The Standells - Dirty Water

I'm Gonna Tell You a Big, Fat Story, Baby

For Scott

1. My friend Scott is from Lynn, Massachusetts which is 26 minutes up State Route 107 from Boston. The abolitionist Frederick Douglass lived there from 1841 to 1848. Social Distortion frontman Mike Ness was born there (I love me some Social D). It’s hometown to dozens of professional baseball and hockey players who made their living in Boston proper. They even have their own suggestive rhyme:

   Lynn, Lynn, city of sin

   You never come out the way you came in

   You ask for water, but they give you gin

   The girls say no, yet they always give in.

   Scotty had been pestering me for the better part of a decade to attend the Fourth of July celebration in Boston with him. We met at the Defense Information School and the friendship formed fast. You see, if you’re Scott’s people he immediately pulls you into his orbit. I need people like Scott in my life because I’m a natural introvert, and Scott works hard to bridge the gaps in geography and lifestyle. The time was right in 2013, so I caught the train to Boston and plunged headlong into the cradle of American liberty.

2. New England is America’s attic: it’s where all the most interesting shit is. It’s also home to the largest Fourth of July celebration in the nation. Other cities do okay. Philly is good. NYC too. Boston parties on the Fourth like Keith Moon partied in the ‘70s. Keeping that Tea Party alive. For generations, people have lined up and camped alongside the Charles River waiting for the morning of the Fourth when they rush the field at the Hatch Memorial Shell, where the Boston Pops Orchestra holds court, to get their first-come, first-served spot on the grass. Scott showed me all the things, both of us being history nerds - the Freedom Trail, the Old North Church, Fenway, Boston Commons, Bunker Hill, the USS Constitution… We stopped for a coffee late at night and stepped outside to sip our Dunkin. He pointed across the street to Ben Franklin’s birthplace and we had to laugh. It’s currently a printer’s office, which feels so right. Only in Boston can one casually stumble upon a Founding Father’s birthplace. We returned to his squad’s campsite near the Hatch Shell. This Red, White, and Blue Crew had been camping out regularly for the Fourth of July for generations. There are grandkids and grandnieces and nephews who camp out now respecting the tradition. The Red, White, and Blue Crew have been front and center for the Boston Pops for DECADES. Scott and I lined up to storm the field because we’re not gonna let tradition die on OUR watch. We did our duty and took the field, front and center.

3. This was the Fourth of July just two and a half months after the Boston Marathon bombing. Tensions were high. Healing was necessary. No town rallies like Boston. In all of American history, regardless of the consequences, no town rallies like Beantown be it the Revolutionary War or the American League Championship Series. The experience was genuinely epic. The Massachusetts National Guard fired Howitzer cannons in time with Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture in the pouring rain. I made the Boston Globe and local news reports.

   

   What REALLY excited me, what truly spiked my blood pressure, was that I camped out alongside the Charles River with a good mate, perhaps the best of mates. He didn’t know it, but The Standells’ Dirty Water was a vital piece of my youth. He knows the song because everyone in the entire state of Massachusetts knows that song, but he didn’t realize why I loved and still love that song so much. Sometimes frequency modulation radio connects people through literal space and time with genuine, regularly incredible human beings. Scott is one of those wired-in people connected on the same frequency. He’s an antenna picking up anything in his absurdly broad bandwidth. He picked up me, metaphorically and literally. As a boy, the radio was more instructive than any school teacher I’d had. Dirty Water was an audio road map of things I needed in my life, but age and distance would not allow it at the time. Dirty Water is honking fuzz and bouncing buzz. In those moments, camped out with coffee in my hand, chatting with people who had participated in this delightfully patriotic ritual for dozens of years, I was right there, within arm’s reach of that beautifully dirty water in actuality. It was RIGHT THERE. That alone was worth the trip. The dirty water. Scott made that happen. On that night, with those people, the radio was alive in my ears. Scott was responsible for the freedom I felt, the connectivity I felt to all things proud and joyous, that dirty water, and those fucking mighty cannons.