WHAT Festival Fundraiser is an “Eclectic” Preview of Things to Come

A fundraiser for the popular Wyoming-based WHAT Festival is being held in Laramie Friday, June 29th. The fundraiser will feature the bands Whiskey Slaps, Kannibal Korpitz, It Gets Worse, J Shogren & The Shanghalved, and Beatgrass. "It's going to be a very eclectic night of music," says WHAT Festival organizer Carter Parks.

The fundraiser is being held at 7:30 PM at the Gryphon Theatre in the Laramie Plains Civic Center.   Tickets are $10.   Parks goes on to say that money raised from this event, will go on to fund the much larger WHAT Festival in Riverside, Wyoming this summer.

"The WHAT Festival is a two-day free music festival with free music and free camping," says Parks. "This will be the ninth year the WHAT Festival has gone on."

This week's fundraiser will serve as a sort of sneak peek of things to come this summer. Several of the musicians featured on Friday will be joined by over 35 other performers and bands for the WHAT Festival on July 27th and 28th.

Carter says that the festival began outside of Cody where performers were frustrated with a lack of venues in the area, so they decided to take it outside and make it a small festival. Now, the Festival has grown, attracting and estimated 1500 to 2000 people to last year's gathering. The size of the event, among other issues, has also led to the WHAT Festival moving from the Cody area to Riverside, Wyoming, just 80 miles West of Laramie.