Steve Mason

Keri:  Okay, so for the record will you say and spell your name for me?

Steve:  Okay, Steve Mason, S-T-E-V-E-M-A-S-O-N.

Keri:  All right, and what is your age, if you don't mind?

Steve: 74.

Keri:  Okay. And how long have you been going to Winfield?

Steve:  52 years – Since the very first Winfield. I started working at the Mossman Company, making guitars in April of ‘72. And I'd been working for about two weeks when we all went to Mountain View, Arkansas for their Bluegrass Festival there. And the idea was to take Bob Redford there and show him a festival. And so, and among other things, they handed me a Mossman guitar and said, "Play this at the festival." So I did that. And we all jumped in and did that festival. And then my focus was certainly on guitar-making. But as the festival [in Arkansas] started coming to a close, we stopped making guitars and we went and we ran fences and built stages and that kind of stuff. We had to put out extra fences to contain the crowd and to make it so people had to go into where they were getting paid. And you know, that paid.

Anyway, and then [in September] we were hanging out at the festival in Winfield and so on and so forth. Then, the next year, it came time to do that. And we were behind enough and in dire enough financial straits at the guitar factory that we couldn't stop and help at the Walnut Valley Festival. And so we weren't much help in Winfield the second year. And the story goes that Stuart [Mossman] sold our share of the festival to Bob Redford for a dollar. The dollar to make the transfer official, you know, that type of thing. So now of course, well, anyway, yeah, so then my contact with the festival every year that I was down there, that I was still working there, we'd do things like give tours of the factory during the festival. And we’d have a booth under the grandstand. Selling guitars and so on. Stuart Mossman generally did that.

Keri:  And he was one of the three founders, is that right?

Steve: Yes.

Keri:  So I don't actually know about the Mossman company. I've read Seth Bates’s book. And you can talk to people over the years. But I've never heard that the Mossman Company was a part owner in the festival.

Steve:  Yeah, yeah. So I've found that pretty much everybody operates on the premise, never let the truth spoil a good story. People at the festival do or in the world, in general.

Keri:  Have you ever missed a single year then?

Steve:  Yes, I'm sure. And I don't remember specific ones that I missed or why. I remember one time my first wife was of teaching in Neodesha, Kansas. She went around the state teaching children's theater to various schools. And she was doing like a month in Neodesha. And so we've drove from Neodesha to Winfield. And we got there like at sundown Saturday and we were [in] Winfield until the wee hours of the night and then drove back to Neodesha the next day.

Keri:  Then have you lived in Kansas for most of your life?

Steve:  No. I was raised in Ann Arbor, Michigan. And two weeks before I moved to Kansas, I couldn't have pointed to it on a map. No idea. And very different cultures. Although most of the guys at the Winfield – the Mossman factory – were displaced Northerners. Stuart Mossman himself was raised in New York and Texas. He had a Texas drawl at New York speed.

Keri:  Oh wow. That would be interesting.

Steve:  Yeah. There were a lot of northern boys. And you know, the Mossman factory kind of had a monastic feel to it. Your whole position in the society of your daily life in Winfield was how good a craftsman you were. And so there was pressure to not screw up everybody down the line from you. It was intense.

It also was a great place to learn the luthier. At the time, my dad was an amateur violin maker and put me in touch with various other prople. When the pro repair person that my dad had been working with died, I took over doing repairs, you know, for that violin shop. And then at the same time that I was doing that, I was working in the hip guitar store in Ann Arbor. And learning, learning luthier from them. And then I started, you know, doing that on weekends and evenings when I was away at college.

And then when I got back from college I started thinking about opening my own luthier shop. I worked with Dan Erwin, who would go around to all the luthier’s conventions. And he was the Socrates of luthier. He didn't know all the answers, but he knew all the questions. Anyway, he talked Stuart Mossman into interviewing with me for a job in Winfield. He just wanted me out of town. Among other things, he was married to an ex-girlfriend of mine. Anyway, so I went down there to Winfield and I got the job in Winfield. And, like I said, I couldn't have pointed to Kansas on a map before I got down here. And I got down here in April of that year. And, you know, Kansas is pretty wonderful in April. Of course, I didn't know about the heat or tornadoes. (laughing)

Keri:  So that festival is what first drew you then to Winfield.

Steve:  Oh yes, absolutely. That and the Mossman guitar company. You know, at that point, there was one book on how to make a guitar. It was about how to make a classical guitar, and, you know, we were making steel string guitars. And so the only way to learn the trade was through an apprenticeship or making pilgrimages to the people who were doing it. And with Mossman being right in the middle of the world, we had a tremendous flow of other luthiers stopping by and trading secrets and so on.

