Chip Taylor (brother to Jon Voight and uncle to Angelina Jolie) wrote “Wild Thing” in the span of a few minutes, and it shows.
It’s not particularly substantive in either lyrics or music, and Taylor himself considered it a throwaway, but The Wild Ones needed a single and were willing to pay Taylor for one, and… well, a gig’s a gig. And as for the vocals on that original recording… well, they were pretty cringeworthy, too.
But then six months later, The Troggs got a hold of “Wild Thing.”
They stripped it down to nothing but its three chords, percussion, and the most famous ocarina solo in rock and roll, and the rest was history.
“Wild Thing” by The Troggs became an instant classic, reaching the top of the Billboard Hot 100 in 1966 and landing squarely in the middle of Rolling Stone’s 500 Greatest Songs of All Time at #257.
It’s a song that any bar band worth it’s salt knows, and the E Street Band is nothing if not the world’s greatest bar band. So in 2009 in Hartford, when a fan requested the song during the “Stump the Band” segment of the show (with a sign so small it’s amazing Bruce even saw it), Bruce couldn’t help but rise to the challenge.
The result was professionally captured and streamed on Bruce’s web site (or at least part of it was).
The E Street Band was clearly up to the task, particularly Max. They reprised it in Stockholm six weeks later, this time with Max’s son Jay on the drums.
But the band’s arguably best performance was their third and last performance to date, in Cork on the Wrecking Ball Tour. It was at least the loosest, with Bruce hamming his vocal and a bit of mid-song confusion about how to handle the ocarina solo before Roy improv-ed his way through it.
(Bruce was wrong about the songwriting credit, though).
That was the most recent time “Wild Thing” surfaced on a Springsteen set list to date, but it may not be the last. Bruce has too much fun with it to resist if he ever sees a sign for it again.
Wild Thing
First performed: April 24, 2009 (Hartford, CT)
Last performed: July 18, 2013 (Cork, Ireland)
