The Waitresses, "No Guilt"

It’s time to talk about what my parents played on the car radio growing up.

Her name was Lola. She was a showgirl …

[needle scratch]

Actually, it’s not that time. I mean, it was my plan for this week. Now it’s my plan for next week, because I’m binging again on the Waitresses.

As my vinyl collection continues to grow, I am trying to be mindful to give equal time to the records that came earliest to my stacks. Because I am the person I am, I can’t bring a new record up to the register without feeling a twinge of loss. Yes, I just found (to take the most recent example) a pristine copy of INXS’s first, self-titled record, and yes, I am beside myself about it. But at the same time I am realizing, and begrudging, that once I take it home, the finite amount of time I have with my turntable will now be divided among n + 1 records, rather than the n I had when I left the house. Meaning I have marginally less time to spend with each of the records I have and love.

So although I’ve got the New Arrivals bin down here to my right, just under the turntable, I make sure to swivel the desk chair regularly to my left, where the rest of my records are kept. I make a conscious effort to pull some wax I haven’t played in too long, so I can put it front of mind again. On Wednesday that record was the Waitresses’ debut album, 1982’s Wasn’t Tomorrow Wonderful?

Now it’s Friday Saturday Sunday Monday and it’s still on the platter.

Cards on the table re the elephant in the room: Wasn’t Tomorrow Wonderful? is a dumb title. First of all, it’s a mouthful, and secondably, it’s trying hard to be funny and not quite getting home. Like, if I had anyone raving to me about how clever a title it was, I’d probably feel the need to put them on Acquaintance Probation. Ordinarily I wouldn’t dwell on something so secondary as the title of a record—see, e.g., Definitely Maybe—but this one gets to me because it contradicts so much of the genius of this record, which is the wit and sophistication in its lyrics. So yeah: bummer there.

I have similar concerns about “I Know What Boys Like” (Apple Music, Spotify), in that it also plays an outsized role in defining who this band is and also ends up selling them a bit short. All that said, the song is a banger: a perfectly-conceived and -executed new wave pop single. We all saw it on MTV back in the day and were happy enough to have it on. Vocalist Patty Donahue struts and clucks and taunts all of us males, delivering her lines with pitch-perfect attitude. She sings the chorus like a playground taunt, actual nah-nanah-nah-nahs¹ included, before leading us on over the bridge: Sorry I teased you (I will let you). This time I mean it (I will let you). How would you like it (you can trust me)? and so on. The football is firmly on the tee, but then Lucy pulls it away again:

SUCKER, [chuckle]

The funky drumbeat and untimely breaks, Chris Butler’s Orange Juice-style guitar chucking, and the saxophone solo all hint at the eclecticism and musicianship you’ll hear through the rest of the album. Really, though: this is a novelty song, arguably closer to I want to bang on the drum all day than to any other Waitresses song I’ve ever heard.

So if you dug the single, went to Woolworth’s looking for the album, and read the title off the sleeve, you’d have had a sense of this band that is fairly out of whack with who they were, which was to my mind the smartest, sharpest, most fun and interesting Stateside new wave band of the early 1980s. I realize I’m getting keyed up here. This could be another Bow Wow Wow Moment. See “Go Wild in the Country.” And in fact that’s not a bad analogy. Too much of America heard “I Want Candy” (Apple Music, Spotify) and “I Know What Boys Want” and set aside these acts as one-hit wonders—and minor hits at that. Their loss. Probably not a coincidence that a quarter-century later, the nation is coming apart at the seams.

Anyway, it was two years ago this spring when I found this record in Florida, in the attached warehouse of a record store in St. Pete. Easily hundreds of thousands of vintage records stocked on aisle after identical aisle of wooden shelves. Might be I’ve built it up in my mind, but the Bananas Records warehouse looks a lot like the building where the U.S. government hid the Ark of the Covenant at the end of Raiders, but with more windows and ambient light, because hey: it’s Florida.

I wasn’t looking for a Waitresses record that day. The warehouse was about to close, and we had something like ten minutes to root around in it before they flushed Mike and me back into the retail space. These were early days in my career as a vinyl hound, and the moment overtook me. Flustered and flummoxed, I burned my allotment of time running up and down aisles with no plan or notion of what to look for. When the bell rang, I went to the checkout counter with just one LP in hand. There was a standalone bin over by the register. I don’t remember why it was there or what it was purporting to hold: could have been new arrivals, records specially priced to move, or some combination of the two. In any case, I found Wasn’t Tomorrow Wonderful? in that bin. The Waitresses meant enough to me that I thumbed open Safari on my phone and looked the record up on AllMusic. I was surprised to see it had a 4.5-star rating. I shrugged and bought it.

Funny how your life can turn on a dime like that. A record in a bin does or does not grab your attention. AllMusic does or does not vouch for it. You shrug or you don’t.

