The Edgar Winter Group briefly caught my imagination when I saw them play their signature song Frankenstein on TV in 1973, featuring the late Rick Derringer on lead guitar.

Edgar Winter was one of two albino brothers who found themselves in the limelight in the early Seventies and I was briefly a fan of both.

Older brother Johnny Winter was a virtuoso guitarist playing that kind of southern blues-rock that was popular at the time, with bands like The Allman Brothers, Lynyrd Skynyrd and ZZ Top.

(Not to mention lesser lights like the Marshall Tucker Band, Molly Hatchet and Charlie Daniels).

Younger brother Edgar eschewed the guitar for keyboards and saxophone, and one of those odd instruments that seems to combine the two and makes a synthy sound.

That’s him at the front on this OGWT performance from 1973, though the spotlight inevitably falls on guitarist Rick Derringer, whom Edgar had imported from Johnny’s band for the occasion.

That’s him, going bananas with the effects pedal in an extended (some would say over-extended) version of Edgar’s signature song Frankenstein.

It’s further evidence that Derringer is a guitarist who has always seemed to me like a kind of caricature of the traditional American rock’n’roll guitar hero, though I say that without ever really knowing his music.

 I liked it at the time but hearing it again now, I’m not sure why.

Reading up on it, I learn that the title came about from the massive editing of the original studio recording – an instrumental added as an afterthought to the album They Only Come Out At Night – akin to the laboratory process that spawned the monster in the movie.

Originally titled The Double Drum Song, after the section in which drummer Chuck Ruff duels with Edgar on percussion, before Ruff came up with the name Frankenstein on account of its convoluted gestation.

Apparently the band deviated from the musical arrangement, built around a riff first used by Edgar in an earlier song, Hung Up – and later on another song, Martians – into “less structured jams.”

It subsequently required numerous edits to shorten it, with the final track being spliced together from many sections of the original recording. They may have succeeded on record but the editor was clearly absent on this occasion.

Winter played many of the instruments on the track, including keyboards, alto sax and timbales, and the song was not only left off the original album track listing, but used as the B-side to another song, Hangin’ Around… until DJs were inundated with phone calls to make it the single instead.