A list of tunes from John Waters’ Mr. Know It All

In his latest book, Mr. Know It All, John Waters dedicates an entire chapter to music. Titled “I Got Rhythm”, Waters dives through multiple genres and tales, referencing all sorts of tunes. Sometimes he gives a history of these tunes, other times it’s simply a brief mention, and most of the time he’ll relate a personal tale to them. Here’s a list along with links to listen and small excerpts from the book (which you should definitely buy). I attempted to cover as much ground as possible, but left out plenty of musical artists references that didn’t come with a direct song or album (though some are included for anecdotal purposes). Enjoy.

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“Cry” — Johnnie Ray

Even though I may have had a slight memory of deaf Johnnie Ray “crying” his ballads in the very early fifties…

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Elvis — “Heartbreak Hotel”

…it was Elvis, and yes, he still is the king, who made me realize I was gay. Just seeing him twitching and moaning “Heartbreak Hotel” on TV…

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Elvis — “I Don’t Care If the Sun Don’t Shine”

…or, better yet, hearing him mumbling, “We’re gonna kiss and kiss … and we’re gonna kiss some more,” in “I Don’t Care If the Sun Don’t Shine” made me masturbate for the first time even though I was only ten and a half years old and puberty hadn’t even hit.

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All the hip-swiveling, crotch-humping white boy singers I loved (Gene Vincent, Billy Lee Riley, Warren Smith, Buddy Knox, Eddie Cochran) were “common,” according to my mother, who reacted in horror to the pinup fan photos of “those creatures” I hung up on my bedroom wall.

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Billy Myles — “The Joker”

I zeroed in on one particularly sullen guy who was slouched up on the jukebox. I just knew he had stolen hubcaps in his young, angry life and I was jealous of his past. He kept playing the same song over and over on the jukebox, “The Joker” by Billy Myles, and was quietly and sexily singing along to the lyrics. Finally my mother noticed. “That same song is getting on my nerves,” she sniffed. Not mine. I started to memorize the lyrics and sing along myself. “The Joker is what they call me. My friends say I’ve never seemed so gay,” I’d warble along with my new pool hall idol, hoping somehow he might notice. Nobody there, including me, knew the modern definition of the word “gay” at the time, but still, those words burned into my young consciousness forever. “Play it again,” I begged him in my mind, and he did exactly that. We were a team! “Can’t he play another record?!” my father finally sputtered in frustration. “The Joker is crying over you,” Billy Myles continued serenading. He meant me, I just knew it.

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Roddy Jackson — “I Got My Sights on Someone New”

When I heard him snarl out the lyrics “Sometimes I think…,” I’d go nuts dancing around my childhood bedroom like the Mr. Top Ten I was in my mind and then join in with him in the title refrain to his big hit, “I Got My Sights on Someone New.” I sure did. Him.

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Eileen Rodgers — “The Treasure of Your Love”

I never wanted to be a drag queen. But if I had to lip-synch to a woman’s song even today it wouldn’t be Judy, Liza, or Cher. No, it would be Eileen Rodgers. Who? you might ask. Well, she was a little-known nightclub singer and onetime understudy for Ethel Merman who had a tiny success in the mid-fifties. Every time I’d hear her sing “The Treasure of Your Love” (not even her biggest hit), I’d get nelly. I’d throw my head high in hauteur and begin belting out the ridiculously earnest unfeminist womanhood lyrics while that god-awful chorus behind her wailed in honky harmony.

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Nervous Norvus — “Transfusion”

I soon realized that I needed to be funny much more than I needed to be feminine. Dark funny. And Nervous Norvus’s “Transfusion” was the first bit of black humor I ever heard.

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Mark Dinning — “Teen Angel”

Naturally I loved the other car-accident teen novelty records, too, a genre that would be completely impossible today. I learned then that no subject matter was off-limits for music if you did it first. “Teen Angel” was released in 1960 and I’d play it every night before going to sleep, reimagining that stupid girl in the lyrics who was crushed by an oncoming train when she rushed back to her boyfriend’s car stalled on the railway tracks to get his high school ring he had given her.

