Straight Tequila Night
Vanguard
July 25, 2025
Tulsey Town Two-Step: '90s Country Spectacular
VFW Post 577
July 26, 2025
Before the Twin Towers fell, when “fake news” meant “Marilyn Manson’s ribs,” and the only meme was a dancing baby, pop country was king. No shade to Shaboozey, but I ain’t talkin’ his pop country. I’m talking Garth Brooks eclipsing Michael Jackson as the best-selling U.S. solo artist. I’m talking the white, teal, and purple of the “Jazz” design on Styrofoam cups leaking onto pearl snap color palettes, line dances under neon moons, and Alan Jackson (no relation) choosing grape snow cones in the name of consent on the Chattahoochee.
In a time when what counts as pleasant news is mostly reports of Elon’s bad luck, ‘90s pop country is seeing a resurgence. Those halcyon days when the lights went down in Georgia are peeking into the windows of modern acts like Midland and Lainey Wilson. Even the fashions of the time have found new homes with brands like Vinyl Ranch and Whiskey Riff, and on vintage clothing racks like Buck’s Vintage and, well, The Racks.
The ‘90s country nostalgia-gasm was in full effect last weekend in Tulsa, with two events in two nights devoted to the music of that era. Friday night saw the Vanguard hosting touring Texas ’90s country tribute band Straight Tequila Night. I (Mitch) rocked my boots, sleeveless pearl snap, Wranglers, and cowboy hat (all black, naturally), and my partner Ollie wore a puffy, pastel, prairie-ready blouse with denim shorts and maroon boots preppin’ to step.
We walked into Vanguard in time for a rendition of The Chicks’ “Wide Open Spaces,” and the place was a cattle call of denim, white tees, ballcaps, and beer cans. “I’m getting covert MAGA vibes,” Ollie said. I wouldn’t go quite that far, but it was surely a South Tulsa night downtown. I got different vibes from the crowd: I’m not saying I’m familiar with the stuff, but I just knew I could rustle up some devil’s dandruff in a pinch.
The packed house was transfixed on the band as they tore through ’90s country classics like “The Thunder Rolls,” “Meet in the Middle,” and “Should’ve Been a Cowboy.” The band was excellent, with congenial stage presence and perfect replication of the source material, but the show felt less like a honky-tonk dance night and more like a Coldplay concert where you might get Affair Cam’d. We weren’t quite sure what we expected, but we definitely didn’t expect to be the only couple dancing. Ollie is a country gal from western Oklahoma and takes every opportunity to lead me in a two-step. But after twirling and dipping her to a few more pop country classics, as the crowd stood around screaming every lyric, we packed it up and moseyed elsewhere.
But the next night was Tulsey Town Two-Step’s ’90s country spectacular at the VFW, and baby had her blue jeans (or rather, her leather skirt with a cheetah print blouse and white thigh-highs) on.
From the moment we walked in, it was apparent this night would be different, and incredibly “Tulsa.” The dance floor was full—every inch of hardwood covered with boots, sneakers, and heels shuffling in time, with the overflow bleeding onto the surrounding tile. The crowd was a wide swing on the demographic wheel: teenagers to old-timers, dapper fits to just-got-off-the-Fortnite-server casual. The ethnic background was just as diverse, with far more melanin than the previous evening. There was a tall cowboy in a sleeveless shirt that read, “Trans people existing does nothing negative to your life, you crybaby bitch.” Well … that was my friend Wade, but no one in the diverse crowd batted an eye.
There were line dancing tutorials, with the Fire Marshal-beckoning throng stepping along to ’90s country bops DJ’d by JD McPherson and his wife Mandy. The live acts of the evening delivered on the promised “cavalcade of Tulsa talent,” with appearances by Jacob Tovar, Cassie Latshaw, Johnny Mullenax, and Grammy nominee John Fullbright, who paid tribute to Tulsa ’90s country act The Tractors with a version of “Baby Likes to Rock It.” The floor was humming until the end of the night.
