In our last post, we briefly traced the rise and fall of the Four Preps. Here are the boys at the height of their popularity on what may be their best recording.
The first to exit the group was Ed Cobb, the six foot four bass singer. He proved to be more complex, driven, and multifaceted than his tenure with the Preps suggested. As a kid, he had been exposed to gospel in a black Baptist church that he and bandmate Bruce Belland would visit with Belland’s father, a local Hollywood preacher. As time went on, he gravitated to a rougher, more beat-driven sound than the Prep’s repertoire could accommodate. He eventually became a successful producer and sound engineer, with over thirty gold and platinum records under his belt, who worked with acts including Pink Floyd, Steely Dan, and Fleetwood Mac. In her memoir Storms (Chicago Review Press 2007), Carol Ann Harris — the girlfriend of Fleetwood Mac singer Lindsay Buckingham — recalls him as an “imposing figure” in “cowboy boots, blue jeans, and a denim shirt” with “cigar smoke billowing around his head.” He ended his days as one of the country’s top breeders of race horses. But it was as a songwriter in the mid-1960’s that Cobb achieved a dash of immortality.
Today, Cobb is largely remembered as the author of this song by the Standells, which became the unofficial anthem of Boston Red Sox.
Stories have circulated that the inspiration came from a run in Cox had with “muggers and thieves” during a 1965 Four Preps gig in Boston. Given his reticence in discussing the matter and tendency to embellish, the truth of that may never be known. But in their book Love That Dirty Water (Rounder 2006), the best source on Cobb, authors Chuck Burgess and Bill Nowlin provide additional insight.
According to an account that Cobb’s widow “pried out” of him, he wrote the song on what may have been toilet paper while in a hotel room with the winner of an American Legion sponsored “Snow Queen” contest. The beauty queen — like the “frustrated women” in the song — had to be back in her dorm by midnight. (Ironically, one of the Prep’s releases in the Fifties had been entitled “Cinderella”). But to the beauty’s consternation, Cobb insisted on jotting down his idea for a new hit record while their time together was running out. That same year, Mick Jagger was wailing over the airwaves that he couldn’t get satisfaction. Perhaps for Cobb, frustration was more of a female problem.
Cobb wrote another song with an ever broader impact — but one that flew under the radar.
This is the original recording by Gloria Jones of “Tainted Love,” which seemed to go nowhere.
Cobb died of leukemia in Honolulu in 1999. Years later, his widow, Lennie Sorenson-Cobb, campaigned to clean up the Gulf of Mexico after the BP oil spill. For the occasion, she rewrote some of Cobb’s most famous lyrics: “Well, I HATE that dirty water./ Oh, ocean, you’re my home.”
Tainted Love…played on the jukebox roughly 238,876 times in the summer of 1981.
I’m partial to the Marilyn Manson version of Tainted Love.