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Ray Peterson — “Tell Laura I Love Her”

“Tell Laura I Love Her” by Ray Peterson came next, and the teenage-tragedy genre was cemented forever. When our hero’s car flips over and in his last dying breath he begs us to, well, you know, the title, I would revel in the sorrow, the adolescent grief, the unfairness of our teenage lives. I was a drama queen early on, and it will help your musical development if you become one, too.

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The Shangri-Las — “Leader of the Pack”

“Leader of the Pack” took the car-wreck sound-effect teen soap opera to a new level of recorded anguished histrionics. The Shangri-Las were plain bad-girl perfect, and I’ll go out on a limb here by saying they were just as tough, if not tougher, than the Ronettes.

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Jimmy Cross — “I Want My Baby Back”

Whatever the Shangri-Las had done, they inspired what is still probably the most outrageous teen-death novelty song ever recorded, “I Want My Baby Back” by Jimmy Cross. After surviving a terrible auto accident (with the same sound effects as “Leader of the Pack”), our driver sings about his now-dismembered girlfriend (“Over there was my baby … over there was my baby … and way over there was my baby”) and the terrible grief he experienced after the collision. Unable to live without his “baby,” he digs up her coffin, climbs in, closes the lid, and sings the final verse, “I’ve got my baby back,” from inside. I was as shocked listening as a teenager as I am shocked today. The only rock-and-roll hit about necrophilia to ever crack Billboard’s Top 100 list.

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Johnny Standley — “It’s in the Book”

I already had a good start in developing a twisted sense of humor because in 1952 I heard the hit comedy record “It’s in the Book” by Johnny Standley on the radio, bought it immediately, and played this comedy monologue over and over in my childhood bedroom.

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Dickie Goodman and Bill Buchanan — “The Flying Saucer, Part One and Part Two”

Sampling was born in 1956, the day the struggling songwriters Dickie Goodman and Bill Buchanan decided to steal the well-known lyrics from the hits of their time and use those words out of context in a whole new narrative that created what some have called the first rock-and-roll novelty record, “The Flying Saucer, Part One and Part Two.”

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“The Flying Saucer” became a monster hit. Baltimore was one of the few cities where it went ahead of Elvis Presley’s two-sided smash (“Don’t Be Cruel” and “Hound Dog”) to become Number One.

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Shirley and Lee — “Let the Good Times Roll”

Just like everything else in show business, “bad” can be the key to success. In music, a nasal voice is often a signature that will last for eternity. Shirley of the Shirley and Lee duo seemed to do it first. When I heard her singing “Let the Good Times Roll” in the fifties, I wondered if she had a cold. Was her asthmatic sound the beginning of a trend?

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Shirley and Lee — “I Feel Good”

When “I Feel Good” became another monster hit for this group soon after, I tried to imitate Shirley’s crooning by putting a clothespin on my nose and singing along with the record, but I knew I would never match her nasal joie de vivre.

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Rosie and the Originals — “Angel Baby”

Years later Rosie of Rosie and the Originals did the same thing when she sang the ballad “Angel Baby.” Did she just have a cold or was it purposeful? If she had blown her nose, would the song have gone to Number One as it did?

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Kathy Young — “A Thousand Stars”

When Kathy Young copied her and sang “A Thousand Stars” in that now-familiar stuffed-up vocal style, did she inspire all future adenoidal singers right on up to and including Rufus Wainwright?

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Lou Christie — “Two Faces Have I”

When Lou Christie went beyond the top of the musical scales with his suddenly radically high voice in “Two Faces Have I” in 1963, I thought I was the only teenager in the United States who held this hit as a secret gay anthem.

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Franki Valli & the Four Seasons — “Walk Like A Man”

And sure, Frankie Valli did it even better when he “Walk[ed] Like a Man,”

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Donnie Elbert — “What Can I Do”

but only one male falsetto voice made me cry every time I heard it — Donnie Elbert’s. He may have had little mainstream success, but his 1957 first rhythm-and-blues number, “What Can I Do,” still sends shivers up my spine every time I listen. Goddamn, that man can wail.

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The Newbeats — “Bread and Butter”

“Bread and Butter,” the 1964 mod ditty, could get on any parent’s nerves with its high-pitched simpleton lyrics and childish beat.

