Garden City, Kan. — There’s no getting around it: Bareback bronc riding is hellaciously tough on the body. This is a sport, after all, that sticks you on a cranky, bucking horse, gives you nothing more than a hand-sized rigging to hang on to, and then dares you to last eight seconds without getting thrown to the ground. It’s no wonder that most bareback riders are used up by the time they hit 30.

But for the brave souls who count themselves as bareback riders, the physical toll is part of the point. “I started out being a bull rider, and bull riders always told me that you had to be tough to be a bareback rider,” says Brady Nichols, an 18-year-old student at Garden City Community College who is studying farm and ranch management. “I thought I was tough.”

Mr. Nichols is one of the stars of the Garden City rodeo team, which competes against two- and four-year institutions…

Read More

Lawrence, Kan.—Here’s the first thing you should do when you walk into a record store: Take a quick glance at the dividers—the little plastic things, I mean, that separate the albums by Wilco from the ones by Lucinda Williams. More than the promotional posters littering the walls or the music blaring over the PA, it’s those dividers that will tell you what you need to know about the place.

Love Garden Sounds—just stroll down Massachusetts Street, the main drag here, and look for the storefront emblazoned with the giant squid straddling the planet Saturn—more than passes the test. At Love Garden the dividers are colorful, hand-scrawled, and littered with names that seem to trace an alternate history of rock music. Stand amid the stacks of LPs, turn to the left, and you might spot The Monks, a bunch of American GI’s in Germany who tonsured themselves and played … well, see…

Read More