Merritt Mountain Music Festival folds its tent

This is a dark day if you like country music, especially the Nashville-sanctioned strain. Organizers have announced the cancellation of the Merritt Mountain Music Festival, an event that once attracted concertgoers the way that steer shit draws flies.

Over the course of its nearly two-decade run, the festival, staged in the small town of Merritt, British Columbia, attracted some of the biggest names in country, from icons such as Johnny Cash and Loretta Lynn to upstarts like Keith Urban and Brooks & Dunn.

Around the turn of the millennium, it also became known as one of the best places in the province to catch a venereal disease, as frat boys, sorority girls, and every loogan who’s ever dreamed of starring in a beer commercial started making the festival their favourite summer party destination. It wasn’t known colloquially as Merritt Mountain Fuck Fest for nothing. Trucked-in couches, hot tubs, and refrigerators and all-night parties made the site's Campground C one of the summer concert circuit's most notorious animal shows.

Organizers took steps to reclaim it from the province’s 24-hour-party people in 2007, the festival making a concerted attempt to turn the attention back to country music. Dwindling attendance, however, caused the cancellation of the event in 2010.

The fate of this year’s festival was announced on the MMMF’s website with the following: “It is with deep regret that the management of the Merritt Mountain Music Festival has come to the sad decision to cancel the 2012 edition of Mountainfest. The reason for the cancellation is the low ticket sales. Although ticket sales had shown the promise of a solid attendance number when going on sale back in October of 2011; sales slowed down considerably from then on, and have not rebounded thereafter causing for the organizers to re-think going ahead with the event with a poor turnout.”

So, if you were planning to knock back a fifth of Jack and then get a scorching case of the clap while some redneck sang about his dog dying and his wife running off to fuck the pickup-truck, you’d best start making alternate plans. Here’s a suggestion: find out where Kid Rock is playing.

Follow Mike Usinger on the Tweeter at twitter.com/mikeusinger.