Wasn’t Tomorrow Wonderful? in early 1982. A re-release of “I Know What Boys Like”, through Polydor, reached No. 62 on the Billboard Hot 100.ZE approached Butler and its other post-punk acts in the summer of 1981 and asked each to come up with a festive song for a planned holiday compilation, A Christmas Record.Butler did so begrudgingly.
The Waitresses were in the middle of a fractious and punishing tour of small venues. Butler ignored the request as long as possible, but when pressed by the label boss, he relented.
On a hot August day, he put the song together using a bunch of half-finished riffs he’d been working on and completed the lyrics on the way to the recording studio in Greenwich Village in New York City.“I go back and I try to think of what the original inspiration was.
I think it was just very much that for years I hated Christmas,” Butler later said.“Everybody I knew in New York was running around like a bunch of fiends.