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.
One of my last photos with my uncle Larry and my aunt Glenda, taken at my sister-in-law Wendy Cross’ home during Thanksgiving 2023.
Amber Tamblyn*
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.”
The Standells were the original cool band, informing culture in ways that would go on for generations. They performed in cult classic films like Riot on Sunset Strip, and even appeared in an episode of The Munsters. They may have dressed and looked like the Beatles, but they sounded like something far more far out.
The Standells in a 1966 TV performance, with Larry Tamblyn at right.
ABC Photo Archives/Disney General Entertainment Content/Getty Images
When garage rock gave way to the age of disco, Larry pivoted, refusing to be pigeonholed. He turned his skills as a keyboardist and songwriter toward full orchestrations, teaching himself how to use Pro Tools and other audio engineering software to create his own scores for everything from audiobooks and films, to interesting side hustles (one of them being a song for a comedy sketch written by my husband, David Cross).
Once, during a particularly resistance-fueled punk rock period of my own teenage years, I was sent to stay at my aunt and uncle’s house for a week after some truly heinous behavior on my part. I remember being outraged at being forced to stay there, but also unexpectedly intrigued by my uncle’s music studio: a nest of instruments and gear that would make even the biggest music geek salivate. My uncle showed me his massive keyboard, with buttons and functions for creating whole orchestral symphonies, something more intricate and impressive than anything I’d ever seen. He showed me how it all worked while playing me some of his songs. I like to think that he saw some version of himself and my dad brewing in me at that young age — the lineage of the bad boy of Hollywood’s golden age and the godfather of punk.
As I grew older and came to appreciate him more and more, we connected over more than just music, but over the inherently punk rock topics of politics, resistance, and activism, too. My uncle was a progressive, through and through, and a feminist at heart. During the #MeToo Movement in 2017, I was writing a lot about gender inequality, and abuse and harassment in the workplace, across industries. My uncle Larry was always one of the first people I knew to share anything I wrote on his infamous amongst friends and family Facebook page (if you know, you know) or yell from the rooftops how proud of me he was for using my voice in the ways that I did.
Larry Tamblyn performing with Yo La Tengo at his niece Amber’s 2012 wedding.
Matthew Wignall
My uncle Larry passed away last Friday at the age of 82 after a formidable battle with a rare blood cancer called MDS (which he was able to fight in the way he did in large part due to the support, financially and otherwise, of the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society). When that fight finally came to its end for my uncle, he was surrounded by his six kids and his wife of three decades, the actress Glenda Chism-Tamblyn. “Larry’s love of family, life, and music was boundless; he was a noble warrior til the very end,” Glenda said to me recently. “It was my greatest blessing to be his wife.” Larry was the epitome of punk rock and what it stands for — to fight for yourself and your art and unapologetically make waves doing it — right up until the very end of his life. That’s a legacy to be proud of.
When I called my parents’ house just after my uncle passed away, my dad answered the phone. He sounded unfamiliar, almost childlike. I asked him how he was doing. “I lost my little brother today,” he said to me. “I know. The cool Tamblyn,” I said, trying to make him laugh a little. But it wasn’t a joke. In many ways, it’s the truth; my uncle Larry was the cool one in the family, who had done so much for music and American culture in such a unique and profound way. Both Dad and I know it, and everyone who knew my uncle and loved his music knows it, too.
Amber Tamblyn is a third-generation Angeleno; the author of seven books across genres, including the bestselling novel “Any Man”; the creator of the popular Substack newsletter Listening in the Dark; an Emmy- and Golden Globe-nominated actress; and an award-winning director.
