THE PROFESSOR OF COOL
A CONVERSATION WITH THE MIGHTY MANFRED OF THE WOGGLES
The Woggles have been making music for over 30 years, and they have recently released the wonderful Time Has Come. It is their first full-length album since 2017’s Tally Ho! During that time, there were a few changes for The Woggles, but one thing is for sure, they still produce groovy music. Their sound is pure garage rock mixed with pop and punk. It all combines together to make a wonderful noise of rock ‘n’ roll, and the end result is the wonderful Time Has Come.
I recently had the opportunity to speak to the one and only Mighty Manfred, a cooler person you are not going to meet. We discussed the band, The Woggles, The Grammy Museum and so much more.
Recently Manfred caught a very special show at The Grammy Museum, and it was a pretty cool show. “It was the 100th birthday celebration of Henry Mancini. The day before, they had a big concert at the Hollywood Bowl, and at the Grammy Museum, it was a lot of the same players, including his daughter who sang on a number of songs. They played about six songs, and there was a great question and answer thing that went on, a great discussion. It was really cool. It is a smallish theatre. I would be surprised if there were more than 60 or 80 people there, but it was way cool.”
I remind him that he is The Professor of Cool, which he quickly denies. But he did talk about the time he got to play with Ian McLagan of The Faces. “The only time I was at The Grammy Museum must have been 2009 or 2010. He did a thing there, just him and a bass player and he talked for about 10 minutes and then played two or three songs, then talked for 10 or 15 minutes. That was phenomenal. At the time he had also put out a record on a friend of mine’s record label who helped land this gig, and afterwards we went out to a pub and I got to share a pint with Ian McLagan. That man is the epitome of cool. As The Woggles, around 1990 or 1991, there was a German label who asked us to contribute to a Small Faces tribute record they were doing. So we did “Hey Girl” and we did it in German too, and it just never came out. Later on they said we could put it out if we want, but by then we had a different guy playing guitar and he was complaining that the guitars were in tune on that recording, so it just languished. There were other songs recorded at the time, like Little Richard’s “She’s Got It” and it seems like there was one other one. There is, speaking of going through the dregs and bowels, this particular guitar player recorded a couple of tracks that will come out as a single this fall on the French label Rogue records.”
TIME HAS COME ALBUM REVIEW
But, this year, the band has released their new album, Time Has Come. However, the album took a while to complete due to life circumstances. “Our guitar player, Flesh Hammer, whose real name was Jeff Walls, had been our producer early on and he used to play in an 1980s band Guadalcanal Diary, and he went on to form his own band Hillbilly Frankenstein. They were doing great in the southeast predating the lounge revival and rockabilly. Jeff was always on the cusp of things, in 2003, our guitar player ‘The Mighty Montague’, George Holton III passed away. Jeff asked if could be our guitar player. I reminded him that he would be taking a big pay cut, stepping out from producer to band member,” laughs Manfred. “But he was willing to take it on the chin. So from 2003 until 2019 he was the guitar player of the band, which was great.
“The sad thing is he passed away in 2019 from pancreatic cancer, which had been misdiagnosed. The only good thing in the bad event is that he was never in any pain, which is why it was misdiagnosed. So, we were going to do shows to raise money for medical costs, but sadly he passed away. Those shows became memorial shows and the money went to medical expenses. We didn’t want the next guitar player to be directly compared, people will make comparisons anyway, but it made more sense to record with a lot of our guitar playing buddies because over the years people have wanted to play with the band. So, let’s do something now.”
This meant calling on some well-known friends. “Well first was [Little Steven] Van Zandt. In February 2020 we went and recorded several songs with him, and that was the first of the people who we wanted to record stuff with. One of the tracks on there is Flesh Hammer, which was a tribute song to Jeff and was written by Pat Beers, the guitarist of The Schizophonics. The last shows Jeff did were on the west coast and we did them with The Schizophonics and Jeff and Pat were quite close, so Pat wrote the song and we knew we had to record that.”
But they could not be a band with just guitarists, so they had Shane Pringle join the band. But they wanted to go back to the original line-up of the band and add a second guitarist. So they added Graham Day, which allows Pringle to play guitar but also keyboards and saxophone.
After 30 years plus, Manfred and the band still are excited by what they do and continue to spread their music coast to coast. “It is like a shark that is swimming…keep swimming or die. I don’t want to die yet, because when you die, you die forever. I’m trying to live my life to the fullest. I expose myself to stuff all the time. There are things I enjoy, there are things I don’t enjoy. Some things inspire me to create my own art. I am very happy with the riches I have created, if no one else sees that, well that’s fine because at the estate sale, none of that matters.
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Background Photo Credit: Greg Pope
