There’s a song by country singer Trace Adkins, “All Hat, No Cattle,” based on the phrase applied to people who dress the part of a cowboy without having lived the life.
Look out onto the packed dance floor of Western Wednesday, the ascendant monthly live country western band dance party at Moe’s Alley, and see if you can gauge who’s a real cowboy, or which dance partners are in ideological opposition outside that venue. The beauty is, with everyone in that aesthetic uniform, you can’t.
Only the mirror knows that night as they cinch their bolo ties and smooth their poodle skirts if they’re cowboy-cosplaying to the nines, or debuting a secret identity a beach town makes them bury. Either way, they look good, and word is spreading to scenes known for their rich history and contribution to the country sound, like Nashville, Bakersfield or Austin.
“The people are a lot better looking in California,” says Mark Stuart of the Bastard Sons of Johnny Cash, laughing.
He clarifies, saying it isn’t just the genes in our particular tide pool that made him headline these western music and dance shows three times.
“The attention to detail and enthusiasm people bring to dressing up helps bring out the excitement [in the band]. It adds another level of, I don’t know…”
Glamor?
“Glamor, yeah! Their individual style.”
Promoter Lane Cunningham, grown in the Central Valley soils of Turlock, says no one is going to “scoff” if you’ve never roped a steer in the crisp dawn—dress-up is part of the draw that made them sell out their January show and nearly sell out their June one.
“I don’t even reach out to bands anymore,” Cunningham says. “I have to turn bands away. I’ve had 2025 booked since…the beginning of 2025.”
The inimitable WW style is catalogued on their Instagram by photographer Natasha Lozanoff, who also shoots tintypes with Cunningham and Sean Skaife as Midnight Oil Collective, in cavorting dance floor candids and smiling posed shots that call to mind an adult yearbook.
We Santa Cruzans see your cowboy hat and boots and raise you a punk band tee and partially bleached shag cut.
Call it blasphemy or flattery, but Stuart claims Cunningham, together with Moe’s owner Brian Ziel, “managed to take something as hip and cool as the Continental Club [in Austin] and put an even more fun, showy spin on it, curated great music, and made it the event you want to be at.”
WESTERN WEDNESDAY…78 OF THEM
People are pregaming in the REI parking lot when I arrive on May 21. They crowd in their flatbeds or hang out on their hood, crushing Coors in the chimera of a Santa Cruz sunset, the encroaching fog soft-focusing the twinkling light. Building their dancing courage as they wait for the doors to open.
Technically, the show kicks off at 8pm on a Wednesday that floats according to the venue’s busy schedule, but Cunningham tells me the start time is malleable, depending on the lackadaisical arrival of Santa Cruzans, who may not seem like we’re going to show up until we do.
That’s a heart attack for a booker.
“Every time at 7:50 you’re like, ‘oh my gosh, there’s only 20 people here and 15 presale tickets,’” he says. “Then by 8:30, it’s packed.”
I’m waiting for 7:30, when a rotating team of dance coaches take early birds through a breakneck tutorial in two-step, a basic dance routine that goes together with this type of music like bubbles and sarsaparilla.
Tonight, that’s Seth Burgess and Rebecca Tivang. Other nights it could be Peter Lollo and Nicole Sahabian, or Cunningham himself and Lena Pine-Campbell (“Lena n’ Lane” really popped on posters). Burgess tells me he loves the “plug and play” aspect to the lessons, giving newbies just enough know-how to feel competent, then the band starts before the momentum can dissipate and confidence wanes.
On that note, he gives the sharpest two-finger whistle I’ve ever heard to summon all potential two-steppers. Tivang asks everyone to circle up around them.
The name of the game, he says, is “soft knees.” Rather than being too erect and stiff, softening your stance makes your knees the conduit of the music, allowing you to bounce to the beat.
“I’m telling her as Lead with my body where that beat is,” he dictates as he demonstrates. “It doesn’t have to be the beat that the band is on, but…”
The two of them sway in unison sans backing music, which would be impossible to instruct over.
“Oh yeah,” he says.
A titter of nervous laughter erupts, like high schoolers in Sex Ed. Dance centers you in your body, and bodies are vessels, simultaneously erotic and embarrassing. The coaches take this interruption in stride, used to it.
