Ever Heard of the 307?

Yes, it is true: I grew up in Wyoming. It is a cultural island, that place, a vast, perfectly square island with secrets to be gleaned from beneath dust and tumbleweeds, where arrowheads and dinosaurs jut up from the earth like pirate booty, but little else. In Wyoming, Bell Biv Devoe provoked a great spiritual awakening, and late-night stolen moments with Dave Kendall on MTV’s 120 Minutes were straight-up boarding the fast train to nirvana.
This is not entirely true; dance teachers imported from Denver (tres sophistique!) brought with them exotic and coveted Salt ‘N’ Pepa, Stacey Q, Shanice singles–entire albums by Pebbles! I LOVED PEBBLES. To which they choregraphed in appropriate measures of funk for sixth graders–vigorous, upbeat, nothing too provocative, but still, there were a lot of snakey body rolls so we got away with a moderate amount of gyration. We were like miniature cheerleaders, O.G. Sparkle Motion (no disrespect to Tiny Lucky), dressed in red sequined leotards, hair crimped and sprayed heavily, to imprison the slightest flyaway. We performed at University of Wyoming basketball halftime, rubbed vaseline on our teeth to keep us smiling. Fifteen JonBenet Ramseys in a V formation. (Apologies if that was too morbid. But her photos, with the excess of mascara, the caked-on lipstick cherry red with innocence–we wore it, too.)
I am fully digressing. My parents weren’t music fanatics. The only tape I ever remember my dad owning was Prince’s Purple Rain, which I stole. My mom listened exclusively to old mariachi records. I am not kidding. This seems really cool now, but then it was excruciating if not mortifying; an 11-year-old does NOT want to hear mariachis all the livelong day, especially when her role models (see dance teachers, above) are rather more partial to Taylor Dayne and Nia Peeples, and the occasional rarer dance 12″ like “Theme from S’Express” by S’Express, which, after recalling it and looking it up on allmusic.com, was apparently the gateway to acid house hegemony. Shame on S’Express. To my young performing dance troupe ass, it meant a good beat and probably eight full measures of the Running Man.
Okay this is also not entirely true. The two records I stole from my Mom’s record collection that WERE NOT mariachi records:
1. Linda Ronstadt with the Nelson Riddle Orchestra
2. Harry Belafonte sings the Blues
In about 1991-92, I started doing mailorder–Dischord, Simple Machines, Merge, etc– and would often get letters back: “We don’t get much mail from Wyoming.” No kidding! Nobody gets much mail from Wyoming; the entire state’s population is 500,000 people.
Cheyenne, Wyoming had an excellent public school system, but it was a small town so all we could really figure was how to get out.
I can’t think of it too fondly, that place–where you might imagine that much wide open space would be ripe with possibility, it was isolation; it was stifling. However, there is one thing I truly and dearly love about Wyoming: its propensity for a good Old West Festival. When I lived in Laramie, there were Jubilee Days, but Cheyenne Frontier Days–the last full week in July, every year since God was born or at least since 1897–is the Daddy of ‘Em All. The world’s largest rodeo, the world’s most debauched carnival, the world’s least changed parade (I can still hear the goosey horns of Model-T Fords, driven by midlife crisis men who came from great Pioneer lineage). Pancake Breakfasts (where my violin teacher ditched the Suzuki songbooks and played it like a damned fiddle, where still more midlife crisis Pioneer lineage men flipped griddle cakes and doused chunks of ham in a goo of real maple syrup). (30,000 pancakes, FOR FREE. You cannot beat that.) The “Indian Village,” where Native Americans keep storytelling and dance traditions–tribes unspecified, but it was presumed they came down from the Rez at Ft. Washakie (we are talking about Wyoming; our team in high school: the Central Indians).
There were concerts there, too–the dominant popular music in Cheyenne is radio country hits–and for two years they had lower-tier rock shows, where I saw Night Ranger and Jefferson Starship (just Starship, perhaps). But in the third year, Belinda Carlisle was scheduled to play. Instead, she canceled and PETA protested the rodeo, as it is indeed barbaric and unnecessary to lasso and rope a calf; then again, not much has changed there and I think someone could probably think up a good argument as to why lassoing and roping a calf is a necessary element of Frontier survival.
So I never felt right there, in Wyoming, and never felt that right anywhere for a long time after that. But I saw Willie Nelson. That counts for something.