In 1966, the English rock band The Troggs had a smash hit song with the single “Wild Thing.” Released in April 1966, the song hit No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 on July 30, 1966, and remained there for two weeks. Nearly 60 years later, it was ranked as one of the greatest songs of all time by Rolling Stone.
The song was recorded using leftover studio time, and it was done in record time.
Troggs guitarist Chris Britton told the Sydney Morning Herald, “The song was sent to us as a demo on an acetate disc by Larry Page, our manager at the time.”
Page invited the Troggs to jump into the end of studio time he had booked, and they quickly recorded the song.
“[Page] said, 'There might be 10 to 15 minutes left at the end of the session, and I think we could fit in a bit of a recording,'" Britton recalled. "We got there and unloaded all the gear, and in the last 10 or 15 minutes of the studio time, we jumped into the studio. They put some microphones in front of the amps, and we recorded 'Wild Thing' and 'With a Girl Like You' in the same session in 10 minutes. And it was actually a live recording, in four-track mono – and then we just came out."
While the Troggs' song was a hit, one year earlier, the first version of “Wild Thing” was recorded by American rock band The Wild Ones, and it failed to chart at all.
The song, written by Chip Taylor, was written in 1965 for the house band at the New York City disco Arthur, per Ultimate Classic Rock. Taylor received a phone call from a United Artists executive who told him he was working with a group called The Wild Ones and wondered if he had something he could send over for them to record. And he needed the song fast.
An emergency songwriting session
“I remember the day I wrote 'Wild Thing,' I wrote it for a group that was recording the next day (The Wild Ones). It was a very organic song, and I hadn't really finished it by the studio time,” Taylor told BBC News.
In an interview with Classic Rock, Taylor admitted that at that point in his songwriting career, he was writing “sweaty kind of dumb things because I didn’t know a lot of chords.” Still, he insisted that when he wrote “Wild Thing,” he took the assignment “as the most serious thing in the universe.”
Taylor wrote and recorded a demo for the song “Wild Thing” in one day. The Wild Ones version of “Wild Thing” was rereleased on Nov. 1, 1965, and it did nothing on the charts. The band broke up in 1967.
While The Wild Ones’ song was a flop, Taylor’s demo wasn’t. When Troggs manager Larry Page heard the demo of the song, he knew his band could do something with it, which is why he rushed them to record it in a chaotic session in London.
“We did ‘Wild Thing’ and ‘With A Girl Like You’ on the end of a Larry Page Orchestra session,” Britton told Uncut. "We drove up to Olympic Studios in London from Andover in our battered J4 van, which took two of us to drive, because someone had to lean over and help turn the steering wheel. …It was utter chaos. Anyway, we arrived outside Olympic, and Larry said, ‘Come on, load yourselves in.' We got in as fast as we could, did a quick run through to get a sound balance, played ‘Wild Thing,' played ‘With A Girl Like You,’ and we were back out in 20 minutes."
The Wild Ones singer was critical of his band's version of the song
Taylor appreciated The Wild Ones version of “Wild Thing,” but noted it wasn’t really what he had envisioned for the song.
“The version that The Wild Ones did was nice, but it really wasn't like my demo,” he told BBC. “As a songwriter, you were always hoping that the group would get the right feel of your song and when I heard The Troggs' record I thought, 'Woah, this is a perfect recording of this song, if this doesn't make it then nothing will', because the feel was exactly like my demo. It was simple and it just felt great. I really loved it.
Wild Ones guitarist and backup singer Chuck Alden agreed, and he admitted he was never thrilled with his band’s version of the song.
“’Wild Thing’ is not something I take pride in,” Alden admitted to Uncut. “It’s like I was holding my nose when I sang it. When you record for a producer, you do what they tell you to do, and that’s it, case closed. It’s spilt milk. I had nothing to do with it except to go in and try to put down a vocal. Looking back, I didn’t even do a good reading on it. If you listen to the demo, they had that little potato pie tin sound, banging away. The Troggs did it the way it should’ve been done."
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