“Some people will just never see me as a guy who plays the blues,” Rick Derringer told me in 2009. Maybe his passing will cement in people’s minds his role in music as one that not just covered so many styles of music but expanded the definitions of all the styles he displayed as a guitarist, producer, and hitmaker.
“They will always see me as the guy on the cover of All American Boy and it’ll never enter their mind that blues really was the music I grew up listening to and loving, and in some ways the success through rock corralled me into being a rock guy for so long.”
He first topped charts in 1965 with the McCoys on their hit “Hang on Sloopy.” His guitar playing on the iconic album They Only Come Out at Night by the Edgar Winter Group featured the classic hit “Frankenstein.”
“For me, music comes in two varieties,” he told me. “It’s either good music, or it’s bad music, and any music that’s good in general I’ve always liked. So, it’s hard for me to do just a basic kind of in one little teensy slice of the pie kind of thing. So, when I go in there and change a lyric like in ‘Still Alive and Well,’ I say, ‘Jesus Christ has risen up to heaven from the grave, and he’s still alive and well.’”
When I talked to him in 2009, he had just released an album called Knighted By The Blues. “On an album like this I really looked at this as an opportunity to show all the different varieties of the blues that I like and actually extend that to how far the blues actually go. What are the boundaries? ‘If 6 Was 9’ [by Hendrix] – to me that is blues, too. The song ‘Sometimes,’ the second one on the album, has blues roots and even though it’s kind of rock; it’s still blues, and the same thing with a smooth song like ‘I Still Love You.’ That’s still, to me, real good blues.”
In a career that spanned six decades, he kept evolving. “In the last verse of ‘Rock and Roll, Hoochie Koo,’ I now say, “Getting jiggy with the beat really knocks me out as opposed to ‘When they wiggle that thing, it really knocks me out.’”
His contributions to the world’s encyclopedia of musical history spans not just history but genres. “I play biker bars and places where pretty rough characters hang out, certainly ungodly, and what they advised me was, ‘Wow, you’ve been given an opportunity to go out there and get in the inside in the belly of the beast, so to speak.’”
Rick Derringer, dead at 77. Hang on, Sloopy, hang on!
