Group recorded cover for French TV, and clip also features footage from Cameron Crowe’s recently reissued Heartbreakers Beach Party film
The whole premise of the Troggs’ 1966 hit “Wild Thing” is about this socially disaffected guy, benumbed to sympathy, empathy, and even his own ego — utterly skeptical of any personal joy, a real Freudian basket case — until he experiences a sexual awakening so subtle that he questions his own motivations. Of course, you’ve heard the song a billion times already and that description oversells the simplicity of the song’s beer tumbler–shaking riff and songwriter Chip Taylor’s troglodyte lyrics. Well, you got lucky, babe, when Tom Petty found the song in 1982 and breathed surprise anew into it.
A newly unearthed music video for the song shows Petty and his Heartbreakers stomping their cowboy boots through a rendition of the song at Los Angeles’ Record Plant in 1982. Petty sounds positively surprised the second time he sings, “You make my heart sing,” and everything is so groovy you can even spot a bowl-cutted, mustachioed blond rocker dude, who looks like a Petty wannabe, in the audience mouthing along to the lyrics. Success: The Wild Thing is still wild. (There’s also footage of Petty looking cool in his sunglasses and some outtakes from the “You Got Lucky” video shoot when the Heartbreakers went full Mad Hatter Max with top hats, dusters, and speed racers.)
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The clip originated on the French TV show Houba Houba, until director Justin Kreutzmann transformed it into the new music vide with extra footage from Cameron Crowe’s recently re-released Tom Petty: Heartbreakers Beach Party film. The recording of “Wild Thing” features on the recently re-released expanded edition of the group’s fifth album, 1982’s Long After Dark.
“There was some music recorded for Long After Dark that didn’t get on the record, that I thought would’ve made it a better album,” Petty once said. “I left off…four things that I liked quite a bit. And probably a few more written that never even got in the door.” The reissue includes seven previously unreleased songs including several recorded for French TV.
