Perhaps the most fascinating news story to appear above the front page fold of British newspaper The Daily Mirror in 1964 concerned the discovery, by vacationing caravaners wandering the Black Hills, of a naked band of troglodytes peeking their hairy heads from a cave—the mouth of which was littered with animal bones—near Kniver’s Edge, Staffordshire.
Terrified, the caravaners fled to the nearby market town of Stourbridge to report their discovery, only to be informed by locals that the troglodytes were no big secret. “Oh them,” said shopkeeper Midge Groot. “They’re a fine bunch of lads, if a bit loud. They’re fond of playing skiffle music with rocks. No easy feat, that.” Royal Air Force Air Marshall (Ret.) Sir Evelyn Crowsley-Spork took a dimmer view of his neighbors: “Bad for the digestion, frankly. Filthy, long-haired louts in need of a good delousing. Almost as unsanitary as The Beatles.”
Fortunately Crowsley-Spork’s opinion wasn’t shared by Fontana Records’ A&R man Andrew Moog Youngam, who heard the future in the form of the past in the group of feral hit-makers whose name he quickly abbreviated to The Troggs. “Their sound was primitive to say the least,” he would later tell band biographer Andrew Beaky Dee. “But when they played their cover of the Wild Ones’ ‘Wild Thing’ I knew it would become the next ‘Louie Louie.’ First, of course, I had to plead with them to drop the sizeable boulders they intended to crush my skull with.”
It took The Troggs—who bristled at being called a garage rock band, preferring the term “cave rock” instead—two years to become sufficiently civilized to enter a recording studio, but their first single, the brontosaurus stomp (yeah, I know, dinosaurs were long extinct, but nobody told The Troggs that!) “Wild Thing,” which went on to top the U.S. Billboard charts. “Wild Thing”–on which vocalist Reg Presley says he “thinks” he loves his gal but wants to test drive her first—was followed by a string of hits and semi-hits culminating in October 1967’s garage pop standard “Love Is All Around.” After that the band’s members purchased Bentleys, took up cricket, and returned hooting to their cave.
The Troggs’ hits, as well as a few songs no one not bat-cave crazy would call hits, can be found on 1994’s Greatest Hits. You’ll find “Wild Thing” first (duh), followed by the positively gentrified and much-beloved “Love Is All Around,” which in a perfect world would have won them knighthood. Presley’s gritty vocals dirty up the band’s second single “With a Girl Like You,” but the song’s hardly drag-your-girl-into-the-lair-by-her-hair fare—by July 1966 the boys had already learned how to use the lobster fork and tossed their stone-pointed spears into the nearest rubbish tip. But while you can take the troglodyte out of the cave but you can’t take the cave out of the troglodyte, as The Troggs prove on B-Side “I Want You,” which is almost as marrow-sucking as “Wild Thing,” perhaps because it is “Wild Thing” with a bit of tweaking.
The Troggs offered similar proof that they weren’t completely domesticated on the proto-punk garage rack classic “I Can’t Control Myself.” “Oh no!!” screams Presley at the song’s beginning, followed by the boys in the band singing “Ba ba ba ba ba ba ba” like the sheep they liked to eat raw. Meanwhile Reg makes it known that if his girl knew him the way he knows himself her knees would bend and her hair would curl (saving her the cost of a perm!). No impulse control rock is nothing new, but Reg’s blood-curdling scream at the end will make you think he invented it. “I Can’t Control Myself” is followed by B-Side “Gonna Make You” with its Bo Diddley beat and very polite vocals, which are kinda cool but make you wonder if the band hasn’t had too many watercress sandwiches. But wait—towards the end Chris Britton’s guitar spazzes out and the lads commence to screaming as they hurl their watercress sandwiches into the loo where they belong.
“Anyway That You Want Me” is so tender and pop perfect it comes with strings, and Presley makes so nice it’s easy to miss how the surprisingly ecology-conscious Troggs have recycled “Wild Thing” for a second time. “Give It to Me” grows in intensity as it goes along—Presley goes from playing nice at the beginning to demanding at the end. Which leaves “Night of the Long Grass,” a so-so psychedelic mind-benders, and “Girl in Black,” which was making its second appearance on the flip side of Troggs’ single (the first backed the band’s previous single and total flop “My Lady”). But instead of making it do double-duty on the ass ends of other singles The Troggs should have flaunted it, because it’s a Who-inspired raver complete with power chords and Keith Moon cymbal hysterics. Its downfall is Presley, who sounds like he’s singing while having high tea with Neville Chamberlain.
The Troggs proved that we wouldn’t have evolved to human status were it not for the their invention of rock and roll. Let’s face it—rock music was the only thing worth becoming human for. A closer examination of the band’s lair revealed they were also responsible for the inventions of the bong, badminton, Baja Blast Mountain Dew, baked beans for breakfast, and the blooper reels at the end of film comedies. But they’ll always be best remembered for “Wild Thing,” which made our hearts sing. But it was The Troggs who made everything groovy.
GRADED ON A CURVE:
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