100 Greatest Songs of the 60’s #99 The Standells – Dirty Water

Released: 1965

These days you can be almost anywhere in the world at the push of a button, walking through it virtually and if you want to, leaving a one star review of a restaurant you never went to. But for The Standells their tale of an unvisited far off place – in this case Boston, roughly three thousand miles from their California home – turned out to be one of slowest burning travelogues in music history.

Formed in 1962 and led by Larry Tamblyn, the quartet made fleeting contributions to mid decade kitsch by appearing on episodes of The Munsters and The Bing Crosby show, before signing up to work with producer Ed Cobb. Here the plot thickened; Cobb had supposedly been mugged in Massachusetts, and the experience inspired him to write a song about it, with the band throwing in the odd reference based on their limited stash of knowledge, including an aesthetically of it’s time nod to Albert DeSalvo, the city’s infamous strangler.

Dirty Water was the result, a pounding garage rock stomp based around the simplest of riffs, a classic of the form before the term was even created. As things do, the song then faded into obscurity until being picked up on an expanded reissue of Lenny Kaye’s Nuggets in 1998; having already been adopted by the Boston Bruins as a victory anthem, that year it also then shifted sports to Fenway Park, where it’s been doing the same for the Red Sox baseball team ever since.

Back in 1965 you had to use your imagination to describe what someplace was like that you’d never been to. Dirty Water however is proof that giving something one star can still ultimately turn into gold for everyone concerned.