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Photo Marcia Resnick
John Waters beckons from the cover of “A Date with John Waters.”
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Photo Greg Gorman
The ever-smooth John Waters wants you to know that nobody knows more about the perfect date than he does. |
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Dirty dancing with John Waters
Valentine CD is naughty, nice and full of surprise
By Sue Harrison
Banner Staff
One thing you can always count on with filmmaker John Waters is the unexpected, and his latest love offering, a CD for Valentine’s Day, delivers plenty of that.
His CD, “A Date with John Waters” on New Line Records, is a combination of the teen angst music of the ’60s along with lounge-y love ballads, rhythm and blues and a liberal sprinkling of cuts that defy categorization. It is both eclectic and electric on a lot of levels with everything from Dean Martin and Ray Charles to Ike and Tina Turner blended with punk rock and movie themes.
Setting the stage is something a filmmaker is always doing and music is a big part of creating and holding a mood.
“I’ve done mixed soundtracks for all my movies, “Pink Flamingos,” “Hairspray,” “Cry-Baby,” “Serial Mom,” “Pecker,” “A Dirty Shame,” he says by phone from Baltimore. “In a way, the [songs on this CD] are soundtracks to my life. That’s the difference. This is what would happen if you came home with me. ‘Let’s listen to some music!’”
Waters had a big collection of albums and 45s as a teen and revealed his emerging showman side then but not with soundtracks.
“More like being a DJ,” he says. “I had a top 10 board over my bed and once a week or so I would call the record stores in Baltimore and pretend I was the radio station and ask them what sold the most and average them out and put the top 10 up with a blank piece of cardboard over each title, pull off the cardboard and say, ‘Number 10 is…’ and name the record and dance around the room. I was really obsessed by it.”
As a grown-up he gets to pick out a new 14-track hit list of his very own date favorites. They had to be good, hot and rare to make the cut.
A sultry but vulnerable Waters gazes out from the cover, and the liner notes are in the form of him chatting with a date, beginning as they come in the door with the first song beginning to play and ending the next morning with breezy talk over breakfast.
He kicks it off with Patience and Prudence’s “Tonight You Belong to Me,” perhaps a fitting way to welcome a date for the evening. On the liner notes he confesses that this was the first 45 he ever stole. (“So stolen, so pure, so good, of course I can be bad too,” he purrs in the notes.)
Now those free 45s cost him plenty. He pays up to $25,000 each to use them on his soundtracks. But sometimes getting the rights for movie use or inclusion on a CD isn’t straightforward.
“I work with Tracy McKnight, a music supervisor who is basically a detective,” he says. “You have to find not the musician but who owns the publishing rights and who wrote the song. Make two separate deals. A lot of these songs, most of them, were not hits in the first place. Sometimes the writer and publisher don’t even like each other because they weren’t hits. I have to find them again and open up an old wound.”
After the first song ends, the CD continues with the provocative “Jet Boy Jet Girl.” It has a big Provincetown connection, he says, and launches into a story about local clubs.
“Every summer I ask, why are there no mixed bars, half gay half straight [in Provincetown],” he says. “I’m most comfortable with that. I like it when you don’t know what everybody is. Provincetown used to have that. I remember every summer, in the beginning, would be the Back Room [formerly part of The Crown & Anchor] and the A-House. One would be straight and one would be gay. You didn’t know, it just happened that first night. For a while the Back Room had a club once a week which [Waters’ movie regulars] Cookie Mueller and Sharon Nesp were the hosts of. It was kind of a punk rock gay club or mixed club which was unheard of at the time. ‘Jet Boy Jet Girl’ was played over and over. It’s the only song that got me a warning on the CD. I mean compared to ‘Johnny Are You Queer.’ This one says, I’m gonna penetrate, make you a girl . There aren’t very many gay punk rock songs — this may be the only one.”
“In Spite of Ourselves” reminds him of Baltimore, and Edith Massey [another Waters film star] does an amazing “Big Girls Don’t Cry.”
“None of these songs are campy,” he says. “That means they are so bad they are good. To me the best song on album is ‘All I Can Do Is Cry’ by Ike and Tina Turner. Most people have never heard of this song. It’s Tina at her most outraged. Sitting in the back of a church while Ike marries somebody else. What a great video that would have made. It’s about the ultimate thing especially when he comes up and says ‘Tina, Tina my darling can’t we be friends,’ which is the worst thing to say to somebody when you break up.”
He saves special praise for the final cut, “Bewildered” by Shirley and Lee.
“Her voice is so amazing. Thank god she didn’t take a Sudafed that day. She has major sinus trouble but that’s why it sounds so great. She was the first singer to have that nasal voice. Then a whole genre of women singers who sounded like they were holding their nose, like [in] ‘A Thousand Stars in the Sky’ and certainly ‘Angel Baby’ was a big one. But Shirley was the template for the nasal ballad. I’m a big fan. On my last album I had the Chipmunks. I like when people talk too fast or like they have a cold. Musically it’s pleasing to me. I always like extremes.”
Everyone he contacted said yes, except Phil Specter for “He’s Sure the Boy I Love.”
“I assume he has things that are more pressing in his life like a murder trial,” Waters says. “I think in a way he might have thought I wanted it because of that but it wasn’t at all”
He offers some quirky love advice, too.
“I used to give men I liked a little chicken heart in a little box. Didn’t the queen in ‘Snow White’ do that? Didn’t she give somebody a heart in a box? I thought it looked good. I got the idea from that Walt Disney movie. I would tell you, if you have a crush on somebody who has a sense of humor give them an animal heart. … I think it’s an innocent nice present.”
He’s doing a CD tour and says he just finished shooting for a Court TV series.
“I’m the star of a show called ‘Til Death Do Us Part.’ It comes out in March. It’s based on true crimes where the bride and groom murder one another, but it’s done with a script and actors. It opens every week with their wedding. I’m always at their wedding. I play the groom reaper.”
Sure, being a big time filmmaker and personality extraordinaire is difficult at times, but mostly it’s all been good for Waters.
“I do have a fun life,” he says. “I have stress but I’ve had a good life. Certainly in Provincetown I’m always in a good mood. I wrote my whole new movie there this summer. It’s a great place to write.”
And when summer rolls around, he’ll be back.
“I’m the ultimate summer person. I arrive Memorial Day and leave Labor Day.”
artseditor@provincetownbanner.com
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In the Arts
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Feb 8th, 2007