The 1966 song Frank Zappa called “so bad it was magnificent”
The task of buying a gift for Frank Zappa was no doubt a difficult one. The moustachioed musician had fiercely firm tastes on music, but I’ll be damned if they ever aligned coherently. There was no knowing what he liked in most walks of life.
In fact, he even endured a bitter feud with The Velvet Underground, to such an extent that Lou Reed declared him the “most untalented musician” ever, before the pair became bosom buddies and were brimming with mutual respect.
But nothing added up, and remaining an enigmatic iconoclast was always part of the appeal when it came to Zappa. To some extent, this was the guitarist’s manufactured way of building up his own outsider angle amid the counterculture melee. That very same indifference also meant he rarely got caught up in what the status quo was saying and remained clear-eyed about the actual ‘quality’ of the music itself.
That unpredictability extended beyond his public persona and into the way he engaged with music itself. Zappa didn’t judge songs by conventional standards of taste or technical brilliance.
Instead, he seemed drawn to the intent behind them, the feeling they created, or even the audacity of their execution. It meant he could dismiss entire movements while still championing individual tracks that, on paper, should have fallen into the same category. His listening habits weren’t guided by genre loyalty or cultural alignment but by a far more instinctive response to what he considered interesting, provocative or, at times, bizarrely compelling.
It also explains why his opinions could feel contradictory without ever seeming insincere. Zappa wasn’t trying to be contrary for the sake of it; he simply valued originality in whatever form it took, whether that came wrapped in sophistication or raw simplicity. In a musical landscape increasingly concerned with image and identity, he remained focused on the substance of the work itself, even if that meant praising something he openly acknowledged as flawed.
So, he might’ve thought the hippy movement was a stupid “fad”, but he did dig some psychedelia and happily championed ’96 Tears’ by Question Mark and the Mysterians as “an art statement”. He also bashed Tommy James & The Shondells but later admitted: “When I heard ‘Crimson And Clover,’ I said, ‘Well . . . they really got something going for ’em.’ That really turned out to be a winner.”
But in the same 1969 Pop Chronicles interview, he reserved his strongest praise for ‘Wild Thing’ by The Troggs. He said that the classic rock song “was so bad it was magnificent. That was a heavy item”. With cleverly chosen words, he later called it an “‘awful-good’ record”, solidifying his stance on the unruly tune.
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 demands 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’.”
When the demo was handed to The Troggs, there was a touch of uncertainty. Their lead singer, 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!”
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 the textbook definition of punk. Perhaps it was that prescience that Zappa admired, and it was the simplicity he derided simultaneously.