One time, John Grevin – who did a lot of pearl work and you know, fancy decorating guitars – he stopped by our place and he taught us all to engrave. One of the other guys and I just went nuts and we just engraved any metal that was soft enough to engrave. We went nuts, covered things with floral patterns and silly stuff. But yeah, we learned a lot and he learned a lot from us. And that was really the only way to learn it. Today, any question you have, you know, you can go to YouTube and Google and it's like everything else on the internet, 20% of it is not true.

Keri:  Yes, yeah, yeah.

Steve:  But anyway, it's a whole different world now. Back then, it was like a pilgrimage.

Keri:  Yes. Would you say that Winfield at all has become a place that people talk about a feeling like it's a home for them?

Steve:  Sure. Yeah. And I think there's a whole phenomenon of, you know, people, they do the same thing on their week off every year.

Keri:  Yes.

Steve:  Probably as much of that as people go in different places every year. And yeah, you go back to Winfield every year and you'd see all the people that you knew. And, you know, lots of people know me down there and are willing to forgive my flaws. You know what I mean?

Keri:  And yeah, what makes it feel like home to you specifically? What are some things specifically?

Steve: Well, you know, people coming up to me, and knowing my name and clearly having a history with me that I don't remember. Every time you're interacting with the public, you have that – you know a lot of faces and a few names.

Keri:  I was going to ask:  Are there any of the people that you do stuff with the shop that then and when field come to your place?

Steve:  Oh yes and you know, I've got a, we made, we made 5,500 guitars at the Mossman factory, and those guitars are spread around the world at this point. I was the vice president of Mossman and I was also the official repairman at that Mossman. And one of the deals was that everybody who worked on a particular guitar put their initials on the label. Anyway, so at least half of our work is Mossman guitars.

Keri:  And that's at Winfield also?

Steve:  Well, yes, I think that would be true. Yeah, under the grandstand, probably half, but then yeah, we do all different kinds of things.

Keri:  I saw you real busy at your shop there at Walnut Valley. What goes on there? I mean, are there musicians that are out there playing and they need something done?

Steve:  Oh yes.

Keri:  Can you tell me about some project you did?

Steve:  Well, yeah. Anything made out of wood changes shape every time the humidity changes. 

Keri:  So, what musicians’ instruments have you worked on like at Winfield?

Steve:  Oh, Dan Crary was a real big deal. Norman Blake was a real big deal.

Keri:  Where did you stay when you were at Winfield – early on?

Steve:  I just lived in Winfield. And the housing was just amazingly cheap. The first place that I lived, I had a house for $35 a month. Eventually, I bought a house in Winfield for $3,000. There used to be a lot of that in Kansas. And I think there kind of still is. My wife traveled around a lot. Ten years ago, the downtown of Sterling, Kansas was for sale for $35,000.

Keri:  The downtown?

Steve:  The whole downtown.

Keri:  Wow. I don't think I've heard of that. Interesting.

Steve:  Well, and then, you know, in Lawrence, housing prices are much more comparable to the rest of the country. And then, of course, nothing is comparable to California. But anyway, so Lawrence has always been, people moving in from Kansas to Lawrence. They can't believe how high the prices are. And people moving into Lawrence from the coast and so on can't believe how low the prices are.

Keri:  So, I want to hear some about your performing. Do you perform? Did you perform at Winfield?

Steve:  You know, let's see. I've won the New Songs Showcase four times. Part of winning is you perform with that song. Then, of course, in the jam sessions and that type of stuff. And we actually were underwritten to play at school in Winfield, during the festival. And there was another thing. Once, as a welcoming thing, they put bands and like all of the restaurants and such in Winfield, the Friday before it.

Keri:  Did you do that?

Steve:  Yeah. We did. We were in the Sonic. And it was fun.

Keri:  What was that like? Describe it.

Steve:  Oh, people were amazed to pull into the Sonic and see bluegrass music going on there. And it was a lot of fun. People were all real nice. But yeah, actually being a booked act at Winfield – we've never done that.

Keri: Did you used to do that at Sonic a lot of?

Steve:  Oh, yes. And all the time that I was working at the factory, I was also playing country music four or five nights a week, in bars. And there were five clubs right in that area that paid for country music. There were four bands, so every place you were playing, you always had the odd man out, you know, offering you more money to switch and so on and so forth.        

For a long time, there were two of us in the Packer band that were so poor that the Packer band was a big chunk of our income. And then Sam Brownback closed the Kansas Arts Commission because he - you know - in his mind, he equated the arts commission with, you know, Mapplethorpe and "Piss Christ" photo by Andres Serrano and all that kind of art. Also, whenever we performed outside of Kansas, we were underwritten by the Mid-America Art Alliance.

But you had to be submitted to them by your state organization and so they were a little pissier than they needed to be. They were like trying to get back at Brownback for it, and we were caught in the middle of it. It was awful. It's a whole lot nicer playing for grant money than playing for what you're actually worth. And the grant money is not what you're actually worth.

Keri:  Who would you say is part of your community there? You know when you're in Winfield, do you have sort of a family there?

Steve: No, but, you know, my generation, we were all about guitars. And, you know, men especially. Everybody knew what kind of guitar Eric Clapton was playing, and all of that kind of stuff. That's always a topic of conversation and, you know, people come to my booth and mostly they're wanting to talk about their Mossman [guitar], and they want me to look at it and see if it needs an adjustment yet, which they always do.

This year, for the first time, I didn't do any repairs myself. The repairs have been coming in more slowly recently, and what we do is the other repairmen get half of the repair charge, and I get the other half. And so, I wanted them to be doing the work, and then I was checking people in and consulting and all that kind of stuff, while they were doing the actual work.

Keri:  Right. So, now your role, more than being a performer, is really the instrument - the art of making the instrument.

Steve:  Absolutely. And, I think it needs to be said about Winfield that it's a participants' festival. Probably because of the national championships, and so on, people come there to jam. Maybe 70 percent of the people there came to jam in the parking lots, and around the campfires, and so on. If 70 percent of those people bring their guitar, pretty much 50 percent of those guitars need adjustment. We didn't do as many repairs this year as last year, and last year was pretty spectacularly lower than the year before that, so who knows what's going on there. But, certainly, a thing would be that any "going home" to the festival that has taken place, well . . . you've got the old generation dying off or not going anymore.

Keri: Tell me what that feels like from your side.

Steve:  Yeah, people who have been running the festival all those years, they've been dying off. In any organization like that, you get key people, and the people who are doing way more than they should. They get old and die. Like Bob and Kendra Redford are both now dead. And Stuart Mossman is dead. Yeah, that happens to all organizations. And the ones that can't develop a strategy for moving in a new generation, they're done.

Keri:  Do you think Winfield has that strategy?

Steve:  Boy, you look around and there's certainly a new generation. Rick Ferris, the mandolin player and a banjo player are like 16 and 18. And there's something about kids having time to practice, whereas adults don't. And so, child prodigies and music are ubiquitous everywhere and they're kind of scary.

Keri:  Do you feel at all that, with this new generation coming in, the kind of the collective feel of the place or of the experience is any different?

Steve:  It's certainly changed. And one thing that I remember from the old days was that two hot pickers would meet out on the Pecan Grove. They'd just meet out in the middle of the road and start jamming. And then other high-quality pickers would join them to jam. And then a crowd would form around them. And then other pickers would come to the back of the crowd and start playing along. And if you came to the back of the crowd and your playing was at the caliber of the guys in the center, the crowd would open up and let you in. But if you weren't good enough to get in, the crowd would just stay closed and let you play outside the circle as long as you wanted to. And there'd be three or four of those, you know, on the Pecan Grove there. And there's always like one good jamming night and the good jamming night would burn everybody out. So, if Friday night was perfect and it was a great jamming night, Saturday night would be less spectacular and vice versa. Because people were so tired. You know, we're talking staying up 'till dawn, playing a musical instrument, maybe twelve hours in a row. It was exhausting. 

But playing too long is a macho thing, macho and facho. Laura Lynn, who's the other fiddler in my band, teaches Italian at KU. And she finishes her class, jumps into her car, drives to Winfield and plays at Carp Camp all night, then jumps into her car and gets back to Lawrence in time for her next class. Then, at the end of that class, she'll drive back to Winfield. And she'll do it essentially without sleep. So, over the years, she's totaled three cars doing that. It's like a mental illness or something. She'll play twelve . . . eighteen hours in a row. People used to do that early on:  They'd stay up 'till dawn.

Keri:  Oh yeah?

Steve:  Yeah. The big jamming is all night. They, jam all night. But it seems less intense now than it used to be. Also, it used to be that every campfire had a separate jam going around. Now, there's a few really big jam sessions, and that's been a change.

Keri:  Do you like that? How do you feel about that changing?

