Wild Thing Troggs

ROCKAEOLOGY.COM: Before the Troggs, the Wild Ones: 'Wild Thing'

In 1965 Sybil Burton opened Arthur, a New York City discotheque that catered to glitterati like Rudolf Nureyev, Truman Capote, Tennessee Williams and Liza Minelli. For her house band, Burton hired away the Wild Ones from the better-known Peppermint Lounge and made drummer Jordan Christopher her musical director.

Burton, who would later marry Christopher, helped secure the group a recording contract with United Artists. For an upcoming session, seasoned producer Gerry Granahan called songwriter Chip Taylor to ask if he had any new songs for the band.

Cory Frye writes that it didn’t take Taylor, brother of actor Jon Voight, long to come up with “Wild Thing.”
Taylor hunkered down with a guitar and some basic chords and crafted a brand-new song in the three hours between his telephone conversation and a demo session he’d already booked at a New York studio.

“I started fooling around my office with a cool little rhythm thing,” Taylor wrote in his memoir, “Songs from a Dutch Tour,” “with a percussive-type strum that had its own sweaty unschooled thing. My guess is that if I was taught to play guitar, my strum would not have been that organic and this song could not have been written.”

The lyrics arrived on the fly, concocted to match the groove, with pauses added for deliberate effect… He added one final flourish: a whistled interlude by engineer Ron Johnson.
All the records in the late '50s and '60s were done by arrangers writing out every note for every player. So, when you walked into a session, most of the time it was with strings and horns and stuff…

Even though it was coming into rock 'n' roll, there were always still going to be some string players around. There were still going to be notes written out for the drummer to play every beat and for the bass player to play every note. So, with “Wild Thing” it's the strumming. The guitar is almost like a little bit of a percussion instrument. When they recorded it, they didn't do any of the in-between things. It just meant nothing! It didn't get the power of the song. They took the power of the song and they diminished it.
I don’t read music, so I picks up this “Wild Thing” and I just reads the lyrics. And I think “What the hell is this? ‘You make everything… groovy?’—I just thought it was a joke. I mean the word “groovy” was right out. “What crap are they sending us?