The 1960s File Feature
Wild Thing
Wild Thing: The Novelty Parody That Crashed the Pop Charts in Early 1967 In the winter of 1967, a comedy record built around an instantly recognizable rock r…
01 The Story
Wild Thing: The Novelty Parody That Crashed the Pop Charts in Early 1967
In the winter of 1967, a comedy record built around an instantly recognizable rock riff managed to infiltrate the mainstream pop charts and reach number 20 on the Billboard Hot 100. That record was Wild Thing by Senator Bobby Featuring Bill Minkin, a satirical novelty track that used the melody and structure of the Troggs' enormous 1966 hit as its vehicle for political humor directed at Senator Robert F. Kennedy. The confluence of a familiar tune, timely political commentary, and the emergent youth counterculture created a brief but memorable chart moment that remains a curious footnote in the history of 1960s pop music.
The original Wild Thing was composed by Chip Taylor and recorded by the British rock group the Troggs, who took it to number one on the Hot 100 in the summer of 1966. The song's raw, minimalist arrangement and deliberately primitive production made it one of the defining singles of mid-sixties garage rock, and its cultural saturation was still very much alive heading into 1967. It was precisely that ubiquity that made it an ideal vehicle for parody. When a song becomes inescapable, it becomes ripe for comedic reinterpretation, and the Senator Bobby version was crafted to exploit exactly that recognition.
Bill Minkin, a comedian and writer who performed under the persona of Senator Bobby, delivered the track as an impression of Robert F. Kennedy, who at the time was a United States Senator from New York and a prominent national figure still recovering his political standing in the aftermath of his brother President John F. Kennedy's assassination. RFK was simultaneously beloved by younger and more liberal voters and a figure of controversy, which made him an effective target for a novelty treatment. Minkin's impression leaned into Kennedy's distinctive speaking cadence and Boston accent, layering these vocal affectations over the driving rock backing.
The record was released on Laurie Records, a New York-based independent label that had already made its mark on the pop landscape with earlier hits and was known for its willingness to take chances on unconventional material. Laurie Records had a history of signing artists and projects that fell outside mainstream expectations, and the Senator Bobby record fit neatly into that tradition of opportunistic novelty releases designed to capitalize on cultural moments.
The chart trajectory of Wild Thing by Senator Bobby was notably rapid. The single entered the Hot 100 at number 77 on January 7, 1967, and climbed swiftly over its first several weeks, reaching number 52, then number 30, then number 23 before peaking at number 20 during the week of February 4, 1967. This represented a total of five weeks of upward movement, an unusually clean ascent for a novelty record. The song spent seven weeks on the chart in total before fading from the rankings, a respectable run for a comedy single in any era.
The release landed in a period of significant political and cultural ferment. The Vietnam War was escalating, and the credibility of Washington's political establishment was under increasing scrutiny from a younger generation. Robert Kennedy occupied an ambiguous position in this landscape, positioned as a political insider who was nonetheless attracting substantial sympathy and support from those skeptical of the status quo. A comedic record that placed him in the role of a rock-and-roll wild man played on these tensions in a lightweight but culturally resonant way.
Novelty records had long been a feature of the American pop market, stretching back through the comedy hits of the 1950s and the satirical recordings of artists like Allan Sherman, who had scored major chart success with parody albums earlier in the decade. The Senator Bobby record followed in this tradition of using popular music forms to deliver pointed comic commentary, though its chart performance placed it in a more modest tier than Sherman's biggest moments. Its peak at number 20 nonetheless represented a genuine mainstream penetration that many novelty records never achieved.
The record's commercial success was built almost entirely on the strength of its source material and the timeliness of its political subject. Without the Troggs' original as its foundation, there would have been nothing to parody. Without RFK's prominence in the national conversation, there would have been no comedic angle to exploit. The confluence of these two elements created a brief window of commercial opportunity that Minkin and Laurie Records seized effectively. The single did not generate significant follow-up chart success for the artist, making it a true one-off novelty event rather than the beginning of a sustained recording career for Senator Bobby as a chart entity.
In retrospect, the record stands as a small but genuine artifact of a turbulent historical moment. The year 1967 would go on to be one of the most significant in American cultural and political history, and this minor chart entry from its opening weeks captures something of the irreverent, satirical spirit that characterized the era's engagement with its own public figures. Robert F. Kennedy would go on to run for president in 1968 before his assassination in June of that year, giving the Senator Bobby novelty record an additional layer of poignancy in hindsight.
02 Song Meaning
Political Parody and the Borrowed Riff: What Senator Bobby's Wild Thing Was Really Doing
On its surface, Wild Thing by Senator Bobby Featuring Bill Minkin is a straightforward comedic novelty: take a hit song, replace its original content with a topical impression, and release it while public interest is high. But the record operates on a slightly more interesting level than this description suggests, using the specific cultural weight of its source material to make a comic point about the nature of celebrity, political charisma, and the way popular culture was beginning to consume and reshape public figures in the mid-1960s.
The choice of Chip Taylor's original composition as the vehicle for this parody was not accidental. The Troggs' version of Wild Thing had been a raw, primal piece of rock and roll, deliberately stripped of sophistication and built on a foundation of unpolished desire. By placing a political figure into this context, the Senator Bobby record drew an implicit comparison between rock-and-roll charisma and political charisma, suggesting that both operated on similarly primitive emotional registers. A senator performing a rock song was funny precisely because the juxtaposition was unexpected, but it also hinted at something genuine about the way political figures in the 1960s were increasingly being processed through the same cultural machinery as entertainment celebrities.
Robert F. Kennedy was a particular kind of political celebrity in this period. His appeal was partly substantive, rooted in his record and positions, but it was also heavily personality-driven, connected to his family name, his physical presence, and a charismatic quality that attracted intense personal loyalty. He was, in a cultural sense, something close to a pop star, and the Senator Bobby novelty record was engaging with this reality in a comic key. The joke worked because there was a kernel of genuine observation inside the absurdity.
The record also participated in a broader tradition of American political satire that had accelerated in the early 1960s with the rise of the First Amendment comedy movement and the success of records and television programs built around political impressions. Vaughn Meader's album The First Family, a comedic portrait of the Kennedy White House, had been one of the best-selling comedy albums in American history before President Kennedy's assassination rendered it instantly obsolete and emotionally complicated. The Senator Bobby record followed in this tradition, applying similar comedic techniques to a different Kennedy family member operating in a very different political climate.
The timing of the record's release in early 1967 was meaningful. Senator Kennedy was not yet a declared presidential candidate, but there was already significant speculation about his political future and whether he might challenge President Lyndon Johnson for the Democratic nomination. This ambient sense of Kennedy as a figure in motion, a political force whose next act was unclear but whose ambitions were widely assumed, gave the novelty record an edge of relevance that a simple impression of a settled, static figure would not have carried. The joke about Kennedy as a wild thing was partly a joke about his perceived restlessness and political dynamism.
For listeners in January and February of 1967, the record offered a moment of relatively gentle, mainstream-acceptable humor about a prominent political figure at a time when more serious forms of political dissent were becoming increasingly charged and contentious. The antiwar movement was growing, generational tensions were sharpening, and the cultural consensus of the early 1960s was fracturing in ways that would accelerate dramatically over the following two years. A novelty record that made a joke out of a senator performing a rock song was a comparatively safe and unchallenging way of processing the increasingly strange relationship between political power and popular culture. Its success on the Hot 100 suggested that this kind of light satirical engagement had genuine mass appeal, even as more radical forms of cultural and political criticism were beginning to find their own audiences.
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