“I’m John Waters, and I’m looking for a date – with you.”
And so begin the liner notes for “A Date With John Waters,” a hilarious and uncouth 14-song compilation that skips gaily through songs by Patience & Prudence, and Dean Martin, Ike & Tina Turner and Clarence “Frogman” Henry, Ray Charles and John Prine.
The songs Waters picks are all classic tunes, spanning the decades and genres with the creepy subtlety of the filmmaker’s pencil-thin moustache. But unless you’re a walking music encyclopedia, you won’t understand Waters’ severe curation until you listen to it once or twice – with the liner notes in hand, of course.
“In a way, I’m a curator,” Waters told The Denver Post recently from his Baltimore offices.
So you’re paying $15 for a lovey mixtape made by John Waters – a collection of songs that isn’t afraid to go from the romantic, swelling strings of Earl Grant’s “Imitation of Life” to the minimalist perversion of Mink Stole’s “Sometimes I Wish I Had a Gun.”
Waters is a curator, and his moves here are as intentional and deliberate as his filmmaking choices in “Pink Flamingos,” “Cry-Baby” and “Pecker.” He sets the mood with the sweet “Tonight You Belong to Me,” a Patience & Prudence song made famous in Steve Martin’s “The Jerk.” (Waters also claims in his notes that this was the first record he ever shoplifted.) He moves quickly to the sexually ambiguous “Jet Boy Jet Girl,” by Elton Motello.
The filmmaker is no stranger to making mixtapes. He likes to make them for friends – with accompanying liner notes – but he also considers all of his soundtracks as mixtapes. The angle of Valentine’s Day and “A Date With John Waters” just opened up the possibilities for the cult-film director often dubbed “The Pope of Trash” and “The Sultan of Sleaze.”
“The music here is all about the highs and lows of love and obsession and being hurt,” Waters said with a sly cackle. “And I love Valentine’s Day. I used to send animal hearts to people, from actual butcher shops, in little boxes gaily wrapped.”
One of the many benefits behind this, his second holiday- themed compilation for New Line Records, following a Christmas album, is its shelf life, he said.
“It doesn’t have to be just for Valentine’s Day,” Waters quipped. “You can have a date with John Waters 365 days a year.”
That may be a little much. But this is the kind of CD you will repeatedly come back to. It’s intelligently put together, and it’s not as crass as Waters’ films. The filmmaker is painting his own picture with other people’s paints, and it’s intoxicating to see what he comes up with.
His inclusion of Clarence “Frogman” Henry’s “Ain’t Got No Home” is, at first, a curiosity. Even listening to the classic track, fronted by the R&B vocalist famous for his many singing voices, it’s tough to see what Waters sees in the song – until you read Waters’ notes.
Waters calls the song “the first tri-sexual song ever recorded. … Let’s play sexual roles, just like Clarence ‘Frogman’ Henry does as he sings. You want to be the ‘boy’ this time? You can be the ‘girl’ too just as long as I get to be the ‘frog’ – I’m just kinda kinky that way.”
When asked what this collection’s centerpiece is, Waters doesn’t hesitate in answering.
“Oh, ‘All I Can Do Is Cry,’ by Ike and Tina Turner is just an incredible song,” he said. “She is (outraged), and I’ve never heard an angrier, more fantastic song about being hurt by love than this. This is a melodrama – an opera of R&B pain and revenge.”
And its inclusion here says all you need to know about Waters and his priceless sensibilities.
Pop music critic Ricardo Baca can be reached at 303-954-1394 or rbaca@denverpost.com.
