Today, Res Presley, lead singer of The Troggs, famous for the song “Wild Thing”–as well as two of my favorite sixties-rock songs “Anyway That You Want Me” and “Love Is All Around”–died at the age of seventy-one.

When I went to interview him for The New York Times, I was surprised to find an artist who was not living in the past of his glory days when his fame was peaking, but was living in, well, to put it mildly, the future. Presley barely even wanted to talk about music, as you’ll see below. And it was a great conversation with a very sweet man committed to an alternate way of thinking and seeing the world: in short, a visionary.

So in tribute to Reg Presley, below the video is an unreleased chapter from Everyone Loves you When You’re Dead featuring an excerpt of that interview.

THE TROGGS

“How long have you got?” asks Reg Presley, the lead singer of the 60’s band the Troggs, when we begin our interview. His words are ones that every journalist wants to hear: an artist implying that he has all the time in the world to talk. What follows is a nearly two-hour conversation that grapples with the mysteries of life, the universe, and religion—and, on occasion, the Troggs, the pioneering garage-rock group he formed in 1964, most famous for its hit “Wild Thing.” Below is just a short excerpt from this interview.

Reg Presley: You don’t know this, but in 1973 the Prime Minister of England put everybody in the country on a three-day working week, and the reason for that is because we had an oil crisis. The Arabs put the price of oil up, and we couldn’t afford it, so we had to reduce our energy. And they put us on a three-day week. The companies moaned like hell, and complained that they lost ten percent of their productivity. Then they realized, “Why only ten percent?” Well, the reason is because people work harder when they know they got four days off. So then the big companies turned around, moaned and said, “If you had told us early enough that you were going to put us on three days, we wouldn’t have lost anything.”

Okay, so where you’re going with this?

Presley: The point is that the human race only has to work half of what it does and still produce the same. Right? Now, that if you take it over a year, you can work six months and have six months free. So if you made a law that says, you have to work by law six months of the year, but you don’t get paid. However, you also have six months off—and everything is free—I bet people would jump at this.

You know, the system does work without money. It’s just that we’ve been programmed one way and we never think of another way.

Most people aren’t ready to make changes. They get scared.

Presley: Okay, you might have to have a government kind of think tank to get it all worked out and maybe it would take ten year’s time, but why not start and see if it’s possible. Anything’s possible if you’ve got the will. I guarantee you, you’d do away immediately with the drug scene. Because there’d be nobody pushing it to make the money.

And all the violence.

Presley: There’d be no new cases. You can have what you want. All of a sudden, the only crimes that you would have would be only crimes of passion. That’s the only thing to steal: another man’s Mrs. And if you’re not killing one another to grab the land and things like that, you don’t need an army either.

Is there is a name for this philosophy?

Presley: Well I’ve thought about it and I’ve never put a name to it. I’ve heard nobody say anything to me about this kind of thing, I’ve just kind of tried to work it in my own mind to see if it would work.

I actually do know one person with a similar philosophy to you.

Presley: Really?!

A guy named Bob Black. He wrote a book called The Abolition of Work.

Presley: Alright. Bob Black! I’d be interested in getting up on the Internet. If this is starting to come into people’s minds, it could be the start of how it’s going to be one day. One person will get the right combination for making it work, and as soon as that happens, people will jump on. I mean like in 1990, when I saw my first crop circle, only about twenty-five or thirty percent of people believed in UFOs. Now it’s more than fifty percent. So things do grow. You know what I mean? (pauses). Are you taping this?

Of course. Why?

Presley: Are you going to write it all?

I’ll write as much as they’ll let me.

Presley: Yeah! Don’t leave out the connecting pieces. Try not to leave out the connecting pieces.

I’ll do my best. I can write about pretty much anything in the Times. As long as it’s not sexually explicit.

Presley: Yeah, they tried to ban “Wild Thing” in England because it was too sexual. It’s like a nursery rhyme compared to what they get away with today. And I’ll tell you what: bloody nursery rhymes are vicious. Like bloody Humpty Dumpty falling off the wall and smashing to pieces. That’s bloody explicit.