All-American McCoy

Rick Derringer's house in lower Manhattan hides a lot of history in its walls. It was originally bought by the rough rider man himself, the late and great Teddy ("Charge!") Roosevelt, for his grandson Willard. Beyond the backyard is a little studio where young Willard would while away the hours playing his grand piano, which is still there. Will, who's still around (but is no longer young), dropped by soon after Rick had moved in and when he saw all the guitars lying around, asked him what he played. "Pop music," answered Rick in his most respectful manner. Quoteth Willard with a raise of the old family eyebrow, "You mean acid rock??!!"

Rick Derringer, nee Rick Zehringer ("everybody was always either prohouncing it wrong or spelling it wrong, so I thought I'd make it easier to remember") has been a mainstay of the national rock scene since 1965, yet he still giggles and chuckles and looks about the same as he did when we first saw him on Shindig, Hullabaloo and Upbeat leading the McCoys through "Harig on Sloopy," "Fever" and "Gotta Go Back (And Watch that Little Girl Dance)." Up on the wall over the mantlepiece is a gold record of "Sloopy," flanked on one side by a gold copy of Edgar Winter's "Frankenstein" single and on the other side by the gold album that it came from, They Only Come' Out at Night, ,both of which this perennial teenager produced.

The story begins in the unlikely little town of Fort Recovery, Ohio. "My parents used to listen to the radio a lot arid since they both played instruments, they encouraged my brother Randy and I from the beginning. I got. my first guitar when I was nine. My uncle used to play at nightclubs and bars, and I'd go down and play with him. He'd show me stuff and then we'd play together. I also had a friend who was a mechanic and he played a little so I'd go over to his house and he'd teach me a song and say, "OK, you come back when you've learned that and I'll teach you something else," and I'd sit home all night practicing so I could go over the next day and learn something new. I sponged off of everybody I knew who played guitar.

I figured it would be a real neat thing to have the town hood in the band.

"NJy brother Randy had started playing the accordion around then too; I think my mom hustled him into it. He played that for awhile, but then right after he'd learned how to play "Pink Shoelaces," he said, " I don't wanna this anymore, I wanna play drums P so he conned our parents into getting him a drum set. Soon as the people in town heard that we had kind of a band, we'd be asked to play at the Kiwanis Club and the Jaycees and places like that. They'd go, "Eh, let's get those cute little Zehringer boys to play at our next meeting." We did "Caravan" with a drum solo, "Steel Guitar Rag," lotta C&W. The guitar was so much bigger than me that everyone would go crazy when I played.

"We moved when I was in eighth grade, and my next door neighbor vras interested in playing bass, so I talked him into buying one and showed him a few thipgs and I had my first band. I guess in the back of my head I wanted to start a group, and as I taught him more and more songs the three of us built up a repetroire and started playing dances. A lew years went by and the bass player went away to school and kinda lost ihterest, but we were already feeling like a real band. Then Randy Hobbs came along. Randy was the town hood at the time and I figured it would be a neat thing to have the town hood in the band and he played bass pretty well, so he joined us."

It was at this time that fate stepped in disguised as three Brooklyn boys named Feldstein, Gotterher and Goldstein, known collectively as the Strangeloves. They andtheir congas had scored a major hit with the jungle-oriented "I Want Candy" on the newly formed Bang label, which was headed by Bert Berns. Before they went out on a tour, Berns told his boys about this song he'd written a few years back called "Hang on Sloopy." It had been an R&B hit for a group called the Vibrations, and Berns thought it might be a good top forty tune. So he told them that if they found a band that they thought could do the song, to bring them back to New York.

The Strangeloves, like many singing groups at tfye time, had no steady road band and used the local dance band as a backup group wherever they went. "Dayton was the last stop on their tour and they asked us if we were interested, so we went back to New York with them and recorded the song. Then, just as we all had decided to get excited about the record, someone came into Berns" office with acopy of another version of the song by a group called Little Caeser and the Consoles. Berns is a real man's man, an Ernest Hemingway type, and he said, "Well, if it's going to be my record against theirs, mine'll win," and he put a lot of promotion into the record and in no time we had a hit op our hands.

Duane Allman told me I was one of the ones that gave him the idea of playing slide.

"It was really strange for awhile. We were real young and because we hadn't struggled or anything to make it, we were totally naive about things. We had been kids just playin" for fun and suddenly we were in the music business. It probably hurt us at the time, because we really didn't have anyone pointing us in any particular direction. We were just dazed and dazzled most of the time. We had a lot of fun, though."

After two years of hits, the McCoys went over to Mercury Records where they recorded two superb-yet-unnoticed albums, Infinite McCoys and Human Ball. "The psychedelic period had crept in and every band was doing original songs, and since we'd been playing some of those things live for some time, we decided to record them. No one told us to be commercial or that our records had to sell, so we did what we wanted. It wasn't till later that we realized that the music you play does have something to do with that music selling or not."