At this point I knew three songs by the Waitresses: “Boys,” “Christmas Wrapping” (Apple Music, Spotify; see also “Father Christmas”), and the theme song from Square Pegs (Apple Music, Spotify)—and I’d forgotten all about Square Pegs. My work colleague Javier mentioned it to me a month later when I was raving at him about this record: Didn’t they do the Square Pegs song, too? Yes: yes, they had, and I loved that show. Sarah Jessica Parker and Jami Gertz.

But this is the kind of record I’m most likely to buy these days. The artist is known to me, I like a song or two, but I have none of their stuff on CD—so I don’t have to swallow down the guilt of buying a vinyl copy of an LP I already own, when I need to be finding money to put my kids through college. Most of the qualifying artists here date from the early 1980s, and accordingly, I’ve lately stocked some real gems from the aforementioned Ultravox!, Magazine, Missing Persons, Gary Numan, Simple Minds, Howard Jones, and the Selecter. But of all these and like acquisitions, of all these old records I should have known years ago and am loving up right now, it’s the Waitresses I keep coming back to.

Add one more to the list of innovative post-punk bands with Ohio roots: Devo, the Pretenders, Pere Ubu, and now the Waitresses. Akron-born Patty Donahue met Chris Butler at Kent State. Along with Devo’s Jerry Casale, Butler had been in the crowd when the Ohio National Guard opened fire on the protesters. One of the dead was Jeffrey Miller, whom Butler had just loaned a drum kit. The band came together later in New York City, swelling to six regular members by the time Wonderful? was recorded. Vocals, Donahue. Guitar, Butler. Bass, Tracy Wormworth. Drums, Television’s (!) Billy Ficca. Keys, Dan Klayman. And saxophone (listed as “Reeds” in the record credits), Mars Williams.²

**I HEREBY GRANT TO THIS ENTIRE RECORD A SAXOPHONE EXEMPTION.** I mean, listen to Mars Williams bleat on “Redland” (Apple Music, Spotify). If it’s gonna sound this good, go for it.

At the base level, the Waitresses are a ska band. More often than not they play the back beats—sometimes on keys, sometimes on guitar—and the songs are always a good time. Listen to Patty’s I really gotta—gotta—gotta—gotta problem skank on “Quit” (Apple Music, Spotify), and try not to pogo on every one of those gottas. Lots of post-punk sounds here, too: BPMs uniformly in the 100s, discordant chords twanged out from the guitars. But for all this they were too syncopated and unserious to claim true kinship with the likes of Wire or Buzzcocks, and their look and messaging didn’t hold with the rude-boy ethos of the Specials and the other 2-Tone ska acts, either. So we find the Waitresses in a category of their own, pulling useful ingredients from the hipper acts of their day, leaving others untouched, and urging listeners, among other things, to factor in the range of variation as a function on a curve. Music by, for, and about square pegs, for sure.

Let’s dig into the record and, for the sake of brevity, train our focus on a select three songs. First of these is “Wise Up” (Apple Music, Spotify). This is a Kafka-inspired barnburner about alienation and forced conformity, I think. Some assembly of bureaucrats is aggressively questioning a guest:

This meeting will come to order. Please take your seat. The minutes of the last meeting will be read. Old business, new business. There’s a motion on the floor that we review new applications. State your qualifications: be specific!

RESPONSE: I banged my head against a brick wall. Finally got smart, wised up. I know better now. Won’t do it again.

Tell us about yourself: what events have brought you to us? How did you reach this decision? Are you aware of our function? The consequences and restrictions of this organization? Be reminded we are listening for slip-ups indicating a lack of conviction.

RESPONSE: I won’t repeat past mistakes, mistrust my feelings, learn from my experiences.

Administer the serum. Where’s that list of questions? We all know why we’re here, so let’s get right to it.

[scorching guitar solo]

There must be order! There must be order! How many times must they be burned before they learn their basic lesson? Recondition their behavior! Reprogram their responses!

I have questions, starting generally with What’s happening here? Is this an internal dialogue? Is this Patty’s board-level superego dressing down her id? Or are we outside her head, and she’s applying for indulgence from some dystopian state agency? Matters certainly take a turn toward A Clockwork Orange in that third verse. And on a record boiling over with attitude from its lead vocalist, the flat affect of Patty’s id/ petitioner persona in this moment suggests something fishy has happened here. Have her inquisitors broken her, drugged her, brainwashed her … ?

Not sure I’ll ever get to the bottom of this, but the stage-setting here cracks me up.

The record’s last track, “Jimmy Tomorrow” (Apple Music, Spotify) is where it all comes to a head. This is the Waitresses distilled to their purest essence. The song opens with an instrumental overture of what’s coming, then turns to its Act 1, where Patty delivers a masterfully snarky monologue over bass-scatting and some signature post-punk “angular” scratch guitars from Chris Butler. Act 1’s vocals—which are spoken-word poetry, really—cover a fair bit of ground:

• The shift from early ’70s KSU counterculture to NYC new wave: And yes: my hair was longer then. It’s what happens when your choices are narrowed to fashion or violence. You make adjustments.

