Garrick Rawlings

Once upon a time, not long after I moved to the mile-high mountain town of Prescott, Arizona, in the middle of a snowy winter, I noticed little groups of either women or men huddled up out in front of random homes in random neighborhoods smoking cigarettes in the freezing cold while I drove home from random gigs in the middle of the night. In the daytime I would see more than a few official-looking corporate passenger vans with their official corporate logos transporting non-corporate looking folks around town, I wasn’t hip.

Turns out, at the time, Prescott was unofficially known as having the highest per-capita rate of rehab homes and facilities in the nation, both private and corporate. Along with a desirable geographic locale, the larger draw was that the town was almost completely unregulated. Homeowners would literally wake up one morning, without any warning, to find the house next door or across the street full of recovering addicts legit or not, with a gang out front havin’ a smoke morning, noon and night. It got so bad they’ve since cleaned it up quite a bit.

I kept hearing my friend Marc O’Dell playing and singing the first verse he wrote, I asked him if he minded if I took a crack at flushing it out, and he was cool. So it’s half a “oorah” song in tribute to the honest hard working folks grinding it out for the good, and the other half is a protest calling out the inhumane greed of the folks who victimized helpless innocents, along with those duplicitous “solid citizen” enablers who profited while looking the other way for so long … and hopefully the other ‘half’ is a lot of fun!