John Waters is a loon, always has been. Raised in the “tyranny of good taste,” he was part-Wicked Witch of the West and part-Baltimore suburbia hophead, smoking his weight in pot and submitting to the corruptive powers of homosexuality and drug addiction, which he learned about from all the library books he stole. Being straight and sober, he reckoned, was no way to go through life. As a counselor at a summer camp he read his short story about a family reunion murderer to cabins full of kids.
In the sixties, he knew a Shepherd Pratt Hospital orderly who’d fetch him tabs of LSD, which doctors were using to treat the Baltimore alcoholics. Then he got kicked out of NYU after the campus’ first ever dope bust. The trouble bled into his films: He wrote a scene in Multiple Maniacs where Divine gets raped by a lobster; the early flicks, like Roman Candles, were obsessed with drag queens, motorcycles, and beer-drinking priests; he reinvented Patty Hearst’s image by casting her in Cry-Baby. Before we had DVDs, Waters and Divine would travel to whatever college campuses were showing their movies, because you couldn’t find much weird art anyplace else in this country.
“We’d go there and show up and introduce the movie and we’d have a fake cop come in and pretend to arrest us,” he remembers, chuckling. “I’ve always been a carny!” He’d rent out church basements, inviting people to come see Polyester with the promise of a “door prize.” Then he’d put a pound of ground beef under some lucky fella’s seat. “You’d win, but it would not be refrigerated. The audiences loved it. AHHHHH! They’d start screaming!” It was like having a bad odorama number. “You’ve got to take tradition and spin it around and do the opposite and make it better,” he insists.
John Waters also loves Christmas, for real. Even when the holiday went bad—namely, and historically, a Christmas tree falling on his grandmother—he never felt embarrassed by it. In his 1986 book Crackpot, he titled one of the chapters “Why I Love Christmas” and watched it snowball into a yearly Christmas tour, which he’s still doing. That’s why I’ve got him on the horn on the day before Thanksgiving. Every year the show is 100% new, adapted from whatever he’s doing in his Going to Extremes program. For the holiday he’ll talk about Christmas sex and fashion terrorism and perhaps the weather. He’ll tell you how you should dress and what you should do with your parents on Christmas Eve—regaling “every possible thing that can happen to you at home on Christmas each year, in a new way.” He says he’s been doing the holiday shows for “nearly half a century,” though it’s probably closer to 20 years than 50.
Of course, I ask Waters for a taste of his new material, a request he dismisses and immediately likens to a movie trailer: “They show you all the good parts. You watch it and think, ‘Oh, thank you for warning me. I won’t see that one,’ or you just saw the whole movie.” He does let the promise of his wardrobe slip, but only slightly: “I always have three brand new outfits for the tour, and they’re pretty good this year.”
Waters tells me a secret: he always wanted to be on the Naughty List. Perverse curiosity, I suppose. “I only ever heard of one friend of somebody I didn’t know that ever really got sticks and stones, because to do that is really mean to your child, if they believe in it,” he continues. “I always hope maybe, because it would be like, wow, what kind of sticks and stones? That could be a really good art gift if they were well-cracked—if they were hand-picked, good sticks. And people talk to stones. Coal in your stocking? I like that idea, too. You can just take it out and throw it at people that are caroling.”
“I got coal in my stocking one time and it was black licorice rocks, which is somehow worse than coal,” I say to Waters.
“Well, licorice can be a good thing for bad Christmas sex: you make out with people after eating licorice,” he replies.
Though he has no history with the Naughty List, Waters is no stranger to naughtiness. If you’re looking to misbehave this winter, he says, you can do the “The Snowman”: “That’s when someone gives you a facial, you go outside, and it freezes and you say, ‘Merry Christmas!’ You can put that in your magazine.” He doesn’t have time for “Christmas miracles,” because he still holds a grudge about the Nativity Scene, due to impotence and whatnot. “I’m always just mad that the Virgin Mother didn’t ever get to decide the Christ child might have been a woman,” he admits. “It wasn’t an option, because she didn’t get to pick it. And Joseph, he just carried a load he could never deliver.”
Another reason I’m on the phone with Waters is because he recently released another 7” single via Sub Pop (“They’ve got great people, including Beach House, who live in Baltimore—my friends!”), maybe the only record label in America willing to share a recording of him talking in Pig Latin (“A Pig Latin Visit From St. Nicholas”). “My parents used to speak in it so we wouldn’t understand,” he recalls. “But then my mother taught me.” Pig Latin is a part of Pink Flamingos, when Edith [Massey] answers the phone with an “Ello-hey.” Well, it’s been a part of a lot of Waters’ movies. “I illstay ancay eakspay,” he says. “But recording that whole [song]… what is it, an hour or eight minutes or something? It was really hard to get it right.” He learned that you can translate anything into Pig Latin on your computer, but that you have to “really police it.” If you have to fact-check the computer, you might as well transcribe it yourself. “I was amazed that you even could do it, that it was possible. I tried reading it after it was translated, but it was easier for me to look at the English and read it a couple lines at a time.”
“A Pig Latin Visit From St. Nicholas” is actually the new single’s B-side. The A-side, “Happy Birthday Jesus,” was originally recorded by Little Cindy in 1958. “I heard that record and it moved me,” Waters remembers. “It was weird: she was talking about ‘maybe I can come live with you’ and stuff. I could just picture it. I wish I could see the video of her recording it with her mother there. She makes a mistake, and I do the same thing on purpose in the song.” Waters identifies this practice as “appropriating, but with respect,” carefully letting go the original serious, spiritual tone of “Happy Birthday Jesus” without losing the saintliness of Little Cindy herself. “There is nothing campy about ‘Happy Birthday Jesus,’” he insists. “She was not doing it to be funny, she did it to be spiritual. I believe it was put out to be spiritual. I made it a novelty record by covering it.” Where did the itch to cover Little Cindy come from? Probably Cat Power’s recent Bob Dylan album, he offers.
