Orville Peck’s “dizzyingly queer” Nashville rodeo had a special emcee no one expected

Writer and filmmaker John Waters is a big fan of country music. One of his favorite country stars is the gay, mask-wearing musician Orville Peck.

Waters got to enjoy both – and commune with his inner cowboy — when he traveled to Nashville recently to host Peck’s Sixth Annual Rodeo, a gathering of country singers and fans who came together for three days of performances at three different venues in the Music City.

Waters was the emcee for the biggest event at the Rodeo, a six-hour concert at Ascend Amphitheater featuring Peck and other musicians, including Tanya Tucker, Mickey Guyton, and Noah Cyrus. The show was a reunion for Peck and Waters, the “special guest host” for Peck’s multi-artist “Rodeo at Red Rocks” concert in Colorado in 2021. 

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This year, Waters picked up where he left off, again singing Peck’s praises. In a monologue crafted just for the Rodeo, he also shared some of his views about country music and other subjects he doesn’t ordinarily address in his popular spoken-word shows around the country. He wondered, for example, if today’s “new non-binary kids” know about all the old country songs he hears on Willie’s Place on SiriusXM, and he speculated about what they do for fun. 

Based in Baltimore, Waters started by offering to sing The National Anthem (he was joking) and then telling the country fans in Tennessee that he’s part Southerner like them. He admitted that he’s not much of a horseback rider, though: 

“The first time I got on a horse was the last time I got on a horse,” he confided. “I never got on again.”

Still, Waters said, he’s a cowboy at heart.

“I’m a cockeyed cowboy. That’s what I am,” he told the audience. “And many of us here today are crackpot country in many ways. We’re hillbilly hipsters; we’re rock-and-roll radicals…we’re queer cowboys…bisexual brats…gender-bender yodelers. And guess what? We only have one pronoun: Y’all. I’m from Baltimore, which is half the south, so I can half say that right.”

‘Fractured fruitful future’

At Peck’s Rodeo, Waters wore a black and gold swirl-patterned sports jacket designed by the late Issey Miyake. His main job was introducing the singers and setting the stage for what he called the “fractured, fruitful future of country music we’re gonna hear today.” 

In addition to Tucker, Guyton, Cyrus, and Peck, the performers at Ascend Amphitheater included Goldie Boutilier, Medium Build (Nicholas Carpenter’s stage name), Waylon Payne, and Fancy Hagood.      

Waters didn’t just introduce the singers. He talked about their music and what it meant to him or took a gentle jab at them. He called Guyton a “black trailblazer” who performed at the 2024 Democratic National Convention and noted that her song “Black Like Me” was “based on a book that was so important to me when I was in junior high.” He called Medium Build “hot-ish” and “cool as a cuckoo-cumber.” He described Tucker as “the heat index and the wind chill factor in one perform storm.” He lauded Boutilier, a singer, DJ, and model now based in Paris, for clawing her way to “the best place here, the bottom of the bill.” 

Waters saved his most effusive praise for Peck, who’s having a big year after releasing his Stampede album and related videos. Stampede contains 15 tracks, all recorded as duets between Peck and other artists of various genres, including Elton John on “Saturday Night’s Alright (For Fighting),” Beck for “Death Valley High,” and Kylie Minogue and DJ and music producer Diplo on “Midnight Ride.” The first single off the album was Peck’s duet with country legend Willie Nelson, singing Ned Sublette’s “Cowboys are Frequently, Secretly Fond of Each Other,” written in 1981.

“He…startled the world by doing a gay country duet with Willie Nelson, which is so great,” Waters told the audience. “Can you imagine how confused some people were: ‘What? Willie Nelson’s gay?’ No, he’s straight and great and without hate like our other great hetero brothers and sisters here.”

Mutual admiration

Waters and Peck have had a mutual admiration society ever since Waters talked about Peck during one of his spoken-word shows in 2019, and the singer called him to say thank you. Peck said in a 2020 interview that he admired Waters more than anyone when he was growing up.

“John Waters was my absolute No. 1 idol, inspiration when I was a teenager,” he said on Sloppy Seconds with Big Dipper and Meatball, a podcast hosted by rapper Dan Stermer and drag artist Logan Jennings. “John Waters changed my entire perception of art and life, really.”

Peck was between shows during a tour in Australia when he made the call, unsure if he would wake Waters up or if he would even answer his phone. He said he got Waters’ private number from his agent because they both had the same booking agency, but he held onto it for weeks before working up the courage to call.

“Do I text him? Does he even have a cell phone? He’s like a weird guy,” Peck said on the podcast. “And so we’re sitting in this lobby, and we were in Sydney or Melbourne, I think. We were waiting for the transport to take us to the festival, and it was going to be about an hour in the lobby. I just thought, like, OK, f**k it, I’m just going to call him, try it. I didn’t even know what time it was in Baltimore.”