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Ian Whitcomb — “You Turn Me On”

His hit, “You Turn Me On,” perfectly summed up everything you should always believe in: the parodying of enthusiasm, sexual confusion, and the mocking of convention.

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Ian Whitcomb — “N-E-R-V-O-U-S”

His little-known follow-up, titled “N-E-R-V-O-U-S,” is beyond a doubt the pinnacle of a great “bad” recording, combining all the elements one needs to develop perfection in musical taste: overwrought vocals, oddball storytelling, a total lack of concern over rejection, and a comic timing combined with unashamed innocence. Go right over to your computer and look up his hilarious spoof of an avant-garde, before-its-time, pre-MTV music video, and you’ll feel the same joy and defiant delight I still do when I see it.

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It’s certainly impossible to mention falsetto voices without bringing up some personal heroes of mine — Alvin and the Chipmunks. I have been a lifelong fan, own every one of their albums, and play their music often in all my homes (much to the annoyance of my friends) while I marvel at their effortless crossover from children’s music to pop to rock to grunge to punk to techno to rap and back again to Christmas.

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Ike & Tina Turner — “It’s Gonna Work Out Fine”

Am I wrong to point out that Tina Turner never sounded better than when she sang under Ike’s control? When I first heard her snarl “Your lips set my soul on f-i-i-r-r-e” in “It’s Gonna Work Out Fine,” I thought my white skin would blister, then shed. It didn’t matter to me when I later found out that wasn’t even Ike’s voice singing back to her on this record (it was Mickey from the “Love Is Strange” duo Mickey and Sylvia).

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[This section is all going to be together because it is a whole story and kind of amazing.]

It wasn’t until way after Ike and Tina, 1981 to be precise, that I went bananas over another soul duo. This time it began with a “situation” song (what the rhythm-and-blues world called soap-opera-ish spoken-word lyrics) that went on to be such a monster hit in the black neighborhoods that it spawned five “answer” recordings over two years. “She’s Got Papers on Me” had its roots in the 1974 Shirley Brown tune “Woman to Woman,” which begins with the sound of a phone ringing, being picked up, and the line “Hello, may I speak to Barbara?” The singer goes on to tell the “other woman” that the man she’s in love with is hers, “from the top of his head to the bottom of his feet.” She pays the note on his clothes and car, too. That’s just the situation, plain and simple.

Seven years later Richard “Dimples” Fields put out an oh-so-soulful power ballad where he whines about being in love with another woman who is not his wife, but he is helpless because “She’s got papers on me.” I had never heard this expression before, but apparently in the African American community it was a well-known term for having any form of written contract: mortgage papers, car loans, and especially marriage licenses. I certainly adopted this expression and may have been the only honky film director who yelled “I’ve got papers” to a studio head from whom I was trying to collect residuals.

But what made this song such a hit was not lover-boy Dimples’ endless vocals — no, it was the “Cleanup Woman” herself, Betty Wright, who came in four minutes and thirty-two seconds after the song began because she was on her way to her job and “forgot my sweater.” “Well, well, well,” she begins as she catches “Mr. Look So Good” singing in the bathroom about “Miss Sweet Little Thing that’s always on your mind.” Just like her predecessor woman-to-woman Shirley Brown, she, too, pays the note on the apartment, but this time not only does she throw him out, she announces that “you must pay me to be free” because “I got papers on you but now I’m throwin’ ’em in the trash can of my memory.” In my favorite breakup line ever she harrumphs, “Now take your little albums and your little raggedy component set that never worked and you can scat!” Component set? God, what beautiful detail. Well, well, well, indeed.

It was only a matter of time before the first answer record was released. Barbara Mason tried to one-up Betty Wright with “She’s Got Papers, but I’ve Got the Man” after Wright left Dimples behind. Fuck him. Nobody cared about the man anymore, this was now a catfight, and the claws were out and ready to scratch. “Betty, I’m addressing this directly to you,” Barbara warned, and we were ready for round two.

