How The Troggs changed the course of music with ‘Wild Thing’
You’re already singing it, aren’t you? The chorus is engrained in society. It has reached that rare lofty height of transcending pop culture and entering our lives at large. You could be a reggae loving 18 year old or an 80 year old Methodist who thought rock was perverse, but at one point or another, we’ve all sung the growled chorus to The Troggs’ ‘Wild Thing’, and that is a scientific fact. I don’t have any evidence, but I’m sure we’ll find it written in the laws of the universe should an alien ever hand us that sacred tome of elusive knowledge.
The song was written by Chip Taylor – who just so happens to be Angelina Jolie’s uncle – during a time when he was struggling to align his songwriting with the demand of the counterculture movement. “I was basically a country writer to start with,” Taylor told Top 2000. “I was from New York City, so I was one of the only country writers there. Then I started writing some rock ‘n’ roll songs which pretty much sounded more Memphis based than New York based. I had no success at the time before ‘Wild Thing’.”
The song came from a sort of odd mix of apathetic desperation. Taylor was tasked with writing a rock ‘n’ roll track in 24 hours if he could. He simply figured that he would give it a bash—and it turned out to be more of a literal bash than he first mused. He simply tried to get into the rocking spirit rather than meddle in musicology or medium as he would when writing a country song. The zeitgeist was swinging he set about capturing that “feel” more than anything.
When the demo was handed to The Troggs there was a touch of uncertainty. Their lead singer, thee fortuitously named Reg Presley, thought it sounded like a hit with a wallop. However, their lead guitarist Chris Britton had been studying classical guitar for almost a decade and he simply cautioned, “it’s three chords!” Now, at the time, in 1966, The Beatles had formed a dichotomy—they clearly pulled away from ‘hit’ based stuff with the complexity of Rubber Soul, while the peace and love of the age contrastingly still pushed flowery simple numbers.
“I think it started when things were getting very syrupy, sugary, kind of music in those days,” Presley recalled. The Troggs juxtaposed this with a grizzly roar of distortion and attitude. “I think it sort of said something about punk for the first time. We used to routine in a garage, so it was coming from the roots. And it was exciting.” In essence, the simplicity that Britton once worried about actually proved to be the beauty of it. It said to hell with virtuosos or sweet radio plays, this is where it’s at. This is the rebellious spirit that this age really needs and you can do it yourself.
As Presley continues: “I think the strength of ‘Wild Thing’ is that every guitarist that ever picks up a guitar to begin to learn to play thinks, ‘I’ll start with something easy’. And they can pick it up, do three chords, and they’ve got a song straight away to sing. And it is almost like a national anthem of the young. It’s the aggression of the young.” That is textbook definition punk. Importantly, it didn’t hide through this or shroud the simplicity, it heightened it further with guttural distortion and a slowed-down, swaggering rhythm. It added perfectly on the nose lyrics to the legacy that Link Wray’s ‘Rumble’ helped to start.
