“Dirty Water” – The Standells
(Words/music: Ed Cobb, available on Nuggets: Original Artyfacts from the First Psychedelic Era 1965 – 1968, Sire Records 1972)

Before I discovered music, I consumed sports voraciously.  During middle school – those awkward years in the lonely gap between the childhood friends I grew apart from and the teenage friends I was yet to meet – I watched a lot of SportsCenter replays.  I used every opportunity in school to study sports.  I remember carrying an oversized NBA history book in my backpack in sixth grade and writing my eighth grade research paper on the baseball strike.  Even though I lost track of sports for a while in high school (yes, around the same time I started obsessing over music – my in-school reading changed from the 1980s San Francisco 49ers to Sonic Youth’s Confusion is Next biography), I eventually came back around in a more moderate way.  I still have a few moments where music and sports cross paths – I remember going to my first game at Yankee Stadium in high school with my Dad and being excited because I could listen to K-ROCK on my walkman on the bus and in the stands.  Even now that the baseball season’s started back up, I’ll find that during commercials of Mets games on TV, I’ll mute the sound and open up iTunes for a couple songs.

While the Mets have a few solid musical connections (Yo La Tengo, Belle and Sebastian’s song about Mike Piazza, and even Piazza’s affinity for metal), the Boston Red Sox have music woven into the Fenway Park experience.  First, there’s Neil Diamond’s “Sweet Caroline” that leads the Sox fans to sing out the “bah bah bah” part in unison (a tradition that the Mets woefully tried to steal).  There’s also the Dropkick Murphys’ “Tessie,” referencing a song that fans of the Boston Americans (later the Red Sox) sang while rooting for their team in 1903.   The Dropkick Murphys wrote the new “Tessie” in 2004 – the same year the Sox made their improbable playoff comeback.

The most interesting of the Fenway music selection, at least to me, is the garage rock classic “Dirty Water,” a song by the Standells.  I don’t know the history of the Standells’ song being played at Red Sox games (let me know in the comments if you do), but I’d like to think someone upstairs at Fenway spins the Nuggets box set of “lost” 60s rock gems.  Aside from it’s obvious lyrical content (“Boston, you’re my home” probably earned this song its place in the Red Sox’s postgame playlist), “Dirty Water” plays as an archetype for the garage rock genre.  The song contains two key elements – the slow moving riff that snakes its way into our brains, and vocalist Dick Dodd’s charismatic performance.  Sure, he’s a little over-the-top, but with such a simple foundation, Dodd has the space to steal the spotlight.  This is the part that many of garage rock’s revivalists missed – most can replicate the straightforward riffs and the aesthetic feel, but too many mistook the idiosyncratic vocals by Dodd and others to mean that they don’t need to sing.  Even if Dodd goes a bit too far (and if the song topped three minutes, I’m not sure I’d let it continue), he deserves credit for charming his way into Boston’s hearts (even though the band was from Los Angeles). As a song for a specific moment (I’m going up to Fenway for a game tonight), “Dirty Water” serves its purpose and lets the crowd revel in the team’s victory.

More on The Standells: Allmusic | Amazon MP3 | Emusic | Last.fm