The Town Pants play & stay in Flagstaff, Arizona. Population: 45,857.
In April of 1998 the Town Pants got an offer to play in Flagstaff Arizona. They wanted us to come fly down for a generous salary, all expenses paid trip and play four nights a week at this bar called "Collin's Irish Pub" for a month. Hmm... Sounded suspicious to me. Play Irish drinking songs in the middle of the Cactus state for 30 days? I'll believe it when I see it.
We didn't have anything major on the plate at the time, so off we figured we'd try our luck and go for it and off we boarded Southwest Airlines flight 304 from Vancouver International and gallivanted down to the Cactus state.
We made a pretty good go of it though, and made quite a few friends and fans, mostly college kids who were attending Northern Arizona University which was about a 3-iron away from the bar... Not to mention all the staff, Steve Holmes our host, and the Collins family as a whole who treated us like kings. (Thanks, boys)
We spent much more than seven drunk nights there I can tell you... Immersed in Americana for a month we ate hamburgers as big as radial tires, took in the Grand Canyon, ran around Red Rock, and shot off some shotguns and hand-guns (a rather embarrassingly nervous first for yours truly).
Some nights during the set breaks I'd go outside and wander around for awhile. At night the weird little desert alpine villa of Flagstaff turns into a strange town. The whole place looks like an out-take from a David Lynch movie. Odd little shops. Lots of strange obscure looking hotels with neon signs... There's a railroad that cuts the town in half and the station was right across the street from where we we were playing, and more than once a show was interrupted by a automobile being hit at the railway crossing by one of the trains. Like I say, strange place.
And some nights during the set breaks I'd drunkenly wander down to those railroad tracks and watch these 130 car trains roll by 20 feet high at full volume.
I could never really tell where they were going, but it was either Albuquerque or Los Angeles. That's basically your choice at the fork in the road of Flagstaff. Sometimes I'd think how easy and how much fun it would be to hop one of these trains and just ride the thing out to wherever it ended. Great thing, gin and tonic.