30 Years of Tailgates

January 8, 2020
man with a guitar in front of a giant yellow W
Dan Brain (Photo by Mike Brain)

Under an overcast sky with sprinkles of rain, the University of Wyoming Cowboys took to the field at War Memorial Stadium on the last day of August. The Cowboys were launching their season with an ultimately victorious face-off with Missouri.

Dan Brain—perhaps better known to some as Danno from Wyo—was launching his 30th year of playing Cowboy tailgates. No stranger to Hawaiian shirts, the local musician offers up both his own Jimmy Buffet-inspired originals and well-known Wyoming classics such as “Ragtime Cowboy Joe.”

“We don’t make a lot of money playing tailgates, never have,” Danno says. “But that’s not the point. The point is we do it because it’s a lot of fun.”

Following his brother Mike (J.D. ’83) to Laramie in the early ’80s, Danno enrolled at UW in 1985. As a nontraditional student in the College of Business—then called the College of Commerce and Industry—Danno took classes in entrepreneurship and eventually earned a bachelor’s in marketing.

But it was his extracurricular interests that would make him a facet of UW Cowboys culture for the next three decades.

Danno played his first ever gig in UW’s Gardens during his senior year. The talent he demonstrated there got him a bar gig, which got him another bar gig.

“It just kind of spiraled from there,” he says.

In the following fall semester, he was invited to play before a UW Cowboys game, and he started working tailgate performances into a packed schedule that sometimes involved upward of 170 gigs a year. At the same time, Danno was buying property around Laramie and moving into the real estate business. He worked under other brokers for eight years before opening his own company, Gem City Real Estate, which is celebrating its 13th anniversary this year.

As the real estate business grew, the hectic touring schedule took a back seat, but Danno never stopped playing Cowboys tailgates. He plays as many home games as he can each year and particularly enjoys the home opener, Homecoming and conference games—especially those against Colorado State University.

His third and most recent album of original songs is called “Just For Fun,” and that title captures Danno’s philosophy pretty well. But playing the tailgates and energizing fans with his infectious good humor is also a way for him to give back to the institution that shaped his life.

During his university days, Danno did not know he wanted to be an independent real estate broker, but the education and mentorship he found at UW prepared him for it nonetheless. His loyalty is on display every time he takes to the stage in the Indoor Practice Facility.

“We’ve had some really poor teams, we’ve also had some fun teams and some good teams—but every tailgate I have ever played, I predict a Wyoming win,” he says. “I don’t care if it’s when Texas came here, when Nebraska came here, I don’t care. I predict a win and I predict a score at every game.”

Danno says there’s no reason to stop anytime soon.

 

 

Contact Us

Institutional Communications
Bureau of Mines Building, Room 137
Laramie, WY 82071
Phone: (307) 766-2929
Email: cbaldwin@uwyo.edu


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