Chip Taylor, the songwriter behind the Troggs’ rock hit “Wild Thing” and the uncle of actor Angelina Jolie, has died. He was 86.
Taylor died Monday in hospice care, according to Page Six, citing Taylor’s longtime friend, producer Billy Vera.
Taylor, born James Wesley Voight in Yonkers, New York, in 1940, was actor Jon Voight’s brother, but built a formidable music career outside of his famous sibling’s shadow.
As a teen guitarist, he joined the band Town & Country Brothers, which toured with Neil Sedaka. His songwriting submissions to RCA Records impressed the artist Chet Atkins, who championed his tunes in the country music scene. Taylor also wrote out of the same 1650 Broadway building in New York where Gerry Goffin and Carole King were based.
In 1966, Taylor penned “Wild Thing” for the garage-rock band the Troggs, which rocketed to No. 1 and kicked off a new mode for rock ’n’ roll that favored grungier musicianship and more overt sexuality. “That upstrum, there? You wouldn’t play that if you were properly schooled,” he told the Independent in 2023. “I did it because I didn’t know any better. I ended up with this innocent energy. It came out of me looser that way, the feeling just flew out of me.”
Jimi Hendrix famously performed the song at Monterey Pop in 1967 in a fever of sexual tension (it featured in the 1968 concert documentary), making it an era-defining rock hit and Taylor’s most famous tune. He also wrote “Angel of the Morning,” popularized by Juice Newton and Merrilee Rush, and penned songs performed by Willie Nelson, Linda Ronstadt, Johnny Cash and Janis Joplin, among many others.
Taylor’s career pivoted in the ’80s, when he became a professional gambler and a rogue on the Atlantic City casino strip. Yet he had a resurgence in his career in the 2000s, after he met fiddle player Carrie Rodriguez at the South by Southwest Music Conference in Austin, Texas. The pair released several acclaimed alt-country albums together. Taylor’s 2012 single “F— All the Perfect People” prominently featured on the soundtrack for the hit Netflix series “Sex Education.”
Taylor said the song was inspired by performing concerts for prisoners, some of his favorite gigs. “I’ve always liked talking to prisoners because, for the most part, they’re extremely honest,” he said. “I never met a prisoner I didn’t have empathy for. I wrote that at 6 a.m. one morning when I realized I had some shows for prisoners coming up and I wanted to write something that was just for them.”
Taylor’s final album was 2025’s “The Truth and Other Things.” He is survived by several children and grandchildren. His wife, Joan Carole Frey, died in 2025.
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