Rick Derringer, long revered as one of rock’s greatest guitarists, passed away at age 77 on May 26 at his home in Ormond Beach, Florida. Derringer first came to national prominence via the 1965 hit Hang On Sloopy, which he recorded with his band, the McCoys. It was released just as he was turning 17.
Thus began a long and storied career that found him working as a multi-instrumentalist on guitar, pedal steel and bass, and as a successful producer. The long list of artists he recorded with or produced includes Johnny and Edgar Winter, Todd Rundgren, Steely Dan, Kiss, Cyndi Lauper, Barbara Streisand, Alice Cooper and Air Supply.
He also produced, arranged and performed on six “Weird Al” Yankovic albums, including 1984’s “Weird Al” Yankovic in 3-D, home of the Grammy-winning Eat It.
Derringer – born Richard Dean Zehringer on August 5, 1947, in Celina, Ohio – was raised in Fort Recovery, Ohio. As a child, Derringer was steeped in the music of his parents’ vast record collection and was initially inspired to play guitar by his uncle, Jim Thornburg, a successful local singer and guitarist. Derringer got his first electric guitar for his ninth birthday and quickly began playing music with his younger brother, Randy.
After the eighth grade, the Zehringers moved to Union City, Indiana, where Rick and Randy formed their first band, the McCoys, briefly known as the Rick Z Combo and then Rick and the Raiders before reverting to the McCoys. As Derringer told me in 1994, “The first song I learned to play was The McCoy by the Ventures, and we took our name from that song.” By the time he went to high school, the family had moved to a town just outside of Dayton, Ohio.
In 1965, the McCoys opened for the Strangeloves, a fictional group that consisted of three New York City songwriters. The Strangeloves’ I Want Candy became a hit in mid ’65, and they were considering releasing My Girl Sloopy – which had been a 1964 hit for R&B vocal group the Vibrations – as a followup. However, their touring partners, the Dave Clark Five, told them that they planned on releasing Sloopy as a single when they got back to England.
The Strangeloves couldn’t beat them to the punch because I Want Candy was still so fresh, so they enlisted the McCoys – the band that had been opening for them and backing them – to record the song. “The Strangeloves were looking for a young band that looked like the Beatles, and we fit the bill,” Derringer said.
When we finished, everyone in the control room was jumping up and down, going nuts, yelling, ‘Number 1!’ Hang On Sloopy went to Number 1, and we thought, ‘This business is easy!’
The McCoys flew to New York and sang on the Strangeloves’ already-recorded instrumental track; Derringer – who suggested the name change to Hang On Sloopy – also recorded the song’s guitar parts and amped-up solo. In an interview at the time, Jimi Hendrix said, “Have you heard the guitar player on Hang On Sloopy? He’s great.”
“That was the first time I recorded in a real studio,” Derringer said. “When we finished, everyone in the control room was jumping up and down, going nuts, yelling, ‘Number 1!’ Hang On Sloopy went to Number 1, and we thought, ‘This business is easy!’ I soon found out it wasn’t quite so easy.”
I asked Derringer if they got rich for having a hit single. He laughed and said, “Not at all; we got rich in life experience. We were kids with no experience, and our parents had no experience, and, contractually, we’d sold ourselves down the river. We got cheated about every way you can.”
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Following three albums – You Make Me Feel So Good, Infinite McCoys and Human Ball – the band relocated to New York and became the house band at the Scene Club, which was frequented by the rock elite and run by entrepreneur Steve Paul, who managed Johnny Winter.
Steve told the bouncers to get Morrison off the stage, and four guys grabbed one limb each and started dragging him off while Jim was screaming, ‘AAAROOAAROOOO’ into the mic
“I was there that famous night in [March] 1968 when Jim Morrison got up and sang with Hendrix and went completely nuts,” Derringer said. “Jimi would come down every night, and he, my bass player Randy Jo Hobbs and Buddy Miles would back everyone up. I often got up and played with them, as did Larry Coryell. Jimi usually had an open-reel tape recorder there so he could tape the sessions.
“They were up there jamming, and Morrison, who was so wasted he could barely stand, climbed onstage and grabbed the mic in the middle of this jam! This was when Jimi was wearing hats with feathers, and Morrison reaches over and grabs the hat off Jimi’s head. Jimi was a nice guy, but it was like, ‘Now you’re screwing with my hair!’
“He put Jimi’s hat on his own head, and everyone in there went, ‘Ohhh, I can’t believe he did that!’ Steve told the bouncers to get Morrison off the stage, and four guys grabbed one limb each and started dragging him off while Jim was screaming, ‘AAAROOAAROOOO’ into the mic.