“We keep that pulse the whole time,” he says. “That’s the foundation of our communication together. And if all we do is that, everybody that didn’t take the lesson is going to go, ‘Damn, those people know how to dance.’”
More laughter, punctuated by a slow whoop. Burgess calls for everyone to try this, then pick who’s going to lead and who’s going to follow.
“This is a six-count dance. If you can count to six, you can do it.”
He uses the polar landmarks of the room to direct people’s feet: the stage, the bar.
“Leads are going to start on your left foot, Follows, on your right. We go band…bar…step-step, band…bar. Each of these is a discreet step. Slow…slow…quick-quick.”
The venue resounds with boots scooting and stomping in unison. Watching their footwork I become mesmerized by their footwear, boots of every creed: Blundstones and blunt-tipped; pointed toes or curling up like an elf’s; tan for work, black, white and heeled for dress; flat circumferences and cut V tops; decorated with etchings and stitchings, one with a still life of flowers; weighted with buttons and buckles; sleek as a sports car; purposefully wrinkled like the wizened face of an old rodeo star.
Once opener Lasers Lasers Birmingham starts, the instructors show what they can really do, kicking up their legs, spins and dips galore, eager to utilize floor space before it gets annexed. Moe’s fills up quickly, the early birds embracing the right-on-timers, then the stragglers. Some leap up and down when their hoedown homies arrive, or into their arms. Too many reunions are weddings and funerals—hard to believe this is monthly. The energy is intoxicating.
When the crowd closes in a little too tight and it’s a little like swing moshing, I look for an out. There’s the mezzanine next to the stage, where older and less fleet-of-foot folks can watch the bands. There’s near the bathrooms and merch table, where I’m told some dancers go to enjoy the extra elbow room. I choose the patio.
Jenny Wright, a local children’s dance teacher who knows everything from the Lindy Hop to hip-hop, tells me that after a while you learn “floor craft,” or how not to run into people.
In the modest smoking section I meet Payton Vermeesch, who plays in two of Cunningham’s bands, Lane & the Longbeds, and Ernest Tubb Time Machine. Vermeesch is proud of Santa Cruz’s willingness to embrace this musical genre.
“Even if they’ve never seen a pedal steel [guitar] or a fiddle,” he says, “they’re down to come out.”
After I put in my order at the Taqueria Agave food stand for a fried avocado taco, I meet Rylan Hunt, who says WW is a “generator of energy for the dance community here.”
The more dancers I meet, the more I realize the ecosystem that Western Wednesday supports. They tell me if I really want to dance, I should come to Two-Step Tuesday, or Salsa by the Sea Sundays, or Santa Cruz Swing at the 418 Project.
Cunningham’s Instagram bio is “I’m a member of a country club,” and just by being here once, I feel one two-step closer to belonging.
BIG C, LITTLE c
The question of who is country for is crashing headlong into the current national conversation about who this country is for.
Pop country music star Morgan Wallen recently got tarred and feathered for walking off the final segment on Saturday Night Live, when the cast unites onstage with that week’s host and musical guest for hugs and congrats. Instead, he mounted his private plane and posted to social media “Get me to God’s country,” as if certain parts of America are holy, and certain parts, like coastal cities, ain’t.
This followed the furor over Beyoncé’s Grammy-winning Cowboy Carter, which tapped into Black pain over race records vshillbilly music, when R&B was segregated from country western, undercutting a shared folk music tradition in the American South. Guess who got to be the keepers of the country flame, and who received a pittance of credit for starting the fire long ago?
“The undercurrent of white supremacy in country music is there and I don’t think it does anyone any good to pretend that it’s not,” says Laura Benitez, whose San Francisco band The Heartache is a WW fixture, playing at least twice under original paterfamilias Mischa Gasch’s tenure, and twice after he bequeathed it to Cunningham.
The day we spoke, protests against ICE raids were in full bloom, but she told me that navigating as a progressive Latina singer is a continuum. There’s the ruinous microaggressive racism from people who insist they can’t pronounce her surname, and then there’s dread.
“I don’t know if who’s coming through the door in a cowboy hat is someone who’s going to buy a CD or beat me up,” she said. “I don’t know, and I have never known. My existence has always been a risky thing.”
Cunningham and Ziel make her feel safe, however, a rarity in male promoters and venue owners who are often “gatekeeper-y.”
