Everything about the song Wild Thing is bizarre. It was written by an American whose brother is Jon Voigt and whose niece is Angelina Jolie. It achieved international fame thanks to the vocal stylings of a young man named Presley. It includes an ocarina solo. It was recorded, supposedly in 20 minutes, by an English band named after mankind's prehistoric forerunners and became a huge hit on both sides of the Atlantic. It had already been recorded by an obscure pop combo called the Wild Ones in a version that did not include an ocarina solo. This may explain why the earlier version did not become a monster hit. In 1966, the world was finally ready for an ocarina solo, and the Troggs' Reg Presley was ready to provide it.

The first name of the song's composer is Chip - he was born in New York City but grew up in Yonkers, NY, which for many years was known as the city with the highest rate of fatalities from cancer in the United State,s but is now known mostly for epic levels of political corruption. Chip Taylor also wrote the song (Just Call Me) Angel of the Morning for one-hit wonder Merillee Rush in 1968. Although it does not contain an ocarina solo, a case can be made that it is one of the most dangerous songs ever written because it inspired so many drug-addled young women in the late Sixties to define themselves in cherubic terms and demand that men treat them as such.

Chip Taylor was born John Wesley Voigt, and no one has ever satisfactorily explained why the composer made the curious name switch. In an industry that contains such satanic forces as James Taylor and his siblings Livingston and Taylor, Chip could easily be mistaken for the brother of the man who wrote Shower the People, when it is far better to be identified as Angelina Jolie's uncle. And as Brad Pitt's uncle-in-law. And as Billy Bob Thorton's ex-uncle-in-law. But only to keep quiet about the Angel of the Morning business. The song Wild Thing is closely associated with Jimi Hendrix, who achieved interstellar fame by setting his guitar on fire while performing it as his final number at the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967. Hendrix's incendiary tactics, captured on film, signaled the birth of progressive rock and the death of Top 40 radio, though as the term "progressive rock" would soon come to describe Jethro Tull, Yes, Steely Dan and Genesis, it quickly became meaningless, if not downright sinister.

The song is also associated with the actor Charlie Sheen, who played a mentally unstable relief pitcher in the film Major League and who used it as his personal theme song. Wild Thing was also the nickname of an unpredictable Philadelphia Phillies relief pitcher whose very last pitch in the major leagues resulted in a home run that ended the 1993 World Series. Death threats followed, and Wild Thing quickly exited The City of Brotherly Love. The expression "doing the wild thing" came into vogue among American white trash at some indeterminate point over the past 30 years, and refers in a rather generic, non-specific way to protracted fornication of the intensely pleasurable variety, often with someone one does not expect to ever see again.

Often referred to as forefathers of punk, the Troggs did not achieve huge success in America, in part because of a legal dispute that resulted in their UK records being released on a different label than their US ones. A similar situation - a bastardized version of Please Please Me was released by a mysterious outfit called VeeJay records in the US - had not prevented the Beatles from becoming major stars, but the Fab Four, unlike the Troggs, did not wait two years to tour the States after scoring their first No 1 hit.

The Troggs, who haled from Andover, England, later recorded a second song (Love Is All Around) that figured prominently in a brutally cute film starring Hugh Grant and Bill Nighy. The Troggs thus belong to one of the rarest fraternities in all of popular music: the two-hit wonders. This group also includes Don McLean, whose American Pie and Starry, Starry Night bookend an otherwise uneventful career.

Chip Taylor, who appears to have written Wild Thing as a bit of a joke, was born on New Years Day in 1940, just a few months before the Germans invaded France. His brother is a world-famous geologist, and the three Voigts were recently inducted into the Archbishop Stepinac High School Hall of Fame in White Plains, NY. The fact that a private school for suburban Catholic boys actually has a Hall of Fame says an awful lot about the American people's desperate penchant for immortality at the municipal level.