“It was incredible! He screamed into the mic until the cable wouldn’t stretch anymore and he had to drop it.” (The tracks from this gig can be heard on the bootleg releases High, Live ’N Dirty and Woke Up This Morning and Found Myself Dead.)
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“That’s how we first met and started playing with Johnny Winter, and we all moved upstate to Hyde Park, New York,” Derringer said. “We lived in two houses next to each other and formed the band known as Johnny Winter And. They didn’t want to use ‘…and the McCoys’ because of our bubblegum image, so someone suggested, ‘Just call it “Johnny Winter And!”’
I wrote Rock and Roll, Hoochie Koo for Johnny. I wanted a song that had some rock and pop kind of parts that Johnny would sing… The title says it all – it’s ‘rock ‘n’ roll,’ but it’s ‘hoochie koo’ too, whatever that means!
“We began work on material for Johnny Winter And [1970], which I think is a cool record. Everyone always gives credit to Johnny Winter And Live [1971], but I always thought the studio album was overlooked. It was a great example of what the McCoys did and what Johnny did, and we were writing for each other. The album is really important to me from a collaborative point of view.
“I wrote Rock and Roll, Hoochie Koo for Johnny. I wanted a song that had some rock and pop kind of parts that Johnny would sing, so it needed a melody and lyrics that weren’t foreign to his style. The title says it all – it’s ‘rock ‘n’ roll,’ but it’s ‘hoochie koo’ too, whatever that means! The rhythm parts are more rock, but the single-note riff is more bluesy.”
Also in 1971, Derringer worked with Alice Cooper on his fourth album, Killer, supplying all the guitars and the blistering solo to Under My Wheels.
For his 1973 solo debut, All American Boy, Derringer recut Rock and Roll, Hoochie Koo, which became his first hit as a solo artist. “I felt the version we’d cut with Johnny could’ve been better, so that’s what I tried to do. We sped it up and added the female background vocals. It became more of a rock-sounding record with more energy.”
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After the breakup of Johnny Winter And, Rick joined Edgar Winter’s band, White Trash, and thus began a relationship that resulted in Derringer producing that group’s first four albums, White Trash (1971), Roadwork (1972), They Only Come Out at Night (1973) and Shock Treatment (1974). Derringer supplies incredible guitar work on every record; his solo on White Trash’s Keep Playing That Rock and Roll is one of his best.
“I’m proud of that solo,” he said. “This is one of the few that, when we play the song now, I try to emulate the original solo.
“I’m aiming for a certain balance in my solos. Whether I’m playing show-off kind of stuff, or slower and simpler, it really doesn’t matter as long as the whole thing has some form. John Coltrane always played these wild, strange solos, but somehow they always maintained a sense of form, and I’ve always been a student of that.
“For a time I was studying to be a painter, and I felt the things I was good at were form and composition. I think along those lines for guitar solos, too.”
The live White Trash album, Roadwork, is a showcase for Derringer’s virtuosity as a guitarist. He is featured as the singer on incendiary versions of Still Alive and Well and Back in the U.S.A, and his extended solo on the latter is a masterclass in rock guitar brilliance.
Edgar Winter and Derringer scored a massive hit with Frankenstein from They Only Come Out at Night.
“I was working with Bill Szymczyk as my engineer; he’d co-produced All American Boy with me,” Derringer said. “Then I used him on two projects as an engineer, Johnny Winter’s Still Alive and Well [1973] and Edgar’s They Only Come Out at Night. Edgar had always done a song called The Double Drum Solo, which they first did when Johnny brought Edgar into the limelight to tour with him in the late Sixties. This was a song they did every night to show off, as Edgar would move from organ to saxophone to the drums.
“This turned into Frankenstein; all of the parts were already there except for the synthesizer break in the middle. When we went in to do the album, Bill and I were looking forward to doing that song as much as anything else on the record. The rest of the music was more traditional, but this was a big, long instrumental with all of the wild stuff.
“At some point, we got word that the record company was thinking of not including the song on the album because they thought it was too different – too jazzy or something. Bill and I went to whoever the powers that were at that moment, and we said [shouting], ‘What do you mean you’re dropping it? It’s the best one!’
“Of course, we had no idea how successful it would be. It became a Number 1 record and was a big hit for a long time. The real hits are usually the ones that the record companies have fought against.”
How did the song get its signature title?
