Cheyenne Frontier Days: And So It Begins

Cheyenne Frontier Days, also known as the ‘Daddy of ‘em All,’ is a week-long rodeo/fair/music festival, the biggest rodeo in the country, not that I had heard of it at all before coming to Cheyenne to be an AmeriCorps VISTA and kick some homelessness ass (wait, that came out wrong). Rodeos, like country music, is a very area-specific animal. For most of the country you can't open your car door without hitting a guy wearing a Johnny Cash t-shirt, but wander into certain places and its like country music and rodeos don't even exist. New England, and for the most part Orlando, are both firmly entrenched in these areas. You can find it if you want, but you'd have to actively seek it out. Which I never did. Anyway, it’s held every year during the last full week of July. I got to Cheyenne last year in September, missing it by a month, so I’ve been waiting all year for this thing. I am pleased to say it didn’t disappoint.



I knew my parents and my neighbors Dan and Kim were going to come out during that week anyway, just to see everything. And then in December they announced the country music acts for the week, which included Sugarland. For those of you keeping score at home, my dad and Kim looooove Sugarland. Like a fat kid loves Sonic. Like Joanie loves Chachi. Like this kid loves coloring.

Old meme is old. I know. I still love this picture.

But my point stands! Sugarland at Cheyenne Frontier Days! I believe the text conversation between me and my father went like this:

ME: Just found out Sugarland is going to play at CFD!
DAD: Why haven’t you gotten tickets yet?
ME: They don’t go on sale for another two weeks.
DAD: Stop making excuses. You’re out of the family.

Don’t worry. ‘You’re out of the family’ is just how we saw ‘I love you.’

At the same time I found out Alan Jackson would be playing the next night, and who’s going to turn down Alan Jackson tickets? Okay, unfair question, because I can think of two definite people right off the top of my head who would and another who might. If you don’t like country music – and believe me, as much as I sometimes love country music, other times I just want to punch the whole industry in its collective head (I’ll explain later) – anyway, if you don’t like country music, than having to listen to it even for a few minutes can be a horrible, grating experience, leaving you with a desperate need to find a spoon to dig out your ear drums.

But if you do like country music? You're not saying ‘no’ to Alan Jackson, is my point. So when I got the tickets for everyone for Sugarland we also got seats to Alan Jackson. Two nights, two concerts. Not bad.

And then my boss decided that we should go, as a group, to the Brooks & Dunn concert the previous weekend. Sure, why the hell not? I know ‘My Maria’ and ‘Boot Scootin’ Boogie’ and they’ve been saying that they plan on breaking up after this tour, so let’s do that. Two weekends, three concerts. All right.

Four months later I’m at work, ringing out a customer, making pleasant conversation as I am wont to do when forced to, when I hear snippets of an advertisement on the radio: “Miranda…Bentley…Frontier…July…on sale…” Immediately this customer goes from ‘friendly and a pleasure to serve’ to ‘pain my ass who needs to leave nownownow.’ As soon as he did I hurdled the counter and fell in front of my computer. And my suspicions were correct! Miranda Lambert and Dierks Bentley were going to play a show together the night before Sugarland and tickets were on sale now and what do you mean I can’t close the store to go to the ticket office I’ll be back in like half an hour God stop being so unreasonable.
Four concerts. Eight days. I CAN DO THIS.

I want to put this here because they played it before every concert. Obviously, with Warren Air Force Base being on the west side of the city, the oldest continuously active military installation within the Air Force and I believe only one of two installations left in the country with active missiles (actual only-half-joking request from my dad when I moved out here: "If anything starts happening or launching out of the base, you call us right away.") the city is very respectful and loving of all of the country's armed personnel, and they are willing to beat the shit out of anyone who says anything remotely negative about them. So, before every concert, after the local radio stations stopped making fools of themselves with the Party Zone (the local name for SRO) crowd, they played this video while actual military personnel came out on stage and saluted the crowd. Y'all, The Beatles didn't get the kind of wild reception these people would get every night. And for good reason. No matter the opinion on what the military is doing, its not on these guys, they're just above-average guys with a penchant for shooting shit serving their country.



The quotes in there are from General George Patton. When they played this before Alan Jackson the woman sitting in front of me got this hilarious WTF look on her face, which was surprising until I found out she was from Ohio. No one in the Wild West is going to blink twice at someone mentioning straight murdering the enemy.

Brooks & Dunn
Rodeo
Miranda Lambert and Dierks Bentley
Danny Gokey and Sugarland
Parade!
Josh Turner and Alan Jackson