Ziel, for his part, made sure inclusivity was part of the business model. A day after his daughter’s graduation from UC Santa Barbara, where grads from 33 countries in her Brain Science college proudly grafted their flag onto their caps, he tells me he uses a different Austin club as a paragon than Stuart mentioned: The Mohawk, whose motto is “All Are Welcome.”
Applying that ethos takes elbow grease, which Ziel is happy to do. Promoter Folk Yeah! is sending rock chanteuse Ezra Furman to Moe’s on Aug 6, and he’s accommodating her request that the venue’s bathrooms be made non-gendered. Non-binary outlaw country music comet Jaime Wyatt crashed through in March on a Tuesday, and queer roots musician Adeem the Artist accompanies Dallas’ own Vandoliers, whose lead singer recently went through trans rebirth to become Jenny Rose, on July 5.
Moe’s doesn’t limit booking to gender binaries, or country to Wednesdays.
The venue might be best suited to provide a safe space to get your ya yas out in these fraught times because of the day Ziel and his business partner Lisa Norelli closed the deal with the previous owners: January 6, 2021.
“I’ll never forget,” he said, “our phones kept buzzing while we were trying to sign the paperwork, and we look and see the Capitol’s been stormed.”
They learned how to run a venue when its veterans were learning how to function and stay open during Covid. Everything they built as pestilence infrastructure makes them more coveted today. Ventilation for vulnerable immune systems? Patio expansion? Turns out, Benitez says, those have another benefit.
“Nobody wants to sweat through their shirt,” she said—not the bands, but especially not the crowd. “Learning to dance is a very vulnerable thing. Who wants to humiliate yourself in close proximity to a stranger?”
Along with Moe’s “intimate, friendly size,” she finds the welcoming nature of the dance community another essential ingredient to WW’s delectable “special sauce.”
Bakersfield’s Zane Adamo, whose Soda Crackers have played thrice, says the Santa Cruz setting sells itself. A graduate of CSU Monterey Bay, he has fond memories of the area, but no one’s more excited than his bandmates when they find out he booked WW.
“They’re like, biting my arm off,” he says. “‘Can we go tomorrow?’”
He’s grateful for WW offering a show opportunity in the center of the week, when pickings are slim. The dance halls of Bakersfield, known for its rough and tumble sound to counter Nashville’s sheen, are closing one by one, and historical memory is short.
“Buck Owens, one of the biggest stars of the Bakersfield sound, he and his family worked in the fields with Mexican migrant workers,” Adamo says. When the ecological horror of the Dust Bowl met the economic horror of Wall Street, the people who coalesced in the labor camps made music together “after the day’s work was done.” That’s why you can hear Mexican phrasings, along with Black blues, and German and Czech polkas, in country.
ROOTS RADICALS
A native of Cologne, Germany, Gasch is a living testament to country being for everyone. He had a vision of Western Wednesday after visiting The White Horse in Austin, where two or three live bands played for two hours each and the dance floor was packed from 8 to midnight.
He grew up playing in punk and hardcore bands near Stuttgart, where there weren’t as many Trans-Ams and Ford F150s as Mercedes and Porsches, and Johnny Cash and Hank Williams took a backseat on German radio to Truck Stop, a best-selling band with all the country accoutrements but which sang primarily in German, with songs like “Der wilde, wilde Westen.”
After moving here and starting a honky-tonk band, Miss Lonely Hearts, in 2011, he used his booking agency smarts to wrangle a monthly three-night circuit: Western Wednesday at the Crepe Place; Honky-Tonk Thursday at Overland in Oakland; Outlaw Friday at The Hideaway Bar & Grill in Sacramento, all with one local and one touring band. He did this for two or three years before shifting sole focus to Santa Cruz, employing fun perks to encourage participation and consistent attendance: on-site tintype photos; punch cards netting you free beers and signed band posters; $2 off discount for wearing cowboy boots when that wasn’t a given.
“It was a nice night,” recalls Cunningham about WW’s beginnings. “Plenty of room to dance.”
He went every month, and Gasch passed it on to him after personal commitments persisted. After Bocci’s Cellar removed its bocce courts, he thought there’d be even more room to dance there, and booked a date with their excited management that never happened in February 2020. Five days before, the headliner, Hank & Ella with the Fine Country Band, notified the club that a bandmate had cancer, and didn’t think it wise to play.