I remarked that it was in this period that Rick's guitar playing seemed to be expanding by leaps and bounds, .especially in the progressively trendy areas of wah wah, fuzz and slide. Was Hendrix an influence? "Well, I think everyone was influenced by him in some form or another. At that point (around "69), some of the things that Hendrix was doing were things that I had'been doing i and what it did was give me more confidence to play more freely. You know, people came to see us play and we'd do things with feedback and fuzz. In fact, Duane Allman saw us once and told me later that I was One of the ones that gave him the idea of playing slide. I had been taught to play flashy from the beginning.

"When we did "Sloopy," we had the arrangement given to us and we had to play everything just as it was told to us, but when it came time for the solo, they told me, "OK, your solo," and they kept pushing me, "C'mon, high energy, make it scream!" Every single I'd get the same rap, so each solo would come out ^ of me trying to do something original | while they yelled for more of the same o of what I'd done on "Sloopy." It got me - into thinking about variations on = themes. Like I said before, I learned my > lessons."

The McCoys" national popularity had severely dissipated when they began to play frequently at the Scene in New York, run by Steve Paul. "All we knew of Steve originally was that he sat on the front steps of the Scene every night. We'd come into the club and there He'd be, sitting on the front steps. After we'd been playing there a long time, we got to talking with him and at one point he asked to manage us, but we really didn't know him enough to trust him. Eventually Steve found Johnny Winter and then talked Johnny into bringing Edgar up and about that time he decided to help bail us out of our situation and we decided to let him help us. It had been five years since we'd started touring and we hadn't really had much of a rest in all that time, so we figured we'd stop working and try to get everybody's health back together. The flower generation was killing everybody in sight.

"In the midst of this, Johnny had decided to look for a new band and, he was going to cancel some dates while he scouted around. We offered to help out by being his fill-in band so he wouldn't have to miss any gigs. We jammed together and it was so easy and we all had such a good time that we all agreed that we should be his new band. Our keyboard player, Bobby Peterson, flipped out for about the fifth time in his life and he left us before the first Johnny Winter And album came out, and eventually my brother Randy had to leave too for... health reasons.

"Johnny's previous bands had always been pretty subservient to him. They had a hard time doing anything else except just backing him up and I think he wanted a band that could be just as active and just as participant in the band as he was, so that's what we tried to be. It worked really well for awhile, and I think Johnny's identity came out a bit stronger because of the relationship. In the end though it might have been one of the reasons that he got nervous in the situation. In some respects it was taking some tension off him "cause other people were doing things, but at the same time there was more competitive tension in the group. I don't think he's ever ® been in a band so much because he was £ always out front and he'd never been in 3 a band with another guitar player before. I'd always been in bands though, £ where each guy was a full member and ohad a full say in everything, so it was easy for us to adapt, but for Johnny it wasn't that easy."

"If I can talk, I can sing."

In the last few years, Rick has been seeing more and more action from the producer's seat on the other side of the glass. "Originally I got into it by accident, with the McCoys. When I got into it with Johnny and it said on the records that I had co-produced them, I realized that people were going to attribute what they heard on the record at least in part to me, so I figured that I'd better learn what I was doing. The first things with Johnny were mainly just Johnny communicating with me and me relaying his ideas to the engineers and running the equipment the way he wanted it. When Johnny, came out of the hospital I asked him about the possibility of my producing his album myself, "cause he was thinking about co-production again and I didn't want that. But' since I'd had good success with Edgar and since he really didn't need the extra pressure, he said OK.

"Even though it was me at the controls for Still Alive and Well, I was making a Johnny Winter record just for him and for those people that had been interested in him and still were. And, happily, I pleased myself at the same time. Nothing uncomfortable for him; I just wanted to help all I could. On his newest album (Saints & Sinners) I have more freedom and I think people will find the picture they have of Johnny broadened quite a bit."

Considering his dual identity, it was not the least bit surprising that on his own album, All American Boy, he kept the majority of the arranging, products tion, playing and singing to himself. He Is sees it all as the means to just one end. E "I don't really see myself as a singer. I p mean, if I can talk, I can sing. What's [o most important to me is getting the g feeling of the song across, even if you don't hit all the notes just right."

What is surprising — given not only this desire to do as much as possible himself, but also the phenomenal success of All American Boy — is his current position as a fixture with the Edgar Winter Group. "I really like playing with Edgar's band," he'll tell you, "because they all push to put on a better show each successive night. They're super musicians." But what of a band of his own? "I can't say that I'll never want to do that again, but for npw I have no inclination. "Course, I'm sure Edgar will probably go on to different things eventually, and Dan Hartman (Edgar's bassplayer and co-lead singer - Ed.) might also, so who knows..." But at this time Rick Derringer can certainly afford to call "em exactly as he sees "em; he hasn't missed yet. Which speaks well indeed for the future of the kid from Fort Recovery.