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Photography Edward Biamonte
Rocker Rick Derringer turned his experience as a hitmaking musician into a Grammy-winning career as a producer. From "Rock and Roll Hoochie Coo" to recording the blues, he's done it all and helped many others do the same.
The hands that make the hits have a little dipping sauce on them at the moment. It's a bright, sunny midday in Kansas City, and at the Argosy Casino Hotel & Spa Rick Derringer's hands are full of chicken strips from the first-floor buffet. It's an inconspicuous lunch for a man about to go on tour this summer with former Beatles drummer Ringo Starr and whose handprints are all over five decades of music, but then Derringer has never really been the rock star sort. His first hit, "Hang On Sloopy," came as part of '60s group the McCoys, and his '70s chart-topper "Rock and Roll Hoochie Coo" was a song he recorded with Johnny Winter before doing it solo. Derringer has proven he can stand on his own in the music business, but he is a prized collaborator, a man who is in his element in the recording studio with his hands on a guitar or a mixing board.
Indeed, Derringer's next stop after lunch is Covenant Studios, the spare-no-expense recording facility in the basement of local McDonalds magnate and Christian recording artist Jim Wagy, to work with Bright Shade of White, a young rock group based in Fayetteville, Arkansas. The recording session is a coming-together of industry veterans, including Joe Meador, who has worked for more than 30 years in music publishing and other jobs in Nashville, and rising industry executive Jake Wand, owner of Wand Entertainment, an artist development, management and marketing group. Wand and Meador say they work with Derringer regularly when developing bands because they trust his abilities, and when one looks at his list of accomplishments it's easy to see why. Derringer won two Grammy awards for Best Comedy Recording producing "Weird Al" Yankovic's albums with his self-titled 1983 release and 1988's Even Worse. He also worked with Cyndi Lauper on the demos that would lead to her breakthrough album, She's So Unusual, in 1983 and was also worked with Steely Dan, Johnny and Edgar Winter and Alice Cooper early in their respective careers. Bright Shade of White is in good hands.
SUBHED: IF THESE HANDS COULD TALK
It also helps that Derringer was once a young musician himself. He picked up a guitar for the first time when he was nine years old, when a mechanic at the local Ford repair shop taught Derringer chords in his spare time. From there, Derringer says his desire to learn more was insatiable. "As soon as I got the guitar, I started asking people and acquiring [songs]," he says. He still went by his birth name, Rick Zehringer, then, and before long his brother, Randy, started playing drums. When their neighbor, Dennis Kelly, came over saying he wanted to play bass with them, Derringer started showing him how to play "The McCoy" by the Ventures. Kelly learned the song by the end of the night and the foundation for what would become the McCoys was laid. Bang Records took an interest in the band a couple of years later and wanted The McCoys to record their own version of the Vibrations' "My Girl Sloopy." "They had the idea that if a group of white guys in the Beatle era did the song it would be a hit," Derringer says. The McCoys knew and liked the song and agreed to record it, changing the chorus to "hang on Sloopy" to make it easier to hear within the song. Within weeks of finishing the track, Derringer says it was on the Billboard charts. "Hang On Sloopy" reached the number one position in October 1965 and remains the official Rock 'n' Roll anthem of the state of Ohio, the only such honor bestowed on any rock song in any state.
Even as The McCoys were at the peak of their careers, though, one could see Derringer doing more work on the other end of the studio. Derringer says he started with playing bits of music from one recorder onto another to create layers and loops of music, and by the band's third album, 1968's The Infinite McCoys, he was helping behind the mixing boards in ever-growing capacity. Johnny and Edgar Winter each asked for Derringer's help while he played for them, too, leading to a second, and very different, career. "It's a lot like being a traffic cop," Derringer says, motioning traffic signals with his hands. The way Derringer sees it, every artist needs different directions to get to where he or she wants or needs to go and has different needs to attend to along the way. His traffic management paid off early; according to Derringer, every record the Winter brothers put out during the '70s that went gold or platinum came with him producing. Working closely with artists such as these allowed Derringer to form an approach he says he uses to this day when working with young artists, a sort of "paint by numbers" approach to enhancing an artist's identity and sound without changing it. Derringer's advice to musicians, he says, is pretty standard, too. "Don't leave your wallet in the dressing room," he says.