Little did Cunningham know when he canceled it, but WW wouldn’t restart until January 19, 2022.
In the meantime, Cunningham met Ziel and Norelli through Summer Ziel, a friend who owns Tomboy vintage, the clothing shop on Soquel Avenue, who were enthusiastic about giving WW a new home at their “new” Moe’s. He admired their sound guy, and decided to work with friends over the Bocci’s team whom he didn’t know as well. This ethos—work with who you know—has served Cunningham well. People warn against going into business with your friends, but when it’s zero profit…
“All the money that we make from the door, I give to the bands.”
Even the gorgeous film Lozanoff shoots on comes out of his own pocket.
“I’d rather the bands get it, especially bands on tour, and they tell their friends’ bands about [WW].”
Ziel gave him the option of having his own company, tasked with ticket sales and promotion, or letting Moe’s handle that internally with staff like Sarah Guidon, who’s designed everything WW in the last year or so, and shaving more off the back end.
“Cool,” he said at the time. “You guys take care of that.”
He wanted to focus on contacting and contracting with bands, because there is a finesse to it. WW requires a certain type of band who: knows country standards, particularly roots; have enough material if they’re the only band to play two sets with an intermission, or be okay with an equal co-headliner payment; keeps banter and self-promotion to a minimum besides merch because monologues are awfully hard to dance to. Keep the music flowing and the dancing constant, even if the tempo might change.
“When I write the setlist for Western Wednesdays it’s two hours of shuffles and straight eights,” Benitez says, beatboxing to differentiate them for me.
“The shuffles are meant for couples dancing,” Adamo says. “A straight beat lets the line dancers know what step is coming next.”
Any complaints from interested parties who want to play WW but not play by those rules, Cunningham politely, and he’s nothing if not polite, tells them to not let the barn doors hit them on the way out.
SWING KIDS
I arrive a bit late to the 1.5 Intermediate Swing class social at the 418 Project the night after Western Wednesday because Cunningham says they’ll be busy filling out consent forms.
He catches me admiring the planetarium-like decorations and the neon light fixtures near the ceiling, framing what is now essentially a ballet mirror.
“They turn on the neon especially for our class,” he says, beaming. Ordinarily it’s prohibitively expensive.
He points out regulars who made a considerable voyage here: from Hollister, over the hill, Monterey. Some of them were at WW last night.
What’s the difference between 1 and 1.5? Other classes are 2 and 3.
“1.5 is more abstract and improvisational than 1,” he says. “It just felt like an extension.”
Outside of this dance hall, Leading and Following can be an existential dilemma. Here, it just means a supplemental distribution of dance moves. Gender is irrelevant.
Lisa Marie Howe, a WW regular who subs for Lozanoff on camera duties when needed, offers to lead and I accept.
“I found partner dancing after the pandemic,” she tells me. “We were all starved for touch and Western Wednesday offered us an opportunity to touch and be touched in safe, supportive, community-building ways.”
The song ends and I offer to lead Shelby Northrup, a recent transplant from San Diego, where she says the swing scene is remarkably small. Seeing familiar faces here and at WW has facilitated her making friends, and the dance community has a group chat where they post cheap or free events.
What does she love most about WW?
“It’s the only time of the month I get to wear cowboy boots.” She laughs. “That’s fun.”
An older woman asks me to dance and is frustrated by my lack of coherent moves, eyeing me incredulously as we jerk around the floor, but she’s nice about it when we part.
“You should come back next week,” she says. “Have you been to Western Wednesday?”
Cunningham learned Western swing from Burgess, and is now so advanced that he teaches, although not tonight. The reason he schedules a free two-step dance lesson after doors open at WW is to pay forward kindness shown him in Louisiana circa 2008, watching Cajun bands with a friend, dancing the only way he knew how: “clogging,” aka “flat-footing,” aka “buck dancing.” It was a solo dance, and everyone in the joint was partner dancing. Two girls approached to recruit them to the cause.
“’Hey, that’s cool, but do you want to learn to two-step?’” they said.
His Turlock twang goes falsetto.
“Heck yeeeah, let’s go.”
You can purchase tickets in advance for Western Wednesdays via moesalley.com. For information on Santa Cruz Swing, visit santacruzswing.com.
Read Mat Weir’s roundup of other country music nights in Santa Cruz