Steve:  The first time that I really loved Winfield was when I had learned three fiddle tunes. (Now, my dad was a violin maker.) At the factory, we'd hurry up and eat lunch and then we'd each grab a guitar and a pick in the setup room. I was a finger picker and not a flat picker, and so I suddenly realized that I could be the best fiddler instead of the worst flat picker because there were no other fiddlers. So, at Christmas time, I went back to Michigan and I came back with one of my dad's violins and started playing the violin. Anyway, when the festival rolled around, I knew three fiddle tunes. And I went from campfire to campfire playing my three fiddle tunes all night long.

Keri:  And I bet they loved it.

Steve:  Sure. It's like a language and, you know, you get together with people who speak your language. And that's like a fiddle jam. In a fiddle jam, my job is to make the fiddlers on the other side engage in the jam and smile. I'd do something that impresses them or throw in a quote or something that makes them look up at me and smile.

Keri:  So you went around to campsites and did the finger picking or played the three fiddle tunes.

Steve:  Right. Right. I'm sure that lots of people did that. You know, at the very beginning of fiddling, you learn a tune - just the notes and the basic melody of the tune. And I had three of those and didn't have any improvisations at a campfire. As soon as I'd done all three of the songs, I was done and just went to the next campground.

Keri:  You were just carrying your violin. What were the songs you have in your memory?

Steve:  Let’s see:  “Soldiers Joy,” “Old Joe Clark,” and something else. Oh, “Cabbage Down,” I think. Just three simple tunes that everybody knows because they're the easiest ones.

Keri:  Yeah. So, you said that's when you first fell in love with Winfield.

Steve:  Yes.

Keri:  Why did you? Was it the nature? Was it the music? The camaraderie?

Steve:  You know, it's that camaraderie that festival is really all about. And there are a whole lot of people down there that don't ever get to a show. There's a lot of people at Carp Camp, for example, that they may pull themselves away from Carp Camp to come and watch two or three special shows in the whole week. But there is that whole kind of bonding thing of sitting and talking to people in this language (of music).

Keri:  Yeah. So it's like you were there and you felt like you were connecting through those three songs.

Steve:  Yeah. The three fiddle tunes then inspired me to keep getting slowly better on the violin. I won the state championship in 2007 and then I got second two years ago.

Keri:  Oh, wow. So you're glad you picked up the fiddle then?

Steve:  Yeah. The fiddle is the best jam session instrument because it's real loud. It's right under your ear. You can always hear what you're doing and you can back off a little bit. And then you can learn a new lick or polish an old lick or whatever. And nobody can hear you because you're playing just loud enough for yourself to hear. Guitars are specifically designed to project forward, so everybody can hear your guitar better than you can. In a big bluegrass jam, the guitar players are breaking strings and getting arthritis because they can't hear themselves. And also, in a jam session, the fiddler needs to get one note right. Three notes define a chord, though, so if guitarists are going to be playing the right chord, they've got to get all three of those notes.

Keri:  Right.

Steve:  When you're noodling around with the basic melody, sometimes you hit a wrong note. What they tell you in jazz is, 'If you hit a wrong note, hit it again. Then it's jazz." Also, wherever you land on the string, you're just a couple of notes from a chord member and you can slide over to the chord member. And it's not a mistake until you stop and look at your hands disgustedly. You just gotta keep moving.

Keri:  I don't know if you experienced anything related to this, but Winfield started in early 70s. And you talk a lot about the kind of the mentality of the people and how much they love the music and the jamming. Was there anything in that time that also had kind of a sociopolitical bent to it - for the people who went to Winfield.

Steve:  That's interesting because, yeah, at that time, half the songs that I wrote were political. At that time, your draft status had a huge impact on your life. I lost my student deferment and got thrown into the lottery. My lottery number was 139, and they called up to 125 that year. And then, you know, I was free and clear. But yeah, if I had to go to Vietnam, I would be a completely different person.

Keri:  Yeah. And so you would write some songs about that kind of stuff?

Steve: Protest songs and that type of stuff.

Keri:  Was that common at Winfield?

Steve:  Yes. It was common and accepted. And my daughter - now this was well into the 90s, I think - she wrote a parody of the song "If I Only Had a Brain" from The Wizard of Oz and she wrote it about Bush, Jr. It was very clever and it was a good song. There used to be like a comedy camp where they had a little stage. Well, it started out being just a jam session. It was the comedy jam and you'd stand in a circle and kind of wait your turn and then sing a funny song. Then they actually put a stage there and you'd sign up for a time. There were some people in the audience that were clearly pissed about that song. And I had never experienced that at Winfield before, probably just because I had political blinders on. I thought that everybody agreed with me.

