Rick Derringer (77) was born Richard Dean Zehringer in Fort Recovery, Ohio on August 5, 1947. Aside from his parents’ extensive record collection, his first major music influence was his uncle, Jim Thornburg, a popular guitarist and singer in Ohio.
Derringer recalled first hearing him play guitar in the kitchen of his parents’ home and knowing immediately that he wanted to learn the instrument. He was eight years old at the time, and his parents gave him his first electric guitar for his ninth birthday. Soon after, he and his brother Randy began playing local gigs with his uncle, a country musician, before he was in high school.
After eighth grade, the family moved to Union City, Indiana, where Derringer formed a band he initially called the McCoys. He later renamed it the Rick Z Combo and then Rick and the Raiders before reverting to the original name.
In the summer of 1965, before Derringer turned 18, the McCoys were hired to back up a New York-based band called the Strangeloves in concert. The Strangeloves, who were also record producers from New York City with a major hit song “I Want Candy”, were looking for a band to record the song “My Girl Sloopy”, originally released by the Vibrations the previous year, and chose the McCoys. Derringer later persuaded the producers to change the title to “Hang On Sloopy”. After the Strangeloves recorded the guitar and instrumental parts, Derringer and the McCoys were brought into the studio to sing on the recording, which was then released under their name. The song reached number one on the Hot 100 when Barry McGuire’s “Eve of Destruction” fell from number one to number two and The Beatles’ “Yesterday” shot from number forty-five to number three.
The hit became a kind of theme song for Derringer’s home state and, in a foretelling of his later years making music for professional sports, has been a staple of Ohio State football game for decades. As far as “Hang on Sloopy”… It was one of those songs like “Louie Louie” in that it was perceived to have a dirty underpinning, not that we could decipher it. But “Hang on Sloopy” was a giant hit, and its follow-up, “Fever,” was pretty big too.
But, in spite of opening for the Rolling Stones on their first major North American tour, that’s all they wrote for the McCoys, at least in their Top 40 iteration. However it’s one thing to have one hit, quite another to follow it up, so the McCoys were not seen as one hit wonders, and they did have the definitive version of the Bert Berns/Wes Farrell track, which every nascent guitar player learned after the three chords of Them’s “Gloria.” And once you learned those you played them with your friends in that band that was going to bring you to stardom, even though you never played a gig outside the living room.
By the end of the decade, they then returned to working as a back up band with blues guitarist Johnny Winter and, later, his brother Edgar, touring with both and playing on and producing their albums.
And in 1970 he wrote Johnny Winter’s breakthrough track, “Rock and Roll, Hoochie Koo.”
“Rock and Roll Hoochie Koo” is one of those tracks that seared itself into your brain on first listen. The riffs were chunky, with trebly accents thrown in. It had the earthiness, the rootsiness of the original rock and roll from the fifties, but it fit in perfectly with the acts now dominating the FM band, before prog rock.
“Rock and roll hoochie koo
Lordy mama, light my fuse”
If you were alive back then, this was the track Johnny Winter was most associated with, before he turned a blues purist with a smaller footprint, but with hard core fans that allowed him to live a complete life in music.
In between working with Johnny, Rick Derringer also worked with his brother Edgar Winter, who had more commercial success than his brother, which was confounding at the time. Edgar didn’t sing, but he had hit songs. He had put together a white hot R&B band fronted by Jerry LaCroix, Rare Earth’s old singer, and they called it White Trash.
The partnership with Edgar produced the album “They Only Came Out at Night” with the massive single “Frankenstein,” an instrumental the band had been playing around with for years; the title came from the look of the master tape, which had so many segments spliced together that the musicians said it resembled the horror-movie character’s stitches. The song, produced by Derringer, topped the Billboard Hot 100 in May of 1973; he went on to replace Ronnie Montrose in the band shortly after and remained the Edgar Winter Group’s guitarist and producer for the next three years.
Also in 1973, Derringer enjoyed his first solo hit with “Rock and Roll Hootchie Koo” (which has had such a long life that it was used in the fourth season of “Stranger Things”) and, after leaving Winter, launched his self-titled solo band, which toured extensively throughout the decade and released several albums; their concerts were heavy on guitar dueling and showmanship, and climaxed with Derringer and his second guitarist dramatically throwing their guitars to each other from opposite sides of the stage.
Throughout the 1970s and ‘80s Derringer also worked extensively as a session musician, playing on albums by Steely Dan (including “Countdown to Ecstasy,” “Katy Lied” and “Gaucho”), Todd Rundgren, Kiss and even Barbra Streisand. In the early 1980s he soloed on two massive singles written by Meatloaf mastermind Jim Steinman: Bonnie Tyler’s “Total Eclipse of the Heart” and Air Supply’s “Making Love Out of Nothing at All.”
In the mid-1980s he began working with singer Cyndi Lauper, touring in her band and playing on three of her albums (including the hit “True Colors”), but perhaps more significant was the fact that it led to his entrée into the world of professional wrestling. In 1985, he produced the World Wrestling Federation’s “The Wrestling Album,” which consisted primarily mostly of pro wrestlers’ theme songs, many of which he co-wrote.
Most notable among these was Hulk Hogan’s theme song “Real American,” which was used by President Barack Obama at the 2011 White House Correspondents’ Dinner when unveiling his birth certificate; as a campaign song by Hillary Clinton; and, inevitably, frequently by President Donald Trump.
In his later years he toured with Ringo Starr’s All Starr Band as well as Peter Frampton, Carmine Appice, Tim Bogert and others,
A fiery and remarkably versatile guitarist, a strong singer and a high-profile presence on New York’s rock scene of the ’60s ‘70s and ‘80s, Derringer and his first wife, Liz, were also members of Andy Warhol’s extended circle and frequently appeared in rock magazines of the era, this in stark contrast to his later in life alignment with conservative causes and the release of several Evangelical Christian-themed albums with his wife, Jenda.
Rick Derringer died on May 26, 2025 at age 77, from diabetes related illnesses.
