“Boys in cowboy hats”—said the six-foot-four blonde Austrian woman in a bar in Hamburg—“are either really cool, or really…weird.”
“Can they be both?” I asked.
“No. No. Well…maybe you. Maybe you could be both.”
This anecdote is not about boys in cowboy hats, but it does open the window for discussion about The Troggs, a very cool and also very weird British rock ’n’ roll band from the 1960s.
While driving back from San Diego tonight, I got on a Troggs kick on YouTube, and it struck me just how damn weird they were. I mean, these guys were really strange.
We’ve all heard their big hit, their party-rock classic, “Wild Thing,” since we were little kids. The song, sixty years later, is still inescapable. It comes out of speakers at the supermarket. It gets played all the time on oldies radio. We know all the words. The song is, as they say—ubiquitous. I rarely use that word, but in this case, it applies. You probably don’t think anything of it—it’s just there, always, a hit for the ages.
And yet, put yourself back in 1966 for a second. You’ve got The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, The Who, The Kinks, The Hollies—the British Invasion is taking the world by storm. Each group has their own unique personality, and their own niche in this newly crowded genre of music. The Beatles have all those gorgeous Lennon-McCartney compositions, pop masterpieces all. The Stones are the dark reflection of the Beatles, coming up with mean-sounding and unforgettable songs like “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” and “Get Off My Cloud.” The Kinks have great songs courtesy Ray Davies with the unique slash-and-burn guitar of his brother, Dave Davies. The Hollies have impeccable three-part harmonies with the lowest voice beginning where most group’s highest voice ends.
How to make a dent in this market? There are hundreds of bands, all trying to get hits, all vying for the attention at the top of the heap.
If you’re Reg Presley, Ronnie Bond, Pete Staples, and Chris Britton, you form a band called The Troggs (short for The Troglodytes, which was the original name of the band). You play your instruments in the most primitive way possible, with a built-in out-of-tune-ness that’s an integral part of your sound. You go down to Carnaby Street in London and get some outrageous new suits that would make even Austin Powers feel a twinge of embarrassment. You play the most whacked-out “Louie Louie” three-chord riff on the guitars and bass. Then you give your lead singer, Reg Presley, the microphone.
Presley’s singing voice is sort of the British Invasion version of William Shatner’s acting. It’s always completely over the top, and yet you can’t turn it off or look away. If 1940s British actor James Mason had a teenage son who bought flamboyant Carnaby Street suits and wore his hair long and was trying to get everyone to look at him in a crowded nightclub, he would sing like Reg Presley. It’s hard to describe just how strange Reg Presley’s voice is until you hear it. It’s nasal, and snotty, and cuts through the mix like a knife. It’s one of the strangest singing voices of all time.
And then Presley would step up to the microphone and deliver the sermon:
“WILD THING…YOU MAKE MY HEART SING.
YOU MAKE EVERYTHING…
GROOVY…
WILD THING.”
If that wasn’t unsettling enough, the solo on “Wild Thing” is played on an ocarina, of all things—one of those potato-shaped objects with five holes for fingering and one for blowing into. An ocarina! Man, these guys were really strange.
A batch of truly great and inspired raw and primal (two adjectives that get used a lot when describing The Troggs) singles followed: “Love Is All Around,” “I Can’t Control Myself,” and perhaps my favorite, “With a Girl Like You.”
There’s a fantastic YouTube video of The Troggs performing “With a Girl Like You.” They’re lip-synching, of course, but you can really feel what the band was all about on this clip. The guitar and bass: bashing, reverb-drenched, slightly out of tune in all the best ways. The drums: Ronnie Bond was equally as great as Keith Moon, but in a completely different way. Where Keith Moon had a blazing jazz feel adapted into rock, Ronnie Bond played his drums like a freaking caveman, with pounding tom toms and a heavy feel. And then Reg Presley, convinced of himself in every way, sneers and pouts and preens and begins to sing:
“I WANT TO SPEND MY LIFE
WITH A GIRL LIKE YOU…”
And then, truly the best part:
“BAA, BOMPA BOMPA BAA BOMPA BOMPA BAA….”
I mean, you have to have some giant King Richard III-size balls to stand up there in a Carnaby Street suit with tight pants, and sneer into a microphone and sing “BAA, BOMPA BOMPA BAA, BOMPA BOMPA BAA….” Reg Presley never doubted himself for a second. He just went for it. And then he continued:
“AND…DO ALL THE THINGS
THAT YOU WANT ME TO
BOMPA BOMPA BAA, BOMPA BOMPA BAA…
UNTIL THAT TIME HAS COME
THAT WE MIGHT LIVE AS ONE
CAN I DANCE WITH YOU…
BOMPA BOMPA BAA, BOMPA BOMPA BAA…”
Man, if I could write poetry like that, I would.
The Troggs often come off (in my mind, anyway) as a band and a concept that couldn’t possibly be real. They seem like a great 1960s British parody at times, like the early band (“The Thamesmen”) shown in the movie Spinal Tap. Sometimes they seem like something Peter Sellers or the Monty Python comedy troupes would have invented as a visual and sonic gag about the psychedelic Carnaby Street culture of the mid-to-late 1960s English scene.
But the best part of The Troggs is that they weren’t a comedy bit. Everything they did, they meant to do that way. If it was over the top, great. If it was slightly out of tune, great, let’s hit the strings harder and make it even more so. I once read a quote about Jerry Lee Lewis, something to the effect of, “Jerry Lee Lewis never regretted anything in his entire life,” and the same could be said of Reg Presley and the Troggs. They were over the top, and they reveled in it. God bless them for it.
I could write a twenty thousand word essay on the rest of The Troggs catalog. They kept putting out great, primal, pounding stuff all through the late-1960s acid-rock era, the early 1970s hard-rock era, and even into the punk and new wave era, sounding pretty much like…The Troggs. They cut some stinkers, of course, but the good songs were still amazing, they just didn’t sell anymore. It’s really worth your time to seek out obscure tracks like “Maybe the Madman,” “Surprise, Surprise,” “Say Darlin’,” “Evil Woman,” “Come Now,” and “Feels Like a Woman.” All insanely great stuff, even if none of them were hits.
And what about the infamous “TROGGS TAPES?” Back in the day, a cassette tape was copied over and over again and passed around. The tape featured The Troggs attempting to cut a new track in the studio in 1970, and arguing and cursing each other out, getting progressively more angry as the tape went along. It’s one of the greatest, most unintentional and uncomfortable bits of rock ’n’ roll comedy ever, and some of the quotes went on to influence the script of This Is Spinal Tap years later. There’s a great bit where Reg Presley is trying to get Ronnie Bond to play a particular drum fill: “DUB A DUB A CHA.” Ronnie can’t quite get it to Reg’s satisfaction, and the two yell and argue at each other with such absurd intensity, the only thing you can do is laugh. The other really memorable moment in this unreleased studio dialogue is when someone yells out: “I’M TRYING TO SPRINKLE A LITTLE MAGIC FAIRY DUST ON IT!” If you’ve ever played in a band and used that hilarious expression, now you know where it came from.
I’m happy I got sucked into a Troggs deep dive yesterday on my drive back from San Diego. It’s good to listen to these divine unique British knuckleheads every few years. I love them and I hope you love them too. They make everything…groovy. If there ever were a band that were able to pull off being both very cool and very weird, it was the Troggs. Bompa bompa baa, bompa bompa baa.
Check out the infamous Troggs Tapes! Warning, strong language and hilarity once you click play! I’m listening to it as I type this, and I’m crying with laughter.