• Ambivalence about capitalism and class: There’s nothing left wrong with me that money can’t cure, but I don’t want to be somebody else’s learning experience: some rich kid’s way to spend his allowance. I want magic in my real world.

• A sideswipe at modernist philosophical posturing: You said, “The amplification of the eternal present is the technology of desire.” Shoot! I thought you were already corroded.

This tidal wave of New Wave swells, crests, and soaks the city, whereupon Act 2 commences, the backing band snaps into a ska-punk pool-party groove, and the vocals turn to a call-response Q&A between the rest of the band and Patty. I.e.:

Q. Found a cure for gravity yet? A. Yes, I’m addicted to roofs and jets. Q. Found a cure for hunger yet? A. Black coffee and cigarettes. Q. Found a cure for desire yet? A. I don’t wanna talk about that—why do you keep asking me?

After several repetitions of this Patty relents and articulates her life’s purpose:

My goals? My goals are to find a cure for irony and make a fool out of God.

Brilliant—all of it. But it’s hard to listen to these last lines without feeling that the band tempted fate here. Note that earlier in the song Patty reflects on a moment when she pledged to quit cigarettes, but it was just more gas. Fourteen years later, Patty would die of lung cancer. God and irony are tough adversaries, and they play the long game.

Back at it now, after a brief moment of silent prayer, with “No Guilt” (Apple Music, Spotify). In my earlier post on the Long Blondes’ “Once and Never Again,” I wrote a little about my unease with breakup songs—and specifically, the subset of these where billionaire pop stars tell us their comeback stories. Look: I don’t object to the sentiment, but I do wish that the role models singing to our daughters could address matters of female empowerment that aren’t kickstarted by their boyfriends leaving them in the depths of hell. It’s for this reason that I nominate “No Guilt” today as the Best Breakup Song of All-Time, beating Jarvis Cocker’s “She’s a Lady” (Apple Music, Spotify) by a nose.

A quick note before we proceed: generally speaking I find that the more I learn and study about a band, the more I can appreciate the music they make. That said, digging deeper into the Waitresses threw me for a loop when I learned that Chris Butler has the sole songwriting credit on all these songs. That’s right: the hand-on-hip, sassy, sphinx-y feminist lyrics that lift this record onto my Top Shelf were written by a dude. Reading that sucked. Now it turns out Chris did consult closely with Patty on the songwriting, so that his written words more often than not captured her sentiments and sensibilities. Reading that helped, for sure. And still, somebody needs to sing the written lines, and for the life of me I can’t imagine this record with anyone other than Patty Donahue on vocals. Plus she doesn’t just sing the lines—she performs them. The swagger, the attitude, the fast-talking: that’s all Patty. All right: I’ve bounced back. The joy I take in Wasn’t Tomorrow Wonderful? is discounted, but only by a little.

Let’s talk about “No Guilt.” Like many breakup songs, it provides an update, but with a twist. Patty’s not telling her ex how she’s feeling—she’s briefing him on her progress living alone. In fact, the more you listen, the more it becomes clear: she needed this separation, just to move forward as an independent modern woman. I learned a lot, since you’ve been gone. I’ve done a lot, since you’ve been gone. Examples:

Needed new posters, so I bought ’em. I know the cost of stamps now. The 31st is when I pay the phone bill: I told them I don’t know anybody in Toronto!

Every day at 7, I’ve been watching Walter. I’ve been reading more and looking up the hard words.

I had no trouble setting up a desk. I learned the reason for a three-prong outlet. I got a hundred on my driver’s test.

And so on. Backing this record of personal progress are uplifting ska guitars and harrumphs from the saxophonist, and now and then a bell rings, as if to celebrate that Patty’s checked another box on her punch list.

Thank you for the chance to grow up. I’m sorry I wasn’t defeated. It wasn’t the end of the world.

As we bop and skank our way to the fade-out, Patty reassures her man—who given the pauses here, we assume is on the other end of a phone call:

I’m really fine. Everything’s great. … I’m doin’ all right. Really. Really, everything’s fine. … What? I’m doin’ all right. I’m doin’ all right. … Everything’s great. … Sorry but I’m fine. … That’s it.

Might be she’s reassuring herself, too. This song is perfect. The perfect opening track on a close-to-perfect record.

There is nothing not to love—and to love all day long—about the Waitresses. The service here is excellent, so patrons, please: don’t skimp on the tips.

And Patty, we miss you.

1. My children reported back to me that in New England schoolyards, the custom is to chant nana-nana-FOO-FOO, which is ludicrous and if I were a playground monitor would call for on-the-spot intervention and retraining in the Arts and Tradition of Abusing Others. No wonder these people grow up to be such buffoons in the bleachers of Fenway.

2. Ralph Carney has the sax credit on “Boys” and “No Guilt”—which I’m supposing were recorded in earlier sessions.