Wings For Wheels

Celebrity compilations and playlists are usually predictable – half a dozen hits from their teenage years, one or two genre-benders (white guy chooses rap, black guy picks a metal song), a song their parents loved, and finiah it off with an obscure gem and a hip, new song to establish credibility.  As a result, you never get that window into the soul that such a list is supposed to provide. Thankfully, filmmaker John Waters doesn’t have that problem on A Date With John Waters, the Valentine’s Day follow-up to his successful 2004 holiday CD, A John Waters Christmas.

Don’t get me wrong, musically the disc is all over the map, but the vision is distinctly Waters, celebrating innocence and trash equally with genuine affection.  This allows Waters, whose encyclopedic knowledge of obscure soul songs is legendary, to include bargain-bin gems like Patience & Prudence’s “Tonight You Belong To Me” with Ray Charles’ classic “(Night Time) Is The Right Time” and make it seem perfectly natural.

Along the way, we get numbers about teenage gay sex (Elton Motello’s “Jet Boy Jet Girl”), wedding day jealous rage (Ike & Tina Turner’s harrowing “All I Can Do Is Cry”) and a song both seductive and creepy (Dreamlander Mink Stole’s “Sometimes I Wish I Had A Gun”).  There are also enough songs filled, intentionally or otherwise, with double meanings that, by the time you get to Eileen Barton’s “If I Knew You Were Comin’ I’d’ve Baked A Cake,” your inner Beavis comes to the fore and you find yourself giggling along with practically every line.

But the centerpiece of this collection is John Prine and Iris Dement duetting on Prine’s “In Spite Of Ourselves,” which features the duo as trailer trash and trading lines like, “She looks down her nose at money/She gets it on like the Easter Bunny” and “He ain’t got laid in a month of Sundays/I caught him once and he was sniffin’ my undies.” The song reveals two characters who love each other because of their faults, and is definitively Waters in its humor and sweetness. 

Although this is a fine compilation, there’s little in here to serve as the backdrop for a romantic evening at home, and if any of the songs, apart from the Ray Charles and Dean Martin tracks, get you or your partner off, well, who am I to judge?

Go to my Blogcritics preview to see Waters read the liner notes and to download Josie Cotton’s “Johnny Are You Queer?” from the CD.

Waters was also the guest on NPR’s All Songs Considered talking about the songs on this CD.  You can find it here: