in the end they just decided to grit their teeth and come on through. And since there is not that much to do out here, I decided to prove to them that there was music outside of New York City.
So we went out to Last Resort, which is held under the tree at Corps of Engineers State Park, about 500 miles SSW of Popcorn Patch. The audience sits on the grass in the sun. Even though the booking people (Henry Wiggins and his wife) look for groups that nobody else will invite and pay them practically nothing to come out here, they still can't afford shade, and the people take it because it's too much trouble to go anywhere else. You know it takes about nine hours to get out of Kansas, except by tornado.
I will just mention the low points; it can be fairly said about the Last Resort that if there are any high points, it is fairly hard to tell them from the low points.
This year the first up was an Americo-Celtic outfit called "The Weisenheimers." This consisted of two guys and two gals dressed in blue denim and wearing round straw hats; and their thing apparently was, to find tunes nobody ever heard of, maybe so nobody would know if they played them right. I copied down what they played, or at least what they said they played: Napoleon Crossing the Kaw, Humours of North Fork, Robin Working Close to the Lawn Mower, The Builder Who Doesn't Play, Planxty Henry Wiggins, Loch Bally Shallow, and The Fretted Broom.
They had one CD with all those numbers on it, and also were selling home-made soap, of which I bought a bar. It cost four dollars and lasted four minutes, but it smelled pretty good.
Then there was "The Grue and the Bleen," a Disjunctive Bluegrass group, which had an unusual bass player. What he did was the darnest thing you ever saw since Byron Berline hired a drummer. He dug a hole under the tree, stretched a hide over it with a heavy string in the middle, and tied the other end to the tree. As far as I could see it only played one note, but audiences, what do they know.
Third was a guy who played what he called Old Time Radiator, hitting it with ball-pein hammers, and he had a welding torch to tune it with. This would have been the best set at the festival, except that he played for twenty minutes straight Old Time Radiator with not even a guitar back-up and didn't sing.
After that there was a general uprising, where the audience said it was their turn to be under the tree, and let the players be in the sun for a while; but the players demurred on this, saying that they could not perform with the sweat rolling off of them. But the audience won out, and so the rest of the sets were pretty short. But then some of the audience complained that they didn't get their money's worth, since now that they were in the shade, of course, they wanted their pound of flesh.
Anyway then it was time for the contests. This year, due to an unusual shortage of judges even for the Last Resort, they only had the Grass Harmonica Contest, which nobody had entered since Dave Para couldn't make it this year, and the Fretless Banjo Contest, which I, as the only entrant, won hands down. The prize was a Last Resort T-Shirt, which are otherwise unavailable.
Well, the couple from New York City said that I had not proved there is music outside of New York City, and before I could marshal up any deep arguments to the contrary, they had left for Colorado, sneaking away stealthily in the night. After all, they probably said to themselves, it's only another 540 miles.