Tomorrow is the home opener for the Red Sox, and Lansdowne Street will be filled with the smell of sausages. Wally will be greeting fans and, hopefully, that song that rings in every win at Fenway will be blaring: “Dirty Water” by The Standells.
The riff that gets the crowd to its feet was not intended to be an anthem or an ode to someone’s hometown. In fact, “Dirty Water” got its start thousands of miles away from Boston. It all begins in Los Angeles in the early 1960s with a guy named Larry Tamblyn, the founder and original lead singer of The Standells.
Tamblyn formed the group right around when the Beatles were British-invading, and he and his bandmates wanted to do something a bit different. Their sound was less crisp, a sound that’s now referred to as garage rock or pre-punk. And The Standells were starting to get fairly popular, but not “Beatles popular.” So in 1965, the band decided to team up with a new producer, Ed Cobb, who brought them a new song: “Dirty Water.”
It started with a riff. But then, Tamblyn said, their drummer Dick Dodd started ad-libbing lyrics.
“Dick invented some of the lyrics like, ‘I’m going to tell you a story, it’s all about my town. I’m going to tell you a big fat story. It’s all about my town,’” Tamblyn said.
The group was singing about Boston. But nobody in the band had ever been to the city.
“That’s true. None of us had been to Boston. You know, we get this all the time on the internet. ‘They weren’t from Boston, so they shouldn’t be so popular.’ It’s just sour grapes, I guess,” Tamblyn said.
The band started to toss out references to everything they knew about Boston at the time. Mostly bad things — like the Boston Strangler — and, of course, the Charles River, which at the time was famously polluted. The titular “Dirty Water.”
When it was released, the song got some play — mostly in Orlando, of all places — but for the most part, it kind of just faded away. To find out how a goofy track about Boston from a bunch of guys from Los Angeles that got popular in Florida became what it is today, this journalist turned to someone who literally wrote the book on “Dirty Water”: Bill Nowlin.
Nowlin says, to see how this song became a Boston anthem, music historians have to fast forward three decades from its release. And at least at first, baseball wasn’t the sport “Dirty Water” was tied to.
“Some time in the middle 1990s, it started being played at Boston Bruins games when they won the game,” he said.
Nowlin says the production company that did the music for TD Garden also ended up getting hired by the Red Sox. The timing was perfect: It was first played on Opening Day in 1998 at Fenway after an improbable come-from-behind win. From that point on, they played it every time there was a Red Sox victory.
The rest is Fenway history — a history that also, of course, includes other songs like “Sweet Caroline,” played in the middle of the eighth inning at every game. And, with “Dirty Water,” there two other songs that complete the trilogy of victory tracks: “Tessie” by the Dropkick Murphys and “Joy to the World” by Three Dog Night.
"I'm still amazed this day that the song has lasted so long and developed such a following."Larry Tamblyn, founder of The Standells
As for “Dirty Water,” Tamblyn is aware of how wild it is that more than half a century after its release, his band’s song about a city that they had never been to is an anthem. He’s made the trip to Boston a lot of times since, including performing at Fenway with The Standells for the 2004 World Series.
He said playing Fenway is one of the best memories he’ll ever have. And to this day, he still can’t believe how beloved his band’s song is.
“This is all something you know that that grew organically, if you want to call it that — that we had literally no control over, it just grew naturally and it mushroomed into something,” he said.