SUBHED: A ROCKER AND A BLUESMAN
As Derringer talks it's hard not to notice a tattoo on his right hand, a small dragon breathing fire upward toward his wrist. It's the only tattoo Derringer has. There is no particular meaning behind it, he says; he just figured that with as much as people watched his hands while he played his guitar solos on songs such as "Rock and Roll Hoochie Coo" he should give them a little more to look at. Derringer describes getting the tattoo as "a Rock 'n' Roll thing." The irony here is that he got it about 18 years ago, he says, which is about the same time Derringer started recording blues albums. The first, Back to the Blues, came out in 1993 after a phone call from the head of record label Blues Bureau International. Blues music has been an occasional foray for Derringer ever since, most recently with the release of Knighted By the Blues last year. This latest album includes covers of songs by Ray Charles and Jimi Hendrix, but is primarily new original material. One of the originals, "Sometimes," will soon be made into a music video, and another popular song from Derringer's catalog, the '80s Hulk Hogan WWF theme "Real American," was re-recorded as an entrance song for the Pittsburgh Steelers of the National Football League. All of this gives Derringer more choices to make for this summer when he goes on tour with Ringo Starr & His All-Starr Band. Derringer says each of Starr's handpicked bandmates has considerable history in music and gets to play at least two of his or her own hits during the show. Derringer will have work to do to whittle it down to two, but there will be time for that. Bright Shade of White are in the studio, firing up their guitars--Derringer's siren's song. It's off to man the boards for another day in the studio, looking, as always, for the next hit. You know what they say about idle hands.
SIDEBAR: WOULD YOU BELIEVE...
- Rick Derringer's Grammy awards for producing "Weird Al" Yankovic aren't the trophies you're used to seeing on television; they're plaques. According to Derringer, the winning producer for Best Comedy Recording never received trophies because comedy recordings were typically live standup routines with little to no production. Nonetheless, he says he keeps his Grammy plaques on display in his house.
- Derringer says he took his guitar out several times in recording sessions for Yankovic, most notably playing the guitar solo on Yankovic's Michael Jackson parody "Eat It." "I played whenever there was kind of an important guitar thing and we wanted to get it as close as we could," Derringer says.
- Remember the Steely Dan classic, "Rikki Don't Lose That Number?" Meet Rikki--er, Ricky. The line started as a comment to Derringer as he was--what else--writing a number down in the studio one evening. The line stuck, but the meaning changed.
SIDEBAR: TOURING WITH RINGO
This summer Rick Derringer will head out on tour with Ringo Starr & His All-Starr Band for 31 dates in major markets across the United States and Canada. This year's lineup of music legends in the group includes Derringer; blues great Edgar Winter; Gary Wright, arguably best known as the singer of "Dream Weaver;" Richard Page of '80s group Mr. Mister; Wally Palmar, singer for the Romantics; and drummer Greg Bissonette, who has worked with Maynard Ferguson, Toto, Steve Vai and more. Here are the tour dates confirmed as of press time:
(Date, Venue, City, State/Province)
June 24 Fallsview Casino Niagara Falls, ON
June 25 Fallsview Casino Niagara Falls, ON
June 26 Bethel Woods Center Bethel, NY
June 30 Westbury Theatre Westbury, NY
July 2 State Theatre Easton, PA
July 3 Caesar's Circus Maximus Atlantic City, NJ
July 7 Radio City Music Hall New York, NY
July 8 American Theatre Lancaster, PA
July 10 Chastain Park Atlanta, GA
July 11 Durham Performing Arts Center Durham, NC
July 13 Ruth Eckerd Hall Clearwater, FL
July 15 Hard Rock Arena Hollywood, FL
July 17 St. Augustine Amphitheatre St. Augustine, FL
July 20 City Lights Pavilion Cleveland, OH
July 21 CMAC Canandaigua, NY
July 23 Caesars Windsor, ON
July 24 Horseshoe Casino Hammond, IN
July 31 Chateau St. Michelle Woodinville, WA
August 7 Greek Theatre Los Angeles, CA
