The return of Garrick Rawlings
Garrick Rawlings plays in support of K. Phillips Thursday night at Saint Rocke. Photo courtesy Garrick Rawlings
by Whitney Youngs
Back in the 1970s, signals of rock radio stations never made made the airwaves in the small town of Sturgis, Michigan, where guitarist and singer Garrick Rawlings grew up.
Rawlings, instead, was exposed to rock music in a rather unconventional way.
“My favorite uncle, George, flipped cars,” Rawlings said. “He had a massive amount of cassette tapes that people left behind in those cars and I listened to them. So, I picked up a lot of music from these tapes. Aerosmith, Led Zeppelin, The Who, the Rolling Stones.”
Rawlings began playing as a teenager. He bought his first guitar in high school. With Chicago about two hours away by car, Rawlings and his mother visited the Windy City to experience elements of art and culture inaccessible in his hometown.
“She was afraid I was going to be a country bumpkin,” Rawlings said.
The isolation of Sturgis — which is located halfway between Chicago and Detroit — prompted Rawlings to leave the state upon graduation from Western Michigan University. Rawlings, like countless other college graduates from small Midwestern towns, made his way to Chicago for life in the big city.
“I did the whole corporate thing, played in bands as a hard rock guitar player,” Rawlings recalls.
It was a couple years later, in the early ‘90s, when Rawlings visited a friend from high school who had relocated to Hermosa Beach.
“I went out there and it turned into one of those crashed on the couch and never left stories,” Rawlings recalled. “When I moved to Hermosa Beach, all the locals said, ‘You should have been here in the ‘80s, you should have been here in the ‘70s,’ and 10 years later I was saying the same thing. It was still a surfer, punk rock town with cheap rent back then.”
Rawlings spent the next 19 years in Hermosa Beach, continuing to sing and play guitar, and often visited his great aunt in Prescott, Arizona to escape Los Angeles.
“When I finally got burnt out on L.A., I moved to Prescott, where I’ve lived for six years,” adds Rawlings.
Rawlings will return to Hermosa Beach tonight to perform a set at Saint Rocke, as the opening act to K. Phillips.
“My show’s generally a mix of originals and covers,” explains Rawlings. “I do covers that are generally not known in the mainstream. I love Townes Van Zandt, Guy Clark, Dave Alvin, John Prine, Neil Young, Johnny Cash. It’s Americana, sung from the heart, and you never see the same show twice.”
Garrick Rawlings plays at 8 p.m., September 15, at Saint Rocke, 142 Pacific Coast Highway, Hermosa Beach, (310) 372-0035. www.saintrocke.com. ER