Rick Derringer, who in his hopscotch career as a guitarist, songwriter and producer scaled the pop heights at 17 with the infectious No. 1 hit “Hang On Sloopy,”and who as a solo act in the 1970s minted a Top 40 hit and enduring FM radio staple with the down and dirty rocker Rock and Roll, Hoochie Koo,” died on Monday in Ormond Beach, Fla. He was 77.
His longtime caretaker and friend, Tony Wilson, announced his death in statement but did not give a cause.
Although his early work with his garage-rock band the McCoys was slapped with the dreaded “bubble gum” label, Mr. Derringer was a noted guitar virtuoso who once said that by the time he was 9, he was “playing chord sequences like a pro.”
As a guitarist, he bounced between filthy blues, R&B, pop and intricate jazz-rock; in the 1970s, he recorded with Steely Dan, a group known for its musical complexity and its reliance on only the most sophisticated session musicians. Among his notable contributions, he lent supple slide guitar work to the song “Show Biz Kids” off the 1973 album “Countdown to Ecstasy.”
He went on to make his name as a sought-after producer over the years and showed every bit as much breadth, working with artists as diverse as Peter Frampton, Barbra Streisand, Kiss, Bette Midler, Kiss, Cyndi Lauper and Weird Al Yankovic (that’s his guitar solo on “Eat It,” Weird Al’s 1984 Grammy-winning parody of Michael Jackson’s “Beat It”).
“I love being involved in recording because I’m a knob freak,” Mr. Derringer said in a 1974 interview with the British magazine New Musical Express. “I like buttons ’n knobs ‘n things that flash, ‘n dials ‘n meters.”
He lodged four albums on the Billboard 200 over the course of his career, including his critically acclaimed 1973 solo debut, “All American Boy,” which hit No. 25 and featured “Rock and Roll, Hoochie Koo,” which hit No. 23 on the singles chart.
To some critics, “All American Boy” should have achieved a more lasting reputation. In a review on the site Allmusic, the musician and critic Cub Koda described it as “one of the great albums of the ’70s that fell between the cracks.”
Mr. Derringer also slipped into the Top 200 with his solo albums “Spring Fever” (1975) and “Derringer Live” (1977), as well as “The Edgar Winter Group With Rick Derringer” (1975) part of a longstanding collaboration with the Winter brothers, first with Johnny Winter, the snarling Texas blues guitar titan, and later with the band Edgar Winter’s White Trash.
Mr. Derringer also produced “They Only Come Out at Night,” the 1972 debut studio album by the Edgar Winter Group, which shot to No. 3 on the Billboard 200 and featured the hits “Free Ride” and the instrumental chart-topper “Frankenstein.”
He originally wrote “Rock and Roll, Hoochie Koo” as a member of Johnny Winter’s band, with Mr. Winter handling the vocals on its original 1970 release. “The rock was me and ‘hoochie koo’ was Johnny,” Mr. Derringer said of Mr. Winter’s less ferocious version of his song in an interview with Guitar Player magazine last year. “He was the bandleader, so we did it his way.”
Richard Dean Zehringer was born on Aug. 5, 1947, in Celina, Ohio. He got his first guitar at 9, “and it all came very easily to me,” he told Guitar Player. “I know some people hate to hear that, but I was just blessed by the good Lord with the ability to play anything I heard.”
By 10, he was performing songs like “Caravan” and “Beer Barrel Polka” around town with his younger brother Randy, who had taken up the drums. “We had the Rotary Clubs on their feet in no time,” Mr. Derringer recalled in a 1975 interview with the rock magazine Circus.
After his family relocated to Union City, Ind., he and Randy put together an early version of the McCoys, taking their name from one of the early songs they mastered: “The McCoy,” by the instrumental band the Ventures.
The McCoys played together through high school and eventually got a call from the Brooklyn record producers and songwriters behind the bubble-gum group the Strangeloves, of “I Want Candy” fame, and wanted the McCoys to take a stab at “Hang On Sloopy,” which was co-written by the owner of their company.
The McCoys were not the first band to record the song, about a young man’s love for a girl from a rough part of town. It evolved from an earlier version, called “My Girl Sloopy,” which was originally recorded in 1964 by the Vibrations, a rhythm and blues group. In 1965, a fierce competition unfolded to see which band could adapt a rock ’n’ roll version, which led to several of them, the McCoys’ rendition being the most successful.
After it topped the Billboard chart in October 1965, Mr. Derringer and his bandmates were suddenly teen idols. “When the McCoys became really big it was at the height of Beatlemania,” Mr. Derringer recalled in a 1973 interview with Glenn O’Brien of Rolling Stone magazine, “so if you were indeed a Number One record-seller and you appeared on a stage during that time frame then you were given that treatment. Girls ripped clothes off your back.”
The McCoys scored other hits, including a Top 10 cover of “Fever” and a Top 40 rendition of Ritchie Valens’s “Come On, Let’s Go.” But they eventually tired of audiences who “were unpleasantly surprised when they didn’t hear ‘Sloopy’ after ‘Sloopy,’” Mr. Derringer told Circus. In 1970, Rick Zehringer, as he was still known, teamed with Johnny Winter and adopted the stage name Derringer.
“Hang On Sloopy” endured. The song became synonymous with Ohio State University, where the marching band first played it during a football game in 1965. In 1985, the Ohio Legislature adopted it as the official state rock song.
“Rock and Roll, Hoochie Koo,” with its titillating chorus and aggressive guitar riffs, also cemented a place in pop culture. It was featured in “Dazed and Confused,” Richard Linklater’s 1993 coming-of-age film about high school students in 1970s Austin, Texas, as well as in Season 4 of the Netflix series “Stranger Things” in 2022.
Mr. Derringer also teamed up with the wrestler Hulk Hogan, composing the music and lyrics of his theme song, “Real American.”
Information about survivors was not immediately available.
In recent decades, Mr. Derringer moonlighted as a real estate agent in Florida, where he lived, The Sarasota Herald-Tribune reported.
He also drew attention for his support of President Trump, which he amplified during a 2017 appearance with Roger J. Stone Jr., a longtime associate of Mr. Trump’s, on an Infowars podcast. The site, frequented by far-right supporters of the president, has been used to spread conspiracy theories.
On the show, Mr. Derringer said that several politicians had used his 1973 song “Real American” over the years, including Mr. Trump, Hillary Clinton, Newt Gingrich and former President Barack Obama, who he said had played it in jest at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner in 2011.
At the event, the song was played when Mr. Obama showed a copy of his birth certificate stating that he was born in the United States, refuting conspiracy theories promoted by his successor that he was not.
When one of Mr. Derringer’s associates asked whether he might send a bill to Mr. Obama for using the song, he said that he should.
Michael Levenson contributed reporting.
Alex Williams is a Times reporter on the Obituaries desk.
Neil Vigdor covers breaking news for The Times, with a focus on politics.
The post Rick Derringer,
Rocker Known for ‘Hang On Sloopy’ and Other Hits, Dies at 77, appeared first on New York Times.