After a fairly tepid beginning, three minutes into the song, our “other woman” finally gives us what we want — full dissing! “You see, I’ve never been in position to give him any material things,” Barbara icily explains, “but then I’ve never demanded … no papers, no rings.” Uh-oh, Barbara’s gonna get personal. “I have his slippers, his bathrobe, and the component set you told him to take with him when he left.” Did she have to mention the component set? So mean. So heartless. Is there no such thing as mercy?

Another mouthy woman, named Jean Knight, who had one hit record behind her, “Mr. Big Stuff,” answered Betty, too. There seemed to be a real rush to judgment going on here. “You’ve Got the Papers, but I Got the Man” came out at about the same time as Barbara’s rebuke, but this time the answer seemed even nastier, and to make matters worse for Betty, Jean brought along a Dimples imposter named Premium to croon along with her. Another phone call. More attitude. Meaner, yet maybe the funniest insults so far. Jean had a few things she’d like to tell Betty and minces no words, because the man they are competing for is “dealin’ in class now, honey, not trash.” She goes on to call Betty a “poor housekeeper” and a “terrible cook” and then accuses her of “layin’ around, getting big and fat.” And here comes Premium wailing soulfully about how happy he is now to be with his “sweet little thing” and how they can be together forever. This situation is getting out of hand!

Betty Wright can stand no more abuse. It is time for her to strike back. She’s been quiet too long. Publicly humiliated on the radio for months by these sloppy seconds, thirds, and fourths! Besides, she’s over Dimples! He doesn’t even sing on this record. Plus she’s got a new man and a song to celebrate him! It’s called “Goodbye You, Hello Him,” and this time the papers just say, “She’s gone!” The furniture, too. She’s left his dog, who’s chewing up his clothes — “all the ones I didn’t burn up or rip up.” Hell hath no fury. And then the final clincher: “And oh, by the way, there are no more pimples on my face.” I am overwhelmed. Completely overwhelmed. To hell with the Great American Songbook. This “I’ve Got Papers” answer says it better.

Learn to milk whatever success you’ve had. You can keep doing the same thing over and over as long as you have a sense of humor about not having a new idea. Just when Dimples, Betty Wright, Jean Knight, and Premium had begun to move on, along came Barbara Mason again with a new twist on the same old situation. It might have taken her three years and she was now singing disco, not soul, but she had discovered the man they were all fighting over was gay! Yep, in “Another Man,” as the song was called, “another man is beating my time, another man is lovin’ mine.” What a hilarious development! Down-low and without papers! Just think how this new gay guy could have answered her.

Lo and behold, he did! A group known as Tout Sweet challenged her right away with a little ditty entitled “Another Man Is Twice as Nice.” “You stole a man,” they accused her, “but you wound up with two.” Barbara Mason later admitted in an interview that when she first heard this song, she fell on the floor laughing. But who laughs last laughs hardest, and Tout Sweet had a dare for her about the second man: “He’s got a lady too and I already know she’s crazy about you.”

Then it stopped. “Now, what else is going to come out?” Barbara publicly wondered, but nothing ever did. Dimples died in 2000 of a massive heart attack. He probably just couldn’t stand all the trouble he’d caused. But he wound up with the papers all right. A death certificate. The final papers.

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If you’re a junkie, jazz is for you. Bebop is the sound of heroin, isn’t it? Plain and simple. Every jive master I have ever loved was an addict: Chet Baker, Bud Powell, Billie Holiday, Anita O’Day, Miles Davis, Charlie Parker.

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The Nutty Squirrels — “Uh Oh, Part One and Two”

I should have told my mother about the Nutty Squirrels. They did jazz and they weren’t junkies. This sped-up vocal group who imitated the Chipmunks actually beat them to television with an animated show called The Nutty Squirrels Present, and they looked down on the pop sound of Alvin and his gang. The Nutty Squirrels actually had a big jazz hit with “Uh Oh, Part One and Two,” but if you go back and listen to the rest of their discography, you’ll be blown away by some of their other riffs. These cats were smoking! If my mom had heard jazz like this at the wrong speed, she might have loved it.

