I still play this song and it’s twin Louie Louie. I like the Hendrix version too but there’s no substitute for the original way The Troggs produced the song WILD THING. It was a new thing.
It’s easy to see why so many aspiring rockers took to the song as their first lesson. Strummed in a bluesy rock A-major and using a simple chord progression, Wild Thing was that raunchy, goofy ode to unbridled lust that anybody could relate to and that almost anybody could play – all the things that have made Wild Thing perfect cover fodder for major stars and rank amateurs alike.
However Taylor insists that Wild Thing in execution and intent was serious business.
“I treat all my songs seriously,” he says. “There was an honesty to the song. Sure, when you break it down there’s not a lot to it. But when I was writing it, I was treating it as the most serious thing in the universe.”
By 1965, Chip Taylor, who readily admits he was writing “sweaty kind of dumb things because I didn’t know a lot of chords”, had made a name for himself as an April Blackwood Music staff writer in the country vein, penning songs for the likes of Johnny Cash, Willie Nelson and Chet Atkins.
Read the complete article here:
https://www.loudersound.com/features/the-story-behind-the-song-wild-thing-by-the-troggs