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Fact #106340

When:

Short story:

The Animals spend the night in Centennial, near Laramie, Wyoming, USA.

Full article:

John Steel (drummer, The Animals] : This wasn't a gig, but it was a memorable night. We flew to a lot of these gigs but this day, our manager Mike decided we'd get hire cars and drive from Cheyenne to Salt Lake City, where we were to play on the 2nd. So on the 1st we stopped near Laramie and Mike found a log cabin, a hunting lodge up in the mountains in a place called Centennial. It was rustic and great, but very comfortable. We'd bought guns in Cheyenne, which you could do with no problem. So we'd bought these .22 guns and a thousand rounds of ammo, and we were going to go into the woods and blaze away at trees and things.

The cabin was pretty remote and isolated so Eric Burdon and I decided we wanted to go down to the village, down to Centennial, where they had a bar and a livery stable. We tried to sneak out without telling the others but Eric reversed the car into a ditch and we had to get them out to help us pull it out.

They all had a good laugh at us, and Eric and I went on down to the bar where we fell into conversation with this guy in the full cowboy gear, the hat and the boots. We told him we'd bought these guns tucked down the back of our belts and he went crazy. "Wear 'em where I can see 'em," he said. What we didn't know was it was OK to carry a gun openly, but it was against the law to carry a concealed weapon.

Anyway we got along famously and he took us out in his pick-up, which had a shotgun clipped on the back, to go jackrabbit shooting in the night. We went zooming down the mountain into the desert, bumping around til he got a jackrabbit in the headlights and then he started blasting away at it with his shotgun. I'm horrified now to think I took part in it, but we were young then. Anyway, we couldn't hit anything with these little .22s. He got stuck in sand and had to winch himself out.

Eventually, about four in the morning, he dumped us back at the cabin with four or five dead rabbits which we left on the porch and went off to bed. The lady who ran the place was horrified the next morning when she found all these dead animals everywhere. Eric and I both came out in a rash, probably from rabbit fleas, and had to get medical treatment to stop us scratching.
(Source : interview with Johnny Black)