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Here’s another nonjunkie jazz vocalist that you can love and impress your family with by your obscure musical knowledge — Mildred Bailey. My favorite jazz singer. Despite a long-lasting career and a critical reputation that placed her second to Billie Holiday by jazz critics in 1943, then first in the following two years, Bailey is largely forgotten today. Maybe because in spite of two failed marriages, she “preferred the company of gay men.” Or is it because she was remembered as “hard as nails,” with “a violent temper” and “prone to nasty tantrums”? Was this what held her back? Oh, yeah, she “passed” as a light-skinned black woman her whole life even though she wasn’t. When the post office put out a series of stamps commemorating jazz and blues singers in 1994, every entertainer pictured was black and Mildred was included. Yet there she was. Not black.

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God, there were so many beyond-cool hillbilly musical gems before and after Patsy Cline, Loretta Lynn, Hank Williams, and Ferlin Husky that I had never heard before. Sure, I had hung around redneck bars all my life, but now I felt the weight of my faux-cracker musical ignorance.

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J.D. McPherson — “Firebug”

Start with “Firebug” by J. D. McPherson. It sounds old but it came out in 2010, which just goes to show that retro is a state of mind, not a year. Who cares if the song is about pyromania?

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Ray Willie Hubbard — “Snake Farm”

If your tastes are a little less extreme but still salt-of-the-earth sleazy, “Snake Farm” (2006) by Ray Willie Hubbard is the song for you, a real mating call for the ill-bred.

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Kevin Fowler — “If I Could Make a Livin’ Drinkin’”

It’s impossible to appreciate country music without being at one time or another in your life a drunk. “If I Could Make a Living Drinking” would be the perfect pickup song if you were looking for a date in either the welfare or unemployment office. This 2014 realistic job-hunting ditty by Kevin Fowler says it all about alcoholism as a career move.

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Hank Thompson — “Hangover Tavern”

Even if you’ve reached a bottom, as they say in AA, there’s one place left for you: the “Hangover Tavern” (1961) by Hank Thompson. “My head is heavy, my spirit’s kind of low,” he sings with melancholy, “and every time I feel this way, to Hangover Tavern I go.” I told you a hangover can sing if you’ll just let it.

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Hawkshaw Hawkins — “Lonesome 7-7203”

The saddest, most heartbreaking, most ridiculous but touching down-home narration can be found in the 1963 Number One country hit “Lonesome 7–7203” by Hawkshaw Hawkins. It’s the telephone line the singer put in especially for his ex-girlfriend to call if she ever changes her mind about leaving him and wants to come back.

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I hated the Beatles when they first came out because they were so goddamn cheery. I didn’t listen to popular music from 1964 until 1976, when I first heard the Sex Pistols. Finally a new antihippie sound that could piss off every musical legend that came first.

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I love punk. I feel safe in that world and of course I realize it’s hardly new these days. Matter of fact I have hosted for four years in a row what really is a punk rock nostalgia festival in Oakland, California, called Burger Boogaloo, brilliantly programmed by the promoter Marc Ribak. Here punk rock groups from the past (the Dwarves, the Mummies, the Damned) reemerge along with headliners such as Iggy Pop and Devo, and other more obscure groups such as the Spits and the Trashwomen who reunite and play — and this crowd has no trouble remembering who they are.

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You only need to make two purchases (and they have a hefty price tag) to feel at ease yet excited about classical music.

First get Glenn Gould: The Complete Columbia Album Collection box set. It’s out of print but you can find it online — all eighty-one albums remastered on CDs with individual original cover art and a 416-page book filled with rare photographs and essays.

The other purchase you need to make in music is Maria Callas. She’s all you need to hear to understand opera. Anyone whose best friend was Pier Paolo Pasolini and got dumped by Aristotle Onassis so he could marry Jackie Kennedy knows how to shriek with beauty, style, pitch, and total abandon. The Complete Studio Recordings, 1949–1969 will make you do mad scenes of your own once you listen to every one of these seventy CDs (including twenty-six complete operas).

