The Wolfgang Press: Funky Little Demons

Annotations, Notes, and Autobiographical Musings during the reduction of a full length album to an EP-length bundle of only five tracks, primarily for mobile iPhone use. It's called EPification and it's what's for dinner.

The Wolfgang Press.
Funky Little Demons (1995).
Label: 4AD.
Genre: Rock.Alt.
E.P.ified Running Time: 20.5 minutes.

• Going South
• Chains
• Christianity
• Derek the Confessor
• People Say

In the summer of 1995, I stayed in Tallahassee not so much to take courses at Florida State... but rather, to drink and have a damn good time. I'm still a bit amazed I survived that summer. It was a mess. A gloriously fun mess. From what I remember.

I'm not exactly proud of myself during the year of 1995.  I still cringe when I really think back to some of the shit I said and did... but those slightly uncomfortable memories are still wrapped in a nice warm blanket of bittersweet nostalgia.

Those were the days when I'd bleach my thick hair to a yellowish-orange tone. I'm bald now.

Those were the days when ZIMA once sent me a care package, asking me to please stop mailing them letters of advice on how to market ZIMA GOLD in the Tallahassee area.

Those were the days of endless shots of whatevah at Surfside Beach Club on the Gulf of Mexico coast, near Alligator Point -- before the owner burned his own joint down for insurance money. He was later caught by authorities and arrested.

Yeah, those were the days of playing guitar until the sun rose above campus. I can still feel those thick mosquito-laden blankets of humidity in the night air.

Fortunately, I survived that year.  Particularly that summer. Despite trying to rope-swing off a small cliff into a sinkhole, drunk off my ass, and literally sliding down and off the rope, busting my toes open on the limestone bedrock before toppling into the thick, blue water of the sink. I tumbled into the water, and came up laughing. That was the summer of 1995 in a nutshell.

The Wolfgang Press and their album Funky Little Demons was an appropriate soundtrack for that summer. Along with Soul Coughing's Ruby Vroom album, Funky Little Demons was the music playing in my head during these odd moments of destructive mayhem. Listening to it now is a different experience, clearly. It makes me think back to that summer and serves as an odd reframing tool, contrasting then and now.

"Going South" is the big single of the album, and an appropriate start. It's as good a driving-song as you can get in the mid-1990s.  "Peace and love, a phony kind of blubber. My instincts tell me to crash [ . . . ] So I'm moving south to the Great Unknown." If that's not made for road-tripping through the Apalachicola National Forest in search of stories, then I don't know what is. This song always stirs those memories and kicks nostalgia into high gear. It makes you want to just drive, whether there are roads or not (and often, there weren't any roads in the backwoods of Tallahassee... not that we ever noticed the difference).

"Chains" is my next pick. I immediately find myself wanting to break the rules for this particular E.P.ification. At the time, I also had the "Going South" single which featured a brilliantly atmospheric remix of "Chains" -- the "Wobble Mix".  Man, I used to listen to this song late at night, or early in the morning. It's a particularly effective song to listen to after a long, long night -- once the party's broken up and everybody's either gone home, passed out, or both. It's the song that follows the storm. It's the softness of four a.m., drenched in the sweat of a thick Tallahassee morning.

"Christianity" follows. A synthy track, but a rather nasty vibe in the lyrics. I have no idea how many times I listened to this song before paying attention to the lyrics. And when I did?  It hit rather hard. Yeah, a rather harsh song. And oddly appropriate to my life at the time.

"Derek the Confessor" is a soft song with an undercurrent of brooding tension. The lyrics echo and reverberate, again, my sense of nostalgia and memory now. Thinking about 1995 and who I was then, I'm faced with the memories of how badly things got fucked up the following year. "Well, I've been thinking about all of the things I've seen . . . Like looking around for people inside my reach. You can't take them back, you can't take them home. So if you let them down, then you must let them go." This song hits me harder now than it did in 1995. There were no confessions in 1995.

The E.P.ification ends with "People Say". A simple song, a light song, a crisp song. An appropriate last song. After the foray into darker vibes, "People Say" brings us back up. Sort of. The tone is upbeat in an off-kilter way. The lyrics a little less so.  "People say they think, but they don't. And then they say they will, but they won't." And yet, the attitude of the song is, but that's okay. It is what it is.

Sort of like those strained and uncomfortable memories of 1995 and 1996:

It was what it was.

A gratifying E.P.ification. It's been too long since I've gone south with the Wolfgang Press.

Janson