The Texas Two Step, colloquially known as “Two Step,” is a product of America’s hopefully-not-withdrawn melting pot promise. An amalgamation of European and Mexican folk dances, it evolved organically in juke joints and rural bars (as opposed to the square dancing Henry Ford pushed into schools as a nationalist “Anglo” identity play), and achieved “template” status around the early 1980s, with myriad flourishes added since then. That authentic spirit and exchange of energies was present throughout the evening, with all manner of different takes—fast and spinning, slow and swinging, parallel and in unison—manifesting before the Old Glory bunting on the stage.
photos: Devan Fixico
McPherson told me he was blown away by the turnout. “It was my wife Mandy’s idea to do a ’90s country tribute, and it was the biggest event we’ve had yet.”
I asked him why he felt this era of country music is so nostalgic for people.
“I think it was the great songwriting, and the last truly danceable era in country music,” he told me. But he didn’t always feel that way: “I grew up in a small town, was a punk rocker, and I hated this music because it was the music of the people who made my life hell.” But when he and Mandy started compiling their list to DJ at the event, McPherson realized “[I] knew every lyric to every song.”
It wouldn’t surprise me if a lot of Okies share a similar trajectory. I certainly do; I’ve even covered “The Thunder Rolls” in my heavy metal band, Blind Oath. I grew up in Coweta, and these songs were the soundtrack to little league practice and Sonic runs in my dad’s truck. When I became musically aware , Korn and Slipknot were waiting for me. Like all good pre-teens, I suddenly despised my father’s music. Nu-metal gave way to punk rock, then true metal, and extreme metal, and the shackles of my father’s tunes were finally shattered in college.
But in my 20s, something strange happened. Through drunken singalongs at pool halls and in my punk band’s touring van, I realized I knew every lyric to these songs. They’re burned into Okie DNA; they’re a birthright of sorts.
I also think the nostalgia goes deeper. In the ‘90s, Garth Brooks was singing lyrics like “When the last thing we notice is the color of skin, and the first thing we look for is the beauty within,” and cowboy hats and wildly colored Western ware were chic from Wall Street to Rodeo Drive. A child’s only worry was if they brought a big enough Super Soaker to the water gun fight, and the president getting a BJ and Harry fucking Potter were primary concerns for adults. Maybe I’m looking back through the lens of youth, but I remember a spirit of hope, comfort, and commonality that died after the towers fell. The dust had yet to settle when Toby Keith wrote the soundtrack to the beginning of America’s end.
McPherson agrees. “It’s crazy to look back at George W. Bush now, and be like, ‘Damn, he doesn’t even seem that bad by comparison now,’” he said with a cackle. “I mean, he’s painting pictures and seems sorry now?”
photos: Devan Fixico
This longing for a lost innocence isn’t just relegated to my elder millennial age group. August Babcock, Gen Z nephew of Buck’s Vintage owner Mary Beth Babcock, told me this music “makes [me] nostalgic for a time I wasn’t even there for, ya know?” He also rocked a sick vaporwavey ’90s country pearl snap to the VFW showcase.
These days, the country music landscape is varied and peculiar. People debate whether Lil Nas X and Beyoncé are “really country,” while Sturgill Simpson makes anime movies, Orville Peck moonlights on Broadway, and Jason Aldean sings admiringly about sundown towns while forgetting that what made Willie Nelson an outlaw was hating bigots.
The co-opting of “outlaw country” by racists, the paranoid style of American politics, the fact that the world is literally on fire—it’s enough to make one yearn for simpler times. It’s not surprising that we’re craving a little boot-scootin’-boogie-ing, longing to go back to the river on a Friday night with a pyramid of cans in the pale moonlight, looking to a moment when the chorus to “Meet in the Middle” could hold the nation’s airwaves, from the most rural and redneck to the unlikely urban, in a rare spell of harmony.
Straight Tequila Night was an excellent band, and I won’t even dog on them for calling Texas home, but there was something so uniquely “Tulsa” about the Tulsey Town Two-Step that went beyond the terroir of the evening’s talent. There’s long been this sense in Tulsa of “making our own fun,” of kicking against the pricks of exclusion, which comes in part from our not-so-recent past as a weekend ghost town. We had to make our own fun here, as many of us did in the small towns that presaged our arrival in the Big City. You could feel the Tulsa freak factor in that humid room, where we all were briefly back in that sweet time, as one.