Waters answered the phone and knew exactly who Peck was.

“I call him and I just hear, like, (deep voice) ‘Hello?’ and I was like, ‘Hi, is this John?’ And he goes, ‘Who is this?’ And I said, ‘Oh, hi John. This is, this is Orville Peck.’ And he said, ‘Orville Peck? Well, I’m a big, big fan.’ And then, I mean I obviously just like disintegrated and like left my body and then he basically just chatted with me for like 45 minutes and I was laughing so hard people were staring at me.”

Peck said Waters turned out to be exactly what a fan might expect.

“If you’re a fan of John Waters, if you’ve seen any of his films or read any of his books or anything, he is exactly the person you think he will be,” he said. “He’s so knowledgeable and he just wants to chat about history and references and the kind of funny oddity of mundane life. He was cracking me up so hard I was like crying-laughing.”

After their initial phone conversation, Peck asked Waters to appear in one of his videos, “Legends Never Die,” with Shania Twain. Then, he asked Waters to host his concert at Red Rocks, an outdoor venue that Waters has described as “Hollywood Bowl meets Jurassic Park.” He told an interviewer this year that of all the people in the world, living or dead, Waters would be his ideal dinner guest. 

What he likes most about Peck, Waters said, is that “he’s the real thing from top to bottom, so to speak…He’s country through and through. He’s a new young version of an old country singer. There’s no irony with him. None at all. He’s a crab-free cowboy. A punk pony. A stud on a stampede. A butch Broadway buckaroo.”

Happy and healthy

Peck’s setlist at Ascend Amphitheater included: “Big Sky,” “Turn to Hate,”  “C’mon Baby, Cry,” “No Glory in the West,” “Hexie Mountains,” “How Far Will We Take It?” with Noah Cyrus, “Conquer the Heart,” “Drive Me, Crazy,” “Blush,” “The Curse of the Blackened Eye,” “Where Are We Now?” with Mickey Guyton in their live debut, “Any Turn,” “Cowboys Are Frequently, Secretly Fond of Each Other,” “Outta Time,” “Dead of Night,” “Rhinestone Cowboy” with Waylon Payne and Fancy Hagood, and “Bronco.” 

 Peck started by saying he has three rules for fans at his concerts. 

“Rule number one is: You have to sing along even if you don’t know the words — because that’s funnier for us,” he said. “Second rule is, If you are able to and you feel like it, please dance along because we really, really, really like that, OK? And the third one is kind of serious: If at any point during the show you feel like crying, you have to cry. Can we follow those three simple rules? Fabulous!”

Between songs, Peck interacted with his fans — asking how they were doing, dedicating “Drive Me, Crazy,” his song about truck drivers in love, to a mask-wearing trucker in the audience named Jerome. He recalled when he was told that “this old guy from Texas” wanted to do a duet with him, and then found out it was Willie Nelson.

“Not only did Willie Nelson want to do a song with me,” Peck said, “but he wanted to do a song about gay cowboys, which, it’s very comparable for me, because I’m…a…gay…cowboy.”

At the end of the night, Peck gave “a big shout-out” to all the “artists, friends, idols” who performed at his Rodeo – “and of course to John Waters for hosting, thank you very much.”

Peck’s Rodeo received high marks from Nashville Scene critic Jason Shawhan, who called it a “dizzyingly queer event” and said Peck’s voice “has such power that it can’t even be fully registered on tape.” Like Waters, Shawhan noted Peck’s authenticity, calling him “a country artist, with no asterisk or subsequent elaboration needed” and a performer who “doesn’t have to play the concealing game as to who his songs are about.” He wrote that Peck’s rendition of “Rhinestone Cowboy” with Payne and Hagood was “fun, a tad subversive, and the kind of enjoyable cover that spans many eras and gets everyone on the same page.”

Shawhan raved about Waters, too.

“Host John Waters (!) was the perfect emcee for the five-act, six-hour show,” he said. “He was nimble on his feet and gave each of the artists all the respect and gentle ribbing they merited, and he let the crowd know where the aesthetic sensibility for the day was oriented. His welcome was comprehensive, proclaiming that we all had one pronoun, ‘y’all,’ and we better see that on a bumper sticker posthaste.”

“Give that man the key to the city,” he urged.

Overall, it wasn’t a bad trip for a certain cockeyed cowboy from the East Coast: a night of country music and a reunion with Orville Peck. Waters always says people ought to have a backup plan in case everything fails. Hosting rodeos for Orville Peck seems a perfect one for him.

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