Chip Taylor, “Wild Thing” and “Angel of the Morning” Songwriter, Dies at 86

Chip Taylor, the singer and member of the Songwriters Hall of Fame who laid the groundwork for “Wild Thing” by The Troggs, “Angel of the Morning” by Juice Newton and “Try (Just a Little Bit Harder)” by Janis Joplin, has died. He was 86.

Taylor died Monday night in hospice care, according to an Instagram post from Grammy-winning singer Billy Vera. In 2023, he underwent treatment for throat cancer, which he wrote and sang about on his album Behind the Sky, released in February 2024.

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One of Taylor’s older brothers is Oscar-winning actor Jon Voight, and one of his nieces is Voight’s daughter, Oscar-winning actress Angelina Jolie.

The much-appreciated Taylor sang, played guitar and recorded some two dozen albums during a remarkable six-decade career — that is, when he was not carving out a living as a professional gambler.

He started out in a rockabilly band born, not in the South, but in his hometown of Yonkers, New York, then spent time as a writer and producer at April Blackwood Music, the publishing arm at CBS, where he signed Vera and James Taylor.

Taylor’s expansive songwriting résumé also included “I Can’t Let Go,” recorded by frequent collaborator Evie Sands, The Hollies and Linda Ronstadt; “I Can Make It With You” (The Pozo-Seco Singers, Jackie DeShannon); “Welcome Home” (Walter Jackson, Dusty Springfield); “Sneakin’ Up on You” (Peggy Lee); “On My Word” (Cliff Richard); and two tunes performed by Vera and Judy Clay, “Country Girl City Man” and “Storybook Children.”

“I’m the kind of writer who doesn’t think too much about what he’s writing about,” he said in 2000 of his approach to music.

Taylor’s first big hit was the rock anthem “Wild Thing,” which the British group The Troggs took to No. 1 in July 1966 and the Jimi Hendrix Experience performed the following June at the Monterey Pop Festival. When Hendrix was through with it, he famously set his guitar on fire.

“I think The Troggs’ record was a right funky record. You couldn’t beat that,” Taylor noted in a 2006 interview. “It was like the demo, except they played it with an electric guitar. The feeling was exactly the way it should have been. To me, that was the start of punk.”

“Angel of the Morning,” a song about premarital sex, was first recorded by Sands in 1967 before Merrilee Rush & the Turnabouts’ version made it to No. 7 on the Hot 100 in June 1968. Thirteen years later, Newton’s take sold more than a million copies and peaked at No. 4 as the first country song to play on MTV.

(Fun fact: Rush’s version was used in the 1999 film Girl, Interrupted, which starred Jolie in her Oscar-winning turn. Watch Taylor perform his song here.)

In 1969, Joplin recorded “Try (Just a Little Bit Harder),” written by Taylor and Jerry Ragavoy, and used it as the opening track on her debut album, I Got Dem Ol’ Kozmic Blues Again Mama!, and as a signature tune in concert.

The third of three boys, James Wesley Voight was born on March 21, 1940. His brothers, Barry Voight, a geologist who invented a formula to predict when a volcano will erupt, and Jon were born in 1937 and 1938, respectively.

Their father, Elmer, was a golfer who played in the U.S. Open in 1928 and 1929 and then served as the pro at the Sunningdale Country Club in Scarsdale, New York. Their mother, Barbara, was a teacher and a swim instructor.

“The three of us were very close in age, and we did all this stuff growing up,” Taylor told NPR in 2010. “Our mom and dad were very supportive of us being crazy, so we have wonderful days together.”

Taylor said his “hardcore turn toward music” came when he was 7 or 8 and his parents took him to see My Wild Irish Rose.

“I didn’t want to go to the show, but I was just mesmerized by the music,” he recalled. “I remember going back in the car that night, I didn’t want to talk, I just wanted to keep the physical feeling I felt when I heard the music sitting in the fourth row. So I felt, that night, that something changed in me.”

He became a fan of country music and Southern blues by listening late at night to a radio station in Wheeling, West Virginia, and while still a student at Archbishop Stepinac High School in White Plains, he wrote songs at the Brill Building at 1650 Broadway.

In 1957, he and his band, Wes Voight & the Town and Country Brothers, were signed by King Records, then predominately a home for Black artists.

Now known as Chip Taylor — execs at the label were worried DJs would have trouble pronouncing “Voight” — he recorded a few singles that went nowhere before moving to Warner Bros. Records in 1962, when he made it on the Hot 100 with “Here I Am.”

However, “It wasn’t any moneymaking time for me. It was still, ‘How am I going to survive to stay in this business?’” he said. “And that’s when I decided I was going to really make an effort to write for other people.”

He wrote “He Sits at Your Table,” recorded by Willie Nelson, then sent other songs to country music execs Chet Atkins and Gerry Teifer. That led to him becoming a staff writer (working often with Al Gorgoni and Ted Daryll) at April Blackwood Music.

Asked to write a song for Jordan Christopher and the Wild Ones in 1965, Taylor told Billboard in 2016 that he “hung the phone up, started looking out the window and thinking about some girls, some wild things I had known in my life. I don’t remember which one I was thinking of at that moment, but the chorus for [‘Wild Thing’] came right to me.

“I loved the sound of the chords and the feeling of the chords. I went in the studio without it being finished and just asked the engineer to turn the lights out, and I tried to put myself in the mindset of whatever the heck I wanted to say to that girl. And it was very simple. I didn’t say much, but it felt right, it was powerful.”

He said his three favorite versions of “Wild Thing” were done by The Troggs, Hendrix and the X rendition that’s heard as Charlie Sheen arrives from the bullpen in Major League (1989).

In 1967, Taylor and Gorgoni formed Rainy Day Records and released the song “Night Owl” by the Flying Machine, a group that included James Taylor. The singer, however, would depart to become the first non-British act to sign with The Beatles’ Apple Records.

Other artists covering Chip Taylor’s songs included Frank Sinatra, Waylon Jennings, Barbara Lewis, Lita Ford, American Breed, Lorraine Ellison, the Bobby Fuller Four, Marshall Crenshaw, The Fleetwoods, Emmylou Harris and Anne Murray.

Taylor recorded seven solo albums in the 1970s, included the gem “Last Chance,” and appeared in Jonathan Demme’s Melvin and Howard (1980) before stepping away from music in 1981 when he said Capitol Records refused to promote his single “One Night Out With the Boys,” which he thought was a sure-fire hit.

He then went from a part-time gambler to a full-time one, with horse racing and card counting, which got him banned from many casinos, his specialty. “To say did I make a lot of money, could I have survived and just lived with that? Yeah, I could have,” he told CBS Sunday Morning in 2008.

Taylor resumed his music career in 1995 and launched an independent label, Train Wreck Records, in 2007, intimate, Americana tunes with the likes of singer-violinist Carrie Rodriguez, guitarist John Platania, bassist Tony Mercadante and singer-fiddler Kendel Carson.

His 2011 children’s album, Golden Kids Rules, featured his granddaughters Kate, Samantha and Riley. And after he was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2016, they all took the stage to perform “Wild Thing.”

In addition to his brothers and granddaughters, survivors include his wife, Joan (they first married in 1964, got divorced and remarried), and his children, Kelly and Kristian.

“I just try to let my spirit go someplace,” he said in 2010. “And then I try to catch up to it, to find out where we’re going with it.”