Rick Derringer, a rock and roll lifer, a force behind the “rock 'n wrestling” melding of the 1980s and other sporting and music nexuses, is dead.
Derringer died Monday in Ormond Beach, Fla. No official cause of death was released, but a family member said he'd been suffering from complications from heart surgery earlier this year. He was 77.
Derringer’s rock-jock bona fides date back to his being a member of the midwestern band The McCoys as a 16-year-old. The Ohio native was still known by his birth surname, Rick Zehringer, when the group released “Hang On Sloopy,” a rocked-up reworking of “My Girl Sloopy,” an R&B track from a Los Angeles-based soul group, the Vibrations. The McCoys’ version of the tune hit No. 1 on the Billboard charts in 1965, and almost immediately became an Ohio State stadium anthem, which it remains.
He later changed his last name to Derringer and served as producer and lead shredder for the Edgar Winter Group, a progressive pop combo that commingled jazz, funk, and rock and had a few FM radio hits in the early 1970s, including “Free Ride.” While with that band Derringer wrote “Rock and Roll, Hoochie Koo,” which was originally recorded by Winter’s bluesy brother, Johnny Winter. Derringer went solo to release his own version of "Hoochie Koo," and it was that rendition that became a classic rock chestnut and, highest-praise possible, was included in the soundtrack of Richard Linklater’s brilliant period-piece feature film, Dazed and Confused. Derringer did studio work for acts from every pop and rock genre, including sessions for Steely Dan, Barbara Streisand, KISS, and Bette Midler.
In the mid-1980s, Derringer teamed up with pop star Cyndi Lauper and pro wrestling manager (and former Memphis rocker) Jimmy Hart in a wacky attempt to get World Wrestling Federation stars on MTV. Their effort succeeded wildly. Derringer served as producer for 1985's The Wrestling Album, a WWF-subsidized record, and wrote and performed its most obnoxious and enduring track, “Real American,” which became Hulk Hogan’s entrance music. A video of Derringer's song featuring Hogan was in heavy rotation for a time on the music video channel.
Back to me: I fell for “Hang On Sloopy” during dance breaks in second grade at Westlawn Elementary School in Falls Church, Va. And “Frankenstein,” from his stint with Edgar Winter, was maybe the only pop instrumental smash from my youth that I could stomach. (Derringer’s the guy dressed in white playing a black Les Paul in this video of the tune.) But my Derringer fandom peaked as a teen in the late-1970s, when I’d spend chunks of my summers in Astoria and my New York cousins, the coolest people on the planet to young and old me, had all his records. Derringer’s 1978 cover of “Lawyers, Guns and Money,” which was big on cool-kids radio in New York back then, opened my world up to Warren Zevon, the troubled genius who wrote it.
But my strongest Derringer memories from those days came from my cousins’ constant imitations of the monologue that he famously closed every concert with.
“I wish we could play all night for you guys,” Derringer would shriek, city after city and year after year, throughout his entire career, “but we’ve only got time for ONE … MORE … SONG!” And then he’d launch into the opening of “Rock and Roll Hoochie Koo,” a riff so familiar back then you knew it whether you wanted to or not. Lordy mama! My cousins' bit killed me every time.
I brought Derringer LPs and that concert-closing gag back with me to my dirtball pals in suburban D.C., and the giggles kept coming. Me and neighborhood buddies went to see Derringer at the Capital Centre in the late 1970s and, sure enough, he ended the set just like we knew he would. So rock and roll!
Fast forward to January 2017. I was with my family in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., where we’d fled for a few days to escape the inauguration taking place back home. I’d read that a cruise ship full of formerly famous bands was setting sail from the local port, and as luck would have it our hotel was teeming with geezer rockers scheduled to be on the big boat. I was in the courtyard drinking coffee one morning when I ran into some guys touring as the band Nazareth, best known for giving “Love Hurts” the power-ballad treatment. I began telling them how their group meant a lot to me, since they were on the bill of my first unsupervised rock show, a May 1976 concert at RFK Stadium. I really thought they’d be happy to be remembered at all, let alone as fondly as I recollected them. Nah. Their eyes told me that being reminded of how long they’ve been around by somebody of my age and level of unkemptness just brought them down. The encounter was as brief as it was awkward. They didn’t even work up a “Thanks!” I was chuckling to myself and thinking how ass any cruise with those dudes was gonna be as I poured another cup from the coffee keg the hotel had set out on the lawn. Then I recognized the guy waiting behind me in line. I asked if he was Rick Derringer. I knew he was Rick Derringer. He said yeah, he was Rick Derringer.
As soon as he confessed, I started recounting the tale of my teen summers in New York. I went into how me and all my cousins were big fans back then and we'd all memorized his concert-closing monologue and were always repeating it to each other. But I'd barely gotten “When I was a kid…” out and Derringer gave me the same gaze I’d gotten from Nazareth only moments earlier. He didn’t want to relive my youth with me any more than they did, at least not before another cup of coffee.
Oh, well. I really did think you were great, Rick. And you were great. I’m now going to go listen to “Rock and Roll, Hoochie Koo” one … more … time. RIP.
Correction: A previous version of this story incorrectly identified wrestling manager Jimmy Hart as Gary Hart.
