Standing on a Corner in Winslow, Arizona
by Jane St. Clair

In 1971, Glen Frey was on his way to Arizona’s beautiful and mystical town of Sedona. He was twenty-three years old, seeking love and peace, when his car broke down in Winslow. He was stuck in Winslow for an entire day, hassling with mechanics and waiting for auto parts.

Like everybody else back then, Glen Frey wanted to be on the road. The particular road that everybody wanted was Route 66.

She was America’s great Mother Road, the one you took from Chicago to California, the one with all the crazy tourist traps like the Meteor Crater and motels shaped like teepees. Winslow was the town on Route 66 that marked the beginning of Native American country, and where you stopped before you got to Flagstaff. If you saw the movie “Cars,” Winslow was the model for the town of Radiator Springs.

Most of that long day Frey was just standing on a corner in Winslow, Arizona. The best moment he had, and probably the only good one, happened when a beautiful girl drove by in her flatbed Ford. And my oh my, how they flirted.

Frey never forgot her, and immortalized the moment in the lyrics of the iconic Eagles song, “Take it Easy.”

Part of this brilliant song came out of Frey’s seeing the girl. However, it was Jackson Browne, Frey’s buddy and guitar friend, who wrote the music and other lyrics. Browne had already nailed the epic chords at the beginning of “Take it Easy.” He had already written the lines about seven women. “Four who want to own you and two who want to stone you, and one who wants to be a friend.”  Browne got stuck on that line.

Then Frey gave him the lyric, “Standing on a corner in Winslow Arizona, Such a fine sight to see, It’s a girl my lord in a flatbed Ford, Slowing down to take a look at me.”

The rest is rock and roll legend.

“Take it Easy” was the first cut on the Eagle’s debut album, and their first single. It shot up the charts the summer of 1972, landing in Billboard’s top spot where it stayed Number One for weeks.

It’s still such a great song.

It captures the Zen sense of just letting things unfold even when you think everything’s going wrong. And there’s that awesome line that sticks in your head, the one about, “Don’t the sound of your own wheels drive you crazy.”

About five years after “Take It Easy,” the town of Winslow was in trouble. A great big highway was replacing Route 66. What’s worse, Interstate 40 bypassed Winslow, removing a big source of their jobs and money –tourism.

Winslow’s town-fathers got an idea to save the town. They noticed that hundreds of people were stopping here to find the corner where Frey wrote the lines to “Take it Easy”. How about building a “Standing on the Corner” Park, right in the middle of Winslow? And that’s exactly what happened.

There’s nothing to do in the Standing on a Corner Park. It’s got no swings or seesaws or sandboxes. It’s just about standing on the corner of old Route 66 and Kinsey Street. It’s a place to dream about a beautiful girl in a flatbed Ford.

The town-fathers commissioned a statue of a man with a guitar who looks a little like Jackson Browne. When Frey died in 2016, the town added a statue of him as well.

Today over 100,000 a year people come from all over the world to the Standing on a Corner Park in Winslow, Arizona.

Jackson Browne and the Eagles raised lots of money for charities they loved, like clean energy, Artists for Peace and Justice, and Farm Aid. Yet one of the coolest things they ever did was help the town of Winslow.

To listen to “Take It Easy” by the Eagles, go here.