Keri:  In political views? What would you say yours were?

Steve:  Oh, you know, I was a hippie liberal. And, you know, I was at the big student mobilization March on Washington. We went from University of Michigan in a big bus with no heat, and it was very cold. We were going up there from Kansas and we didn't understand that it was a lot colder in Washington than it was in Kansas. So we were poorly prepared. Our basic function was to escort people out of the front line because they'd get in the front line and pick fights with the cops and that type of stuff. We were supposed to surround them and give them the peace sign and so on.

Keri:  Did you see any of that play out at Winfield?

Steve:  None of that. Today, you run into the opposition everywhere and you're called upon to argue your side everywhere. Thinking back on it, Kansas was a very conservative state and I don't remember any testy discussions even with the Kansans that we interacted with.

Keri:  At Winfield?

Steve:  Yeah.

Keri:  Really? Okay. So, everybody there was just kind of . . .

Steve:  Do you know about the "Spring Thing?" Bluegrass is a very specific style of music, and there are traditional bluegrass festivals where people do the music of maybe eight or ten bands. And there are ten founding bands and nothing else. You would never, at a bluegrass festival, hear a bluegrass band covering a rock song. It was maybe 50 to 100 different tunes that everybody knew. When you'd call something a bluegrass festival (which they called Winfield), a chunk of your audience would see something innovative and they would say, "That's not bluegrass." So, after a few years, Redford tried something called the "Spring Thing." And it was the stuff that we'd call bluegrass now, which almost any acoustic music can be called bluegrass. So, the "Spring Thing" was a rock festival. And a girl had apparently overdosed on something or was having a bad acid trip or something and they kept announcing her description and trying to get anybody that knew her to come in and get her taken care of. And, you know, there were drugs and it was a full deal 70s rock festival.

Keri:  And that was in Winfield?

Steve:  Yeah, that was in the same place, but in the spring season instead. And the idea was that, you know, bluegrass was expanding musically. They were putting on a rock and roll show and it was very exciting. It was very loud, flashy virtuosity. And they could have killed on any rock and roll stage in the country, but they were all famous in bluegrass and were all going over to rock.

Anyway, musically, it was a wonderful thing. And the music of that year's "Spring Thing" got integrated into the next fall's festival. There was a lot of it - the rock influence. People would be down in front of the stage screaming. So anyway, Bob Redford just hated it. He was just going nuts, and his attitude towards the Spring Thing was: "Never again!" He was even leaning towards stopping the whole festival. It was just happy hippies skinny dipping in the river and, you know, it was a rock festival. And that's not what he was about. He was very conservative and so that's when they started checking for drugs and alcohol coming into the festival. That started after the "Spring Thing" because they wanted no

part of that stuff.

Keri:  They were very conservative with what they'd allow in the festival, or do you mean even politically?

Steve:  Well, I presume politically. Yeah. Bob was an insurance salesman and he did this festival in his spare time. I had to be at work at seven o'clock in the morning, and Bob would always want to meet me for breakfast on one project or another. Breakfast before seven o'clock in the morning wasn't for me at all. But, he was one of those guys that needed only three hours of sleep a night and he was just working hard all the time. I remember him in his orange jumpsuit and he was dumping the trash cans at the Winfield Festival. He had a tractor that would pick him up and dump into the bin. He was a janitor over the Winfield Festival and he was just a hard-working and focused guy. Quite different. It's eclectic – Winfield is.

There is a lot of great stuff down there. I think the jamming is not as spectacular as it was. But yeah, it's hard to get a big overview of it, especially when my life at Winfield is that my booth opens at 10 in the morning. And then they lock the doors at nine o'clock at night and I go and grab some dinner and then go to fiddle fest at 10 o'clock. And fiddle fest is a bunch of Missouri style fiddlers that don't know that they're Missouri style fiddlers, but they don't realize that there's other parts of fiddling other than Missouri style. And Missouri style is more melodic. In Missouri style, you can hear the chord changes coming a mile away because there's a melody that takes you there. And you know where the melody is going to go. And there's a certain type of fun to playing a tune you've never heard before and figuring it out as you go. But, when everybody is playing a tune that they've played for years and they have lots of licks they can use and so on and so forth, that's when it gets really fun for me. I've gotten fine at learning new tunes, but you can't beat that: Playing a simple tune that everybody knows.