THE TROGGS – “With A Girl Like You”
In Incredible Hulk comics there’s often a scene where the ‘emerald man-beast’, cast out from human society, finds something of fragile beauty – a flower, maybe, or a baby deer – which he then accidentally crushes with his mighty strength. Listening to the Troggs I find myself thinking “Hulk form beat group.” There’s a sluggish heft to the playing which sits oddly with the my-first-love-song rhymes, the ba-ba-bas, the way the chief cave-child picks his way so carefully through his lyrics. I’d call it pig-iron bubblegum, except that sounds kind of appealing.
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Doctor Mod said:
I thought I wanted to say something about this clumsily sincere song, but I can’t improve on “pig-iron bubblegum.” I’d say I was chewing on that thought, but …..
Having grown up with (literally) piles of 60s singles scattered around the house I’m genuinely surprised to come across a number one that I can’t even think how it goes. I guess I’d recognise it if I heard it but now I’m not so keen to do that!
Nice to see popular fizzing back into life – I’ve been enjoying it up until now (I keep meaning to say thanks but never had – so consider this that).
Tom, Tom, Tom. Turn the record over! The flip side is one of the great punk classics. (But I’m not at home, and I don’t remember which great punk classic it is. Either “From Home” or “I Want You.” The MC5 recorded “I Want You” a few years later but were a lot clumsier. Lester Bangs’ essay “James Taylor Marked for Death” is something of a meditation on the fact that the MC5′s version of “I Want You” isn’t as good as the Troggs’; they could do yesterday what we cannot do today (how the age of something-or-other vanished in two years)(or something) I’m still in parens.) Anyhow, my affection for Bambi meets Godzilla is clearly stronger than yours. I found the A-side touching back in the day, and didn’t actually hear the B until six years later.
It was I Want You. From Home was the B-side of Wild Thing. And yes, boo hiss nasty Tom; the Troggs are ace, though Girl Like You is weaker than Wild Thing or the priaprismic I Can’t Control Myself…
Tommy Mack
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The Troggs are friends with General Khaki on myspace. True fact.
This wasn’t any influence on The Smithereens’s song “A Girl Like You,” was it?
Marcello – Isn’t “Louie Louie” a clear precedent for “Wild Thing”? (I have no idea, however, if “Louie Louie” ever charted in Britain, though it was a Kinks album track at some point.)
We should bear in mind – not that my mind knows what to make of it – that “Wild Thing” was written by Chip Taylor, an ambitious country music songwriter square enough to work with Chet Atkins. Taylor’s other immortal Top 40 achievement was to write and produce first Evie Sands’ and then Merrilee Rush’s version of “Angel of the Morning.” His most recent album made No Depression magazine’s list of best albums of 2005, though it, like all of his albums, remains unheard by me.
‘Louie Louie’ got to number 26 in the UK in 1964.
Chip Taylor’s version of Wild Thing was awful though. I saw he and Reg Presley doing a horrible acoustic version on TOTP2 a couple of years back. Reg, Reg Reg…
I’m torn between Wild Thing and Louie Louie as to which is best… Louie is more danceable and has Jack Ely’s deranged vocal, but Wild Thing is more audaciously primal, no wonder the Beeb banned it, despite there being nothing explicit in the lyrics – Reg doesn’t have to get dirty; Chris Britton’s guitar wants to rape you…
I bloody love The Troggs, me…
Oh and the Troggs did a version of Louie Louie on the first album with Wild Thing on it. Which smacks of deperation, really, but there you go…
TM
This wasn’t any influence on the Rutles’ “With A Girl like You”, was it?
This is really groovy! As usual: NEVER heard it before, or even heard of it, or even contemplated the idea of the Troggs having other songs besides “Wild Thing.” This is a fun track – I like the cleanly muffled rigidity of the drums especially – wonderfully drum machine-like. There’s sort of a dearth of hooks (the ba-ba-ba-ba thing being pretty much it), but at 2:05 you can get away with that. Thumbs up.
Cute ‘n all, Andover Reg gettin’ a lil bit romantic (enough for Michelle Pfeiffer to pin him up on her teenage bedroom wall) but both Wild Thing and the bulging I Can’t Control Myself, singles either side, deserved top spot ahead of With A Girl Like You. I’d pair this with Spencer Davis’s Somebody Help Me as a non-entity sequel that would have done little without the initial smash.
Tom is right about the iron in the bubblegum – all Troggs stuff has a slightly clunky, sluggish/thuggish air somewhere – but this is a great record – and the slug/thuggishness is part of it. The ‘b-b-ba ba ba’ bits anticipate the backing of their magnum opus ‘I Can’t Control Myself’, whose opening ‘Oh No !’ is ten times better than Ozzy’s on ‘Black Sabbath’.
I recall that the now discredited Jonathan King made a bet around this time that the Troggs would be dead within a year. As their 1967 singles continued to bomb, he looked like winning his bet until the Troggs pulled ‘Love is All Around’ out of the bag in Autumn 1967 and so won the day.
That was their last hurrah, however, so King was a bit unlucky, though Reg Presley had the last laugh with the royalties he got from Wet,Wet, Wet’s massive hit with the same song almost 20 years later (just ahead of King’s subsequent prison stretch!).
TOTPWatch: The Troggs performed With A Girl Like You on Top Of The Pops on 21 July 1966. Also in the studio that week were; Dave Berry, Georgie Fame & The Blue Flames, The Walker Brothers and Twice As Much. Jimmy Savile was the host. No copy survives.
Reg Presley is in hospital and not very well after a suspected stroke. Lots of love to him.