“Wild Thing” has a strange, winding connection to Aerosmith that stretches across nearly two decades and several very different corners of pop culture. Long before the band recorded a short television version for the NFL, the song had already brushed against their world in the late 1980s through one of the most chaotic rock-and-comedy collaborations of the era.
In 1988, comedian Sam Kinison released a hard-rock cover of “Wild Thing,” the 1966 garage classic written by Chip Taylor and made famous by the Troggs, taken from his album Have You Seen Me Lately? on Warner Brothers. Kinison’s version was produced like a full rock single, and the accompanying music video became a regular fixture on MTV, built around an extraordinary cast of late-1980s rock royalty: Rodney Dangerfield and Jon Bon Jovi in the opening diner scene, Tommy Lee on drums, Jessica Hahn as the video’s centrepiece, and cameos from Slash, Steven Adler, Sebastian Bach, Richie Sambora, C.C. DeVille, Billy Idol, Rudy Sarzo and others. Among them were Steven Tyler and Joe Perry, appearing onscreen as part of the chaos and effectively tying Aerosmith to the song in the public eye even though they had never recorded it themselves.
The association went further than a cameo. On March 6, 1990, at the Great Western Forum in Inglewood, California, during the Pump tour, Aerosmith closed their encore with “Wild Thing” and brought Kinison out on stage to perform it with them. It was a natural fit: the song was a crowd-igniting universal that needed no introduction, and with Kinison beside them it became a genuine event rather than just a cover version.
After that night, the song largely disappeared from Aerosmith’s orbit for more than a decade. When it resurfaced, it did so in a completely different environment: network sports television.
In 2003, as part of ABC’s broader NFL promotional push that had already produced the Hank Williams Jr. Monday Night Football opening collaboration, Tyler and Perry returned to the studio to record additional short musical segments for broadcast use. One of those recordings centred on “Wild Thing.” Tyler handled the vocals while Perry delivered the guitar parts, turning the familiar garage-rock riff into a compact, television-ready blast of rock and roll. In the world of broadcast production these pieces function as musical stingers: brief recordings designed to energise viewers during intros, bumpers, or transitions rather than to stand as full performances. The footage was shot against a neutral background using green-screen compositing, allowing producers to layer football imagery and network branding over the performance in post-production.
The finished segment debuted during ABC’s coverage of the NFC Wild Card playoff game on January 3, 2004, when the Carolina Panthers hosted the Dallas Cowboys at Ericsson Stadium in Charlotte. The broadcast used two versions of the clip: a shorter teaser and a longer edit. Both circulated widely among fans who recorded the telecast and remain the only known studio recordings of Aerosmith performing the song.
Because the band never released their own full version of “Wild Thing,” the ABC broadcast segment stands as their only official recorded interpretation of it. The path from 1988 to 2004 is surprisingly clear when laid out: Tyler and Perry appear in Kinison’s outrageous video, tying them visually to the song. Two years later, Kinison joins them on stage at the Great Western Forum to perform it live. Then, more than a decade on, Tyler and Perry record it for television in a controlled studio shoot, and it airs to millions of football viewers before a playoff kickoff. What began as a cameo in a comedian’s music video had quietly evolved into a piece of network sports television history.
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