“The song was too long, even for the album version, and it was cut even more for the single. We didn’t want to call it The Double Drum Solo, and I was thinking it was a real Frankenstein in the way we spliced all the sections together. I may have even suggested it as a title. I didn’t have the power to give it the title, because it was Edgar’s song, and in the end, he chose that as the title.”
Around this time, Derringer began to do a lot of session work, often recording with Steely Dan. Previously, in 1972, Rick had played on a Donald Fagen demo that secured a record deal for the band. Derringer added guitar to the Steely Dan tracks Show Biz Kids from 1973’s Countdown to Ecstasy and Chain Lightning from 1975’s Katy Lied.
In 1980, Derringer again worked with Steely Dan on Gaucho, adding guitar to My Rival, and he played on Fagen’s 1982 solo album, The Nightfly. Derringer collaborated with Todd Rundgren on Something/Anything (1972), A Wizard, A True Star (1973), Initiation (1975) and Back to the Bars (1978).
In 1976, Rick formed the band Derringer, which went on to release six albums. Their eponymous debut LP was released by Blue Sky, Johnny Winter’s signature imprint. The album features stellar guitar work from Derringer and co-guitarist Danny Johnson; one of its highlights is Beyond the Universe.
“This is a song that remained in our set for the longest time,” Derringer said. “We needed an uptempo, fast song, and that’s what I came up with. I had been reading a lot of Carlos Castaneda books, and much of the lyrics were copped from those books. It was something I was into; I wasn’t just writing anything down. I think that was the whole idea of the Castaneda books – that you could go anywhere and do anything.”
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At the end of the track, he and Johnson trade unaccompanied guitar solos. “In a lot of records nowadays, that’s the stuff I miss. In striving to devise something for the marketplace, oftentimes the guitar playing is forgotten, just lettin’ the guys get out there and play.
“Everything is so charted out, the solo can become something of a musical contrivance – it comes and goes so quickly – and you miss hearing somebody really play. When we cut it, we’d been playing it live for a while, and we recorded it totally spontaneously in the studio. We wanted to show people what we were like as a live band, too.”
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In 1982, Derringer began working with comedian “Weird Al” Yankovic, producing his eponymous debut, released in 1983, followed by “Weird Al” Yankovic in 3-D, which included Eat It, a parody of Michael Jackson’s Beat It.
“Something people wouldn’t expect is that some of the best records I ever produced were with Weird Al,” Derringer said. “I feel bad about it in some ways, because we had to take apart the best-made records of that time. When Quincy Jones produces Michael Jackson, unlimited money can be spent to make those records great. We had to learn to take them apart and recreate them!
When Quincy Jones produces Michael Jackson, unlimited money can be spent to make those records great. We had to learn to take them apart and recreate them!
“Because Weird Al was thought of as a ‘novelty artist,’ all of a sudden my production career became stagnant, because people considered me to be a ‘novelty producer.’ The only thing novel about it was how hard we worked!
“This took me into some work with the World Wrestling Federation, and I produced two albums for them. The first included a song I wrote that went on to become Hulk Hogan’s theme song, I Am a Real American. I got the WWF gig because they said, ‘This guy’s a novelty producer – we’ve got to get him!’”
Among the scores of studio tracks featuring Derringer’s contributions, two were hit power ballads written and produced by Jim Steinman – Air Supply’s Making Love Out of Nothing at All and Bonnie Tyler’s Total Eclipse of the Heart, both from 1983.
“It may sound silly to some people, but my favorite solo I’ve ever cut is probably the one on Making Love Out of Nothing at All,” Derringer said. It’s relatively simple, but it’s very dramatic and melodic, and I love how it’s harmonized. It fits the song so well.”
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Over the course of his career, Derringer released 15 studio albums and three live albums. Between 1993 and 2010, he recorded seven blues albums, plus two with drummer Carmine Appice and another with Appice and bassist Tim Bogert (DBA), 2009’s The Sky Is Falling.
In 1997, Derringer became an Evangelical Christian and, with his wife Jenda and their two children, released four Christian-themed albums. Starting in 2010, he performed on three world tours as a member of Ringo Starr’s All-Star Band.
Derringer has provided inspiration to generations of guitar players, including some of the greatest axe-slingers of all time.
“Duane Allman told me he was inspired to pick up slide guitar because he saw me playing slide with the McCoys,” Derringer said. “That blows my mind! He became one of the greatest slide guitarists ever.”
Derringer’s larger-than-life exuberance as a guitarist, singer and songwriter will continue to inspire musicians for decades to come.