According to Waters, the best novelty song ever is the first one he bought (not to be confused with “Tonight You Belong to Me,” the Patience and Prudence single he stole at age nine): “The Flying Saucer,” the inaugural entry into Buchanan and Goodman’s “break-in” series and a major hit song in Baltimore, reaching the top of Billboard’s Best Sellers in Stores chart. “The Flying Saucer” is considered to be the first mashup ever, utilizing samples of popular songs to tell the story of an alien visit. “I never have gotten over that,” Waters beams. “And in my movies, I do the same thing: I have the lyrics from songs telling the stories in my movies.” Whether it was Mondo Trasho, Pink Flamingos, or Polyester, Waters never used a narrator. “That just means you had a test screening, you had to cut a scene out, and now it doesn’t work without a narrator.” Instead, he allowed the bizarre and strange designs of rock and roll to define the shapes and tastes of his filmography.
But novelty songs have always been important to Waters. Not only was his 2004 holiday album, A John Waters Christmas, packed full of them, but he even recently bought Not Now Music’s 100 Novelty Songs CD box set. “They don’t make [novelty songs] anymore, and I’m mad. Why wasn’t there a COVID novelty song?” he asks. “‘Take Off the Mask!,’ or something.” Waters, being the sicko that he is, still dances to the “Monster Mash” around his house—alone—but never on Halloween. “I don’t wear costumes,” he reveals. “Every day, my father used to say, ‘It’s not Halloween, you know!’ every time I’d leave the house. People always say to me, ‘On Halloween, do your fans come dressed in costumes?’ How would I know?? They always look like they’re in Halloween costumes!”
I ask Waters what the worst Christmas song of all time is, and he doesn’t hesitate: “The barking dogs doing ‘Jingle Bells.’ And it’s constantly being played on the radio. You switch the channel as soon as it comes on.” It makes sense then that Waters’ holiday single last year was the Singing Dogs’ “Jingle Bells,” in which he performs all of the canine howls himself. But he also hates “The Little Drummer Boy” and promises to never do a version of it, parody or otherwise. In fact, if he hears “pa rum pum pum pum” one more time he’s going to start strangling carolers. Who could ever put up with someone like Waters? Ian Brennan, that’s who. He’s the Grammy-nominated guy who “goes to the countries no one would ever go to and finds prisoners who do albums” and then orchestrates all of Waters’ musical numbers, Christmas or regular.
Hearing Waters’ singing career is like staring at a taint that somebody pasted a googly eye onto. In 2021, he and Brennan recorded a tribute to Pier Paolo Pasolini at the filmmaker’s murder site on the outskirts of Rome. A year later, he performed a “persnickety, droll, intellectually superior comic monologue” about Little Bo-Peep from the perspective of a revivalist preacher. Then there’s the raunchy yarn “It’s a Punk Rock Christmas,” a balm amongst the chaos of those goddamn barking dogs. In the awful 1980s, Waters said on Letterman: “I find humor in all the things that are terrible about America, and things that people have anxiety about.”
Come to think of it, there aren’t many things as awful and as anxious and as American as that goddamn Yuletide, or the commercialization of it at least (“Are you kidding? I have 19 Christmas shows! I leave Saturday”). The songs that Waters gives away make total sense in his sinistry. This is the guy who wrote a scene in Female Trouble where Dawn Davenport goes on a crime spree because she didn’t get cha-cha heels for Christmas, after all. He means every disgusting, repulsive inch of it, reckoning that “maybe these Christmas songs are for people that did get cha-cha heels for Christmas. I’m trying to say that somebody can ask for this for Christmas. I don’t expect them to play it. I just think they need to hold it, put it on the table every year. You don’t have to listen to it, just look at it. Feel its aura!”
Waters is looking down the hall at the electric chair from Female Trouble, which has become his Christmas tree (“I tell you, I’m traditional!”). It hasn’t got any decorations on it yet, but his assistants will cover it in “ornaments and tchotchkes of Divine and Edith” that fans have made and sent him since 1972, many of which still light up, while he’s away on tour. It’s going to look great in the living room, he says, right next to the Unabomber birdhouse that sits on his mantle all year long. Waters is eager to mention that he has working chimneys, but that he doesn’t want people coming down them in a home invasion. “I got the idea of a ‘flue job’—that would be having sex in the chimney with a flue open. I’ve never done that, but I have to leave something for my nineties.”
We laugh together a bit, as the clock ticks down on our talk. “Any final words?” I gesture to Waters, admittedly pandering to his polite showmanship. “Didn’t Elvis say something like ‘Have a cool yule and a frantic first’? I always thought that was so great when I was eight years old,” he gestures back, ever the erudite. “I’m still trying to have that, even though the first of the year is the Feast of the Circumcision in the Catholic Church. Pull back the curtains and fire off the smegma, it’s a new year!” I can literally hear the pencil-mustachioed grin.
You should go to one of John Waters’ Christmas shows, and you can find more information on when, how to, and where at here.
Matt Mitchell is Paste’s music editor, reporting from their home in Los Angeles.