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Many listeners my age stopped liking popular music once rap came out, but not me. I don’t love all of it — the gangsta “ho, pussy, fag, gun” lyrics of 50 Cent get on my nerves — he sounds like a big nell-box to me, a nouveau-riche, homophobic braggart — the Donald Trump–meets–Chick-fil-A of rap. Yet I do have a soft spot for Ol’ Dirty Bastard because even though he was busted for robbery, murder, drug possession, and a shoot-out with New York police and later fatally overdosed, he was kind of funny when he took a reporter and two of his illegitimate children with him in a limousine to the welfare office to get his check and pick up food stamps. Now that’s what I call a genius publicity stunt.

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Eminem — “Puke”

I love Eminem too and that ex-wife of his, who wore black lip liner around her mouth and upstaged my mustache fashion-wise by flaunting something equally bizarre not only on top of her lips but on the bottom of them, too. I know Eminem has absolutely no desire to meet me, which makes him even more of a hero. “Puke” is still my favorite song of his, and I actually had Jill Fannon, my onetime art assistant, remix it as if the Chipmunks were singing it and used this now helium-happy number for a time as my introduction music whenever I walked onstage to do my Christmas show.

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Skee-Lo — “I Wish”

“I Wish” by Skee-Lo was one such rhyme that stood out because it was happy and upbeat — a rap that put you in a good mood. “I wish I was a little bit taller,” Skee-Lo lamented. “I wish I was a baller. I wish I had a girl who looked good, I would call her.” Who could argue with that? He wasn’t going to shoot or sexually harass anybody. You could almost pogo dance to it like a racial tourist on a gangsta-lite crossover holiday.

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Biz Markie — “The Vapors”

“The Vapors” was another rap number that had a big effect on me. I’d love to bring back Biz Markie (and it wouldn’t be hard because he now lives in Maryland) to freestyle his hilarious hymn to the Victorian disease that high-style women caught in the Oscar Wilde days whenever they’d get so nervous or frustrated that all they could do was faint.

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Basehead, a D.C. alternative jazzy rap group, fronted by Mike Ivey, would be high on my bill for my new Lollapaloser music festival. Right from the beginning of their career they confused both the hip-hop and hipster worlds with their subtle but highly original beat. As good as A Tribe Called Quest is in my book, Basehead is even better. They started out riffing on pot and depression but then switched over to Jesus and became a kind of slacker Kirk Franklin. There is no chart on Billboard for Pothead Gospel, but if there were, all Top Twenty would be by Basehead.

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Tairrie B — “Ruthless Bitch”

Tairrie B is my number one homegirl, the headliner of my show. The first white girl in rap who stood her ground against Dr. Dre and got punched in the face by him twice for it, even though she was Eazy-E’s girlfriend at the time. Her whole life story is missing from Straight Outta Compton and it shouldn’t be. Tairrie B was a ruthless bitch, just as one of her rap songs was called. Dressed like Mae West, she bragged, “I take apart men like I took apart Ken and Barbie dolls back when I was ten.”

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Don’t get me wrong. I can also love the most commercial pop sounds of today. Like Justin Bieber. He’s better than Sam Smith or Adele in my book. A real rock star, a child prodigy (watch him doing Aretha Franklin songs while drumming on pots and pans in his kitchen in those early YouTube videos), and a worldwide teen idol of unheard-of magnitude.

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Maybe we should all become rock stars. That I can’t sing or play an instrument used to hold me back, but no more. Look at David Lynch. He’s my favorite “new” singer. Yes! He croons electronically on the Inland Empire soundtrack, on his Crazy Clown Time CD, and yet again on his absolutely amazing eighteen-episode TV show, Twin Peaks: The Return. Sometimes David Lynch’s vocals are twisted so scarily he sounds like the Jolly Green Giant.

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Mink Stole — Do Re Mink (Album)

“I Am Fifteen and I Don’t Want to Die” would be the anti-suicide tale about how J-Dog, a white boy from Lutherville, Maryland (that’s me), grew up to be a hillbilly faux-soul gay-geezer rap star. By now, my homegirls Beth Ditto, Iris DeMent, and Mink Stole (who can sing — listen to her Do Re Mink CD) would have joined me for backups. Their name? The Honkettes. Already I’ve musically advanced up to twenty-five years from when I started at fifteen. With their help, I’m feeling much better about my musical self.