Tim Cooper has written for most national newspapers and many magazines on every subject from politics to pop culture. His first published work was in his own punk fanzine, Cliché. He lives in East London indulging his passions of writing, reading, cinema, music, football, cricket, and vegetable gardening.
Rick Derringer was one of those names that I heard a lot growing up, without ever being able to place him or recognise a particular song.
He always seemed like a caricature of the traditional American rock’n’roll guitar hero, though I say that without ever really knowing his music.
Perhaps I’m basing it on photographs of him, looking like the archetypal Seventies rock guitar hero with a denim jacket open to the waist, faded blue jeans and a mane of long hair, pulling faces while mouthing the notes to a squealy solo.
Reading his obits, I find that Rick Zehringer started out, like many American teenagers, as a Beatles copyist after the ‘British Invasion’ of America, forming a band called Rick & The Raiders, complete with mop-tops, suits and ties.
By 1965 he was a chart-topping one-hit wonder.
Hang On Sloopy was a cover of an R&B song (My Girl Sloopy) by a black vocal quintet from California called The Vibrations, but the new version came about in strange circumstances.
In early 1965 a New York group called The Strangeloves, who had just had a hit single with I Want Candy, were touring with the Dave Clark Five and began covering My Girl Sloopy in their set. It went down so well they decided to record their own version.
Cheekily, The Dave Clark Five told them they were going to make their own version when they got back to Britain, using The Strangeloves’ own arrangement. Around the same time, Eric Clapton had introduced the song to The Yardbirds but he left the band before they could record it, so it became one of the first songs they recorded with their new guitarist, Jeff Beck.
Then fate intervened.
On tour in Ohio, The Strangeloves – a trio of New York producers – were impressed by a local band, Rick & The Raiders, and recruited them to record the song instead, flying the band – and their 17-year-old singer – to New York to record it before their rivals could release theirs.
Changing their name to The McCoys (to avoid confusion with another pop star, Paul Revere & The Raiders) and changing the song title to Hang On Sloopy, they shot straight to No.1 in America, and No.5 in the UK.
An instant classic, the Stones covered it in their live sets at the time – and revived it in 2015 for the first time since then when playing in Derringer’s home state of Ohio.
The Yardbirds’ version (still called My Girl Sloopy) came out a month later on their album For Your Love, and decades later Springsteen performed it, while Derringer’s home state of Ohio made it their official state song. The Dave Clark Five, ironically, never did record it.
As for Derringer, when The McCoys broke up in 1969 he became something of a Zelig of rock’n’roll, turning up with his guitar on albums by artists as diverse as Alice Cooper and Steely Dan, Kiss and Meat Loaf, Bette Midler and Barbra Streisand.
The only time I remember seeing him play was on the OGWT in 1973 when the Edgar Winter Group, who briefly caught my teenage imagination with the striking albino locks and complexion of the eponymous front man – along with his older, bluesier, and equally albino brother Johnny – played their signature song Frankenstein.
This is him, going bananas with the effects pedal in an extended (some would say over-extended) version of Edgar’s signature song Frankenstein. I liked it at the time but hearing it again now, I’m not sure why.
The same year, Derringer made a solo album called All American Boy, filled with heavy riffing and fast-fingered solos, which was a popular style at the time and produced his own signature song, Rock’n’Roll Hoochie Coo(covered by Johnny Winter), even if it has failed to age very well.
After turning 50, he mellowed a little and abandoned heavy rock, turning his hand to blues and jazz. But he’ll mainly be remembered as the one-hit wonder who sang this when he was 17 years old:
