Two Towns, One Ticket Stub: A Field Guide to Live Music on the High Plains

Fifty miles of I-80 separate Cheyenne and Laramie, and for most of the year they behave like two different music scenes wearing the same license plate. Cheyenne is a capital-city rodeo town that swells to bursting for ten days every July. Laramie is a college town that empties out when the University of Wyoming lets out and refills when it doesn't. If you want to see live music between them this summer, it helps to know which room is which.

Start downtown in Cheyenne at The Lincoln, 1615 Central Avenue, the old movie house that reopened as a proper live-music theatre. It holds a bit over 1,000 with the floor standing-room and balconies seated, and its July calendar is stacked around Frontier Days: rising country songwriter Jackson Dean plays a late show July 17, and Ned LeDoux takes the After Hours slot July 24. It is, at the moment, the most reliably booked room in the two-town market.

A few blocks over, the Cheyenne Civic Center handles the seated, dressed-up end of things — symphony dates, touring package tours, the occasional guitar deity (Joe Bonamassa is billed there Aug 19, just past our window). For beer-garden volume and a patio, Accomplice Beer Company on West 15th does food, house pints and regular music in historic downtown. What you will not find is the Outlaw Saloon; Wyoming's biggest bar closed in December 2025, and we'll get to that sad story later in this archive.

West on the interstate, Laramie's marquee room is the Gryphon Theatre inside the Laramie Plains Civic Center — a restored ~850-seat house that runs a summer music series and books touring roots and Americana acts through the school year. For a pint-glass-and-a-pickup-band night, Coal Creek TAP on East Grand Avenue pairs house beer with food trucks and local players, and the downtown bars around Grand keep the college-town circuit breathing even in August.

Here's why the geography matters: this is a small market that punches far above its population exactly once a year, when Cheyenne Frontier Days drops arena-sized country and rock into a town of 65,000. The rest of the calendar is carried by a handful of committed independent rooms — The Lincoln, the Gryphon, the breweries — doing the unglamorous work of booking a Tuesday. A scene like this lives or dies on whether locals show up for the non-festival nights.

So use this guide as a dare. Catch a stadium name at Frontier Park in July, sure. But also buy a ticket to the $25 late show, the brewery patio set, the Gryphon roots act on a Thursday. That's the scene that's still here in November.

Sources: The Lincoln — Concert Calendar; Cheyenne Civic Center Events; The Gryphon Theatre; Cheyenne Frontier Days