Chords for Rick Derringer Interview (1 of 9) - The Early Years

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Well, when we started playing in that area, I was probably _ 14, 15, because we played several
years around the Dayton area before we actually had the opportunity to record Hang On Sloopy.
So I was young, just a kid.
We just started out _ gathering our reputation.
We played for a Kiwanis meeting, or we'd get together for a used car lot opening, any kind
of thing we could do to get our name out there and start playing.
And people started hearing about, you know, those little kids play pretty good.
And people start calling.
And eventually, we were doing pretty good.
We had no manager, really.
We had no real agent.
We would just take the gigs ourself.
We had nobody out there trying to, you know, out there stumping for gigs or anything.
We just, the word got out.
And the next thing you know, we were playing for _ radio station concerts.
We started opening up for big groups.
We played with a lot of the biggest names in show business.
And that's how we got the opportunity to do Hang On Sloopy.
In 1965, almost a year later, the _ Strangeloves came through town.
And they turned out to be record producers in reality.
And they had the opportunity to record Hang On Sloopy when they got back.
They had produced the first big hit records for Bang Records.
And so Bang asked them to go out and find a band that looked like the Beatles.
They said, you know, if you can find a bunch of kids that look like the Beatles.
We got this song called My Girl Sloopy that was number one on the R&B chart.
So if we can find a bunch of white boys that look like the Beatles, this thing is
going to just sweep the white charts and we're liable to have a huge hit.
So they were out there looking for that band.
We didn't know that.
But coincidentally, the day that we were going to play as their backup band in
Dayton, Ohio, we went out and bought Beatles suits.
So we all had, you know, being in that era, we all had our little Beatle haircuts.
We had our Beatles [Eb] suits on.
They hadn't found the band that looked like the Beatles yet.
And we went out there and they said, well, one of the songs we're going to
play is My Girl Sloopy.
We all went, whoa, we love that song.
We knew that song because we had heard, you know, we were big R&B fans.
So we had heard it the year before as a number one R&B hit.
So we said, sure.
So we played the heck out of it because we knew it and loved it.
So of course, afterwards, it was the last show on their tour.
They hadn't found that band yet.
They brought us backstage and they said, would you like to come to New York
tomorrow and record Hang On Sloopy?
Well, My Girl Sloopy, it was still called then.
And I asked my dad, I said, what do you think, dad?
And he said, well, our vacation starts tomorrow.
So everything, you know, the Lord works these things out in his own way.
So we hitched a U-Haul trailer on the back of our car and followed the
Strangeloves to New York City the next day and went in the studio next week
and recorded what soon became known as Hang On Sloopy.
And the engineers jumped up and down in the control room and yelled, number one,
number one.
_ And within a few weeks, it was.
We did a four-track recording.
And like we do now, at least we still put down the track without the vocals.
We put down the track.
And what they did was they recorded a little acetate of it.
And they gave us a portable, which was very rare in 1965, a portable battery
_ operated record player that we could play the CD on.
And they said, OK, take this back with you this week and _ rehearse the vocals so
that when you come in next week to the studio, we can have this thing down.
So we actually took it.
We went to the park because it was battery powered.
So we could actually take it out and go into the park up on 72nd Street,
West Side, New York City.
And we could sit out in the park there and play Hang On Sloopy and sing it
over and over.
So the following week, when we went into the studio, we nailed that sucker.
And like I said, it became a number one hit all over the world.
Well, in four tracks in those days, what they would try to do is they were
able to bounce around a little bit.
But if you bounce too many times, they'd lose the fidelity.
So we ended up with a stereo Hang On Sloopy track and then two
tracks of vocals left.
And I think they even actually ended up with a mono.
They bounced the stereo track to mono so that they could overdub the
backgrounds a couple times.
So they could have the background vocals and the background vocals and then still
have a track for the lead vocals.
And then when stereo record, because it was still mono basically in that time
period, but by the time the thing became a hit, the technology was moving so
quickly that they ended up _ remastering it somehow and simulating a stereo version.
I think they actually had all the music on one side and all the vocals spread out.
And a strange thing for what we would have today, but they ended up with a stereo version.
But the coolest thing was very soon we were traveling through Washington, DC.
And we had done a gig in Washington, DC in the afternoon.
And we came home in time, well, to the hotel in time to turn on the big news
show of the day, which was Huntley Brinkley.
Huntley Brinkley News was the big, that was, you couldn't get any bigger than
that news, national news broadcast.
So we turned on the news in the hotel room and Huntley Brinkley said, today,
the Russians have decided to play rock and roll for the proletariat.
And today in Red Square, the communists have broadcast rock and roll for the
first time to the people of the Soviet Union.
And they showed an old time speaker up on the wall, and out of it was blasting,
[G] hang on, Sloopy.
So we went, whoa, check that out.
That certainly blew us away.
The first time we'd ever heard it _ nationally and that kind of a
capacity, and it was from Russia. _ _ _ _ _
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