The Troggs: Wild Things Aging Well

The Troggs

A primitive young pup in 1966 when the Troggs' signature hit "Wild Thing" enjoyed a two-week stint at the top of the charts, Presley rode the sluice of rock's early era to badboy ignominy and rapidly vanishing lucre. Follow-up hits "With a Girl Like You," "Love is All Around" and "I Can't Control Myself" certified the Troggs' position in the hierarchy of early invasion rock; the cash register finally rang for Reg and mates in 1994 with Wet Wet Wet's remake of "Love is All Around," which stayed at number one for 15 weeks in Britain.

The Troggs were rock's original Brit nasties, banned by the BBC, the scourge of char-mums and repressed parliamentarians countrywide, and an early impetus for the punk that would follow. The "Troggs Tapes," a bootleg of inane four-letter studio squabble that has circulated widely over the years, is believed to have provided the inspiration for the making of Spinal Tap.

Presley has popped out rock's backside unburnt and charming. He is passionate in his quest to solve the mystery of crop circles and prove the extraterrestrial origins of the human race. With the money he earned on the "Love is All Around" remake he founded a tv production company, and his first project, Blood Line of the Holy Grail, will be coming out next year.

The Troggs headline Cavestomp! this Saturday. Presley and I spoke by telephone last week.

I've got my National Geographic World Atlas open to England and I'm trying to locate Andover.

Find Southampton right in the middle of the southern coast, 28 miles north of Winchester.

I see it.

Center of the universe!

Can't wait to see you at Cavestomp!

Yeah, what is Cavestomp! exactly?

Basically a three-day garage rockathon. Garage is still a thing in New York City, it being the mother of punk and all. It's the kind of show where anyone caught navel-gazing is beaten to a pulp, then drawn and quartered. Their remainders are fed to the rats on West St. Unadulterated fun, you know? Introspection be damned!

Right bloody time!

I'll say! So Reg, like a lot of your younger fans I was aware of "Wild Thing" and "With a Girl Like You" growing up, but I only really came to know about the Troggs through your collaboration with REM on Athens Andover. How'd that whole thing come about?

The first time I'd heard of REM we were doing a hotel, which was very strange for the Troggs to be doing at that time. I got into the lift and a load of people came in and some guy shouted, "REM has done 'Love is all Around.'" I hadn't heard about that. And me thinking that REM was like EMI, I was bewildered, thinking some company had done the song, but I discovered soon after that how big REM were. Then I thought, whoa, why have they done this? How have they done it? Turns out they did it as a b-side, and I thought maybe, you know, we could get together somehow. Larry Page, whom we'd gone back to to see if he had any magic left, gave them a ring and said, "Hey, how about working together?" They thought it would be a good idea. And so we both started writing. It was immensely exciting to know they'd played our stuff onstage. When we first got together, we stood there for a moment walking around one another just goin' wow!

So take me back to those elemental three-chord days.

Most of the so-called garage bands set up anywhere they could. I suppose we were more raw and more streetwise in the beginning, and you had a feel of what people were after and it was a time, just prior to "Wild Thing," where you were trying to create sounds that hadn't actually been invented. The fuzz pedals came along and things were a bit more controlled, but we were more experimenting in the 60s because we had the Elvises and the Buddy Hollys to think through, and we were feeling more noise, we were feeling more anger at that time.

But you didn't have the technology to express it.

Can you imagine? I mean, we did a Top of The Pops one time. Jimi Hendrix was on it and we had a little chat afterward. I said to him, "Ya know, they haven't invented the equipment to record you properly yet." And he agreed. We were all having the same aggravation in the studio, trying to get our noise. A lot of people were up against it, pushing the frontiers quite heavily. When you did the BBC they had ancient equipment that could barely record. I mean, you had four channels a set to record a group.

Must've been maddening...

There was this French program once, where they had one mic on the bass drum and one mic for everything else except the lead vocal, you know, and at that point it's like naughty time, isn't it? They just weren't up for it.

And now?

Whoa, what kind of ballgame are they playing in England? I don't know about America, but now it's just pure dance on our radio that goes out nationwide. And dance music?well, believe it or not, people do not dance to radio.

Agreed. So back around '62, '63, when r&b was really kicking, who aside from the other Mr. Presley really made you want to chuck the mortar and pick up a guitar?

There were loads. I mean, we'd delve into the record stores and try to get the blues, as it was. The Stones were doing it to get their stage show situated. Most of the black musicians were doing it with a single acoustic guitar and a mouth organ. So as soon as you turned that kind of music into a group form, people went on it, people thought, "Great!" you know. A lot of bands were doing that. The Kinks were great.

Wasn't your eventual manager Larry Page managing the Kinks early on?

He was. And our savior really was that he lost the Kinks. We were there in the wings, as it were, and he thought, "Roight, I've lost the Kinks, why not have a go with the Troggs?" [laughs]

After "Wild Thing," wasn't the press predicting an instant cliff-dive into obscurity, a la the Marauders or the Overlanders?

Yes, but in the same session that we did "Wild Thing" I'd written "With a Girl Like You." Tacked it right on to the end of the session. We did both takes in like 15, 20 minutes. Run-through-and-take. Run-through-and-take. And it hit.

What did you make of Graham Nash's quip that the Troggs were so far behind they were ahead?

He was probably right, because everybody at that time was getting very melodic. We were bleeding into the flower power. And so "Wild Thing" was a love song in a way, but aggressive. You could feel it, something was going to happen with it. I just knew it was either going to be a monster or a flop. Luckily, they loved it.

But the lyrics of those early songs, songs like "With a Girl Like You," "Wild Thing" and then a bit later "Love is All Around," intentions and delivery aside, there's a tenderness in the words that differs from, say, the blatant screw-you-and-forget-you lyrical content of other early invasion bands like the Stones.

Interesting. Never had it put that way, but you're probably right. When you think about it, there was just a little bit more, and that's why it leads on to things like "I Can't Control Myself," where really I was talking about fashion. But at the time Bill Gavin said, "This record should be banned." And I thought, what the bloody hell for?

But banned means bucks.

Nowadays yes. But in those days they took it out of the charts. Today it'd shoot to the top of the charts. You see, there I was talking about design, because everybody was wearing hipster trousers. I had a new way of saying that: "Your slacks are low and your hips are showin'." And everybody took it the bad way.

Everyone talks about the Troggs being the original unthinking man's pop group. Which makes some sense, but even back then didn't it take discipline and a certain kind of intelligence to keep it big and simple?

Oh, it's very difficult to keep it simple.

That problem is evident on the infamous "Troggs Tapes." How did that come about?

We had a contract for X amount of songs, and our publisher called me on a Thursday night and said, "Look, our contract's about up and I've just realized you've got another two songs to do and, well, you're gonna do it. I want you in on Monday." So I had embryos of ideas, at best. Normally, we'd first go into somebody's garage or the village hall and work things through, and if there was any argument it'd come out then. So we get to the studio without having been through the garage, as it were, and all the arguments started to come out. I started winding Ronnie [Bond], our drummer, up, and it went on and on. The f-word... If you've got the real tape, the one that has everything on it, there's 137 f's on it. [laughs]

That ought to earn you a warning label.

Someone even did a rap version of it! Oh, and the strangest thing was is that if it had a title it was going to be called Tranquillity.

The Troggs play Cavestomp! this Sat., Nov. 4, at Westbeth Theater, 151 Bank St. (betw. West & Washington Sts.), 741-0391. Tickets available through TicketMaster: 307-4100 or ticketmaster.com.