During a Rhode Island School of Design commencement speech in 2015, John Waters offered unimpeachable advice: “Go out in the world and fuck it up beautifully.”
It’s this exact attitude that has made Waters objectively punk, long before he wrote, directed, produced, and operated on a shoestring budget to make his early films a reality. As the Pope of Trash, a nickname affectionately given to him by William S. Burroughs, turned from a chain-smoking Baltimore delinquent to a brilliantly gaudy pioneer, he didn’t abandon its ethos: never compromising, never following a conventional blueprint, and never crumbling in the face of censorship as he told stories about kinks, drugs, and drag queens. When I connect with Waters, he’s recovering from a round of 80th birthday shows in Provincetown, Massachusetts, a bohemian town once inhabited by Norman Mailer, Tennessee Williams, and Mary Oliver — seated at the tip of Cape Cod — where he’s summering for his 63rd year. “It needs a punk-rock bar, though. We don’t have one. We need one,” he tells me. Repping a series of eccentric suits, thick-rimmed sunglasses, and a pencil-thin mustache, those types of othered environments have always been where Waters feels most alive. That’s what makes him the perfect host for the punk festival Mosswood Meltdown in Oakland, returning for his 12th run.
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Going down over the weekend, this year’s Mosswood Meltdown gathers up a slew of like-minded spirits into an enticing bill. There’s Iggy Pop, who appeared in Waters’ 1990 film Cry-Baby and continues to rip through Stooges classics without a shirt, well into his 70s. Snooper will bring their punk puppetry to the stage before Mannequin Pussy go on, whose snarling “Loud Bark” has become a highlight of their sets. Fred Armisen and Sleater-Kinney are slated to play Ramones songs as Jack & Judy (“I want bad covers”). Bikini Kill will bring a proper dose of riot grrrl, closing the event on Sunday. Setting the festival apart, Waters writes and delivers introductory remarks for each artist on the lineup, calling the latter “revolutionaries [who] can pussy-whip me any day of the week” when they played in 2022. (He’s still in the midst of writing when we speak and hasn’t gotten to Bikini Kill yet, but he won’t say the same thing twice.)
Of course, part of the lineup’s relevancy can be attributed to the fact that Waters still attends shows. Just this year, he’s made headlines for seeing Trapped Under Ice’s homecoming in Baltimore and Nine Inch Nails in Anaheim. When I ask him about his favorites, he pauses, not wanting to be quoted saying the wrong thing, and asks to call me back. Part of me doesn’t expect him to, but when my phone buzzes a minute later, it’s Waters, telling me that Grudge, Pearl, and Cemetery Piss have topped his year so far.
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As someone who’s never been to Mosswood Meltdown, what’s the temperament of the festival? What makes it different from something like Coachella or Riot Fest?
Well, first of all, in the punk-rock world, they hate everybody but themselves. And that’s so great because they’re all together there with the only people that they like in the whole world. [Laughs.] The only place where they’re in the mainstream or they’re the dominating factor. So it makes me feel very comfortable in the punk world to be there. I think if you don’t fit in, we love a pretty girl who purposely makes herself ugly, or the gaze of anybody there, male, female, or trans, is always the opposite of what it is in the real world, so it’s a great place for people-watching and to clean out the wax in your ears from the sound.
The punk and hardcore space is just a lifestyle in and of itself, and it’s only a community for like-minded people. If you act shitty, someone’s going to call you out on it.
Yeah. You don’t want to be shunned in the punk-rock room if you are a punk. And so I think it’s a tight world. It’s a world that keeps to itself and doesn’t want… It’s the only minority that wants to be hated.
I saw a photo of a man who looked like he was in his 70s — big gray beard — crowdsurfing to the Osees last year.
Well, Iggy does that. Iggy crowdsurfs, and he’s [nearly] 80.
Were you much of a crowdsurfer or a mosher when you were younger?
I like watching it, and I’m for it. I always pray. I never would stand up front in a punk-rock thing. I don’t feel like getting knocked around, slam dance and everything, but I enjoy watching it. I think it’s something that young people should always do. I think if you’re really 80 years old… Well, in the punk world, it’s all right to slam dance at 80 years old. But in no other world is it OK to dance at 80. I mean, you can’t do the funky chicken at 80. You look like an idiot.
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Would you say that’s pretty common at Mosswood for people who are way up there?
It’s completely not an ageist crowd. There’s young people, old people. Everybody gets along together. There’s nothing you can’t be, really. Well, I guess maybe they’re mean to hippies, which makes me laugh. Or Grateful Dead fans. To me, hell would be going to Burning Man. And so this is maybe the Un-Burning… No, the Burning Man that burns down Burning Man.
I always tell my friends that I’m going to reach my Grateful Dead phase when I’m in my 50s. I’m not quite there yet.
Well, I’m happy people like them. I never liked them. They were too hippy-dippy for me, but I understand the cult-ism of it, and I certainly have friends that are obsessed by it. So I salute them for that. They’re just not my kind of cult.
Yeah. It’s just fandom. It’s very core.
And fandom’s fine. That’s great. Are you kidding? Thank God for my fandom, or I wouldn’t still be doing this for 60 years.
One of the things that makes Mosswood so unique, too, is how you come up with the opening remarks for each band that plays the festival.
I’m writing it right now. I just finished Iggy’s.
I was watching some old ones, and I can tell you put so much time and care into it.
Well, I do research, and I want to give every band their due. And so yeah, I enjoy doing it because I learn a lot about all the groups, too, by doing the research, and I spend a lot of time writing it. I don’t just make it up on the spot.
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Do you have a long relationship with Bikini Kill?
Well, I knew about [Kathleen Hanna]. I was a fan and everything, but I didn’t really meet any of them until Mosswood. The only people I ever knew before were Iggy because he was in Cry-Baby. I knew Cheetah [Chrome]. I knew the Dead Boys because Stiv [Bators] was in it, but they had a cover band that Cheetah was still in. I’m trying to think who else that we’ve had that I knew in the past. I had maybe met Devo once a long, long time ago, but no, I get to meet them all again, and it’s really great. I’m starstruck.
We’re always talking about reunions over here at AP. Is there one that you would want to happen at Mosswood Festival at some point?
I just did in another interview, so I don’t want to say the same thing, but the ones that come to mind are, of course, the Donnas and maybe if all the Dead Kennedys made up. Who else? Darby Crash back from the grave. I’m trying to think of the ones that haven’t been there. Well, we’ve never had any of the Sex Pistols, but who knows? Sex Pistols are what — two alive or one alive now?
They’re touring with Frank Carter as their vocalist right now.
Well, eventually all the bands become like the Drifters. None of them were the original. That’s kind of funny, though. Maybe they should have cover bands of, I don’t know, punk rockers covering the worst Barry Manilow — just something so the opposite. The one I always wanted was Nancy Sinatra to come out once and sing “These Boots Are Made for Walkin’.” I tried to get to her, and her daughter, who was a fan, said that she was really retired, but I really did try to get her to do that. Just come out and sing that one song. People would go crazy.
