The Everlasting Cool of my Uncle Larry

A special edition Good Riddance paying tribute to a titan of garage rock and a godfather of punk music.

Hi friends,

It’s Good Riddance Saturday, which means it’s time for our weekly let go. Each week, we say goodbye to a thought we want to release, an object we haven’t been able to part with, an interaction that stung, or anything else that has been weighing on us. Whatever your interpretation of this idea may be, we come together to let go in the comments and support each other in the process.

This week, I said goodbye to my uncle Larry Tamblyn, who died last Friday at the age of 82 after a formidable battle with MDS. My uncle was a founding member of the Standells, the seminal garage rock band formed in the 1960s, known for hits like “Dirty Water.”

Uncle Larry in his home studio.

The Standells’ legacy would go on to inform the punk rock genre that was to come, inspiring the likes of the Ramones, Sex Pistols, the Cramps, and so many others. For my let go this week, I’m saying goodbye to my favorite uncle, who was a feminist at heart and who always supported and loved my work as a writer and an artist. Excerpted below is the piece I wrote for Rolling Stone in tribute to Larry and the incredible legacy he left behind.

I’ll miss my uncle dearly—his curmudgeonly attitude that didn’t suffer fools, his love for my writing and my voice, and his unapologetically progressive values. Love you, Uncle Larry. Rest well.

Remember to share your let gos in the comments below.

The following is an excerpt from “The Everlasting Cool of My Uncle, Garage Rock Trailblazer Larry Tamblyn” by Amber Tamblyn, originally published on RollingStone.com on March 26, 2025. Reprinted with permission.

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The Everlasting Cool Of My Uncle, Garage Rock Trailblazer Larry Tamblyn

The musician, who died last week at 82, founded the Standells and left an unforgettable legacy. He was also by far the coolest member of my family.

I grew up in a bohemian household in Southern California where icons of the literary, film, and music worlds would often converge. On any given evening, there might be a noted author in our living room reading something they’d just written, or a titan of the fine arts drinking whiskey with my parents at the dinner table. These guests were friends of my parents, one of whom is the actor and artist Russ Tamblyn. As a kid, I knew them to be godfather-type figures — Dean Stockwell, Dennis Hopper, and Neil Young among them — whose presence informed my own life as an artist. But out of all the cool people I was fortunate to grow up around, the coolest of the cool was by far my dad’s little brother, my uncle Larry.

Larry Tamblyn was born in Los Angeles in 1943 to performer parents who toured the Orpheum Circuit together in their heyday. Both my father and uncle would go on to follow in their parents’ artistic footsteps in different ways. While my dad became a young movie star of the studio system era, signed under contract to MGM and starring in films such as West Side Story, my uncle Larry became a talented keyboardist who was deeply immersed in the budding underground scene known as garage rock — a precursor to what would eventually be called punk.

In the 1960s, Larry was a founding member of the Standells, who would become one of the most influential garage rock bands in the U.S. The music they made has been cited as a key influence by everyone from the Ramones to the Sex Pistols to present-day musicians like my friends in Yo La Tengo. In 2012, Yo La Tengo performed at my wedding, and asked if my uncle would come on stage to perform a Standells song with them, which he did. This week, I reached out to Yo La Tengo’s lead vocalist, Ira Kaplan, to ask him about any thoughts from that night. Ira told me that getting to play with my uncle that night was “a surreal and special moment” for him and the whole band.

Thanksgiving with Uncle Larry and Aunt Glenda in 2023.

In 1965, the Standells released their most famous song, “Dirty Water,” a mock tribute of sorts to the city of Boston with a hypnotic and memorable guitar riff. It did well on the Billboard charts and catapulted their unruly rock & roll sound into the mainstream. The song became an anthem of the working class and misfits of all kinds, as well as the official victory song of the Boston Red Sox, and it still gets radio play in New England to this day. The Standells even reunited in 2004 to perform at the World Series in Boston, which was the year they won, and I like to think it was the magic of my uncle that had a little something to do with breaking the 86-year-no-win curse. (That, and probably seven shutout innings by Pedro Martinez.)

The Standells also recorded “Sometimes Good Guys Don’t Wear White” (which I can guarantee every guy who ever worked for Vice knows the lyrics to). Over the decades, these songs have been treated with incredible reverence by other artists, something I learned about while discovering punk music myself as a teenager. In the Nineties, while on a road trip with my dad, I asked to play a song for him by my favorite punk band, Minor Threat. As their cover of “Sometimes Good Guys Don’t Wear White” began, my dad laughed. “You know whose song this is?” he asked. “Yeah, Dad, it’s Ian MacKaye,” I said like a little know-it-all who clearly knew nothing. “No,” he smiled. “It’s your uncle’s.”

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The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society were so supportive, financially and otherwise, to my uncle and his whole family as he battled MDS. To learn more about the organization and support their work, visit LLS.org.

The Short and Sweet, April 27 at 1pm ET (virtual): Our next edition of The Short and Sweet, our monthly Zoom gathering for paid subscribers, will take place on Sunday, April 27 from 1pm-2pm ET. April is National Poetry Month, and I’m going to bring in a very special guest to talk to us about craft before leading us in writing the best poem of our lives. Can’t wait to see you there. The Zoom link will be emailed to paid subscribers about thirty minutes before the start of the Zoom.