Tribute to the Standells Founder

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…