It’s become painfully obvious that we’re running FAR too many In Memoriam columns on Pencil Storm, and even more painfully obvious that the Universe of Rock & Roll has reached a point where that trend is not about to slow down anytime soon. So, my In Memoriam approach from here on out is gonna be personalized stories. You can read all about the obituary-ly gory details, facts & figures ANYWHERE on this InterWideWeb; here’s my Rick Derringer story.
In 1970 I was an 18 year old freshman at Ohio State University. (I attended OSU for three years, mostly to avoid being drafted into the Vietnam War, because my family wasn’t rich enough to pay a doctor to say I had “bone spurs.”) I became really good friends with my Freshman Composition Teaching Assistant and his wife. He & I would hang out after classes. I’d go to their house for dinner. They took me along to see The Youngbloods once at Ohio Wesleyan with a bunch of their older hippie friends. It was a great education.
One morning when I stopped in his office before class he asked me if I’d ever heard a song called “Rock & Roll Hoochie Koo.” “Yeah, it’s on the new Johnny Winter album. Rick Derringer from The McCoys wrote it. It’s fucking great.”
He went on to ask, “Could the chorus of the song possibly be, ‘Rock & roll hoochie koo / Come on, mama, light my foo’”? “No,” I laughed, “It’s fuse. Lordy mama, light my fuse.” He tossed me one of my classmates’ papers – in which she, like the rest of us – was supposed to explicate a poem. I myself had broken down a poem by Thoreau, as it had not occurred to me to consider a blues tune by one of The McCoys as a poem. The paper was hilarious. The young lady in question had analyzed “Rock & Roll Hoochie Koo” exactly as if it had been a poem by Shelley or Keats. It included an observation on the line “The way she waggle that thing, it really knocks me out,” as portraying “the medieval application of worms for fishing as a vital source of protein in a largely meatless subsistence farming diet.” (A “foo” - according to Our Girl - was a “sacred Druid candle, used for incantations.”)
Long story short, he gave the young lady an A-plus on her paper and had her read it out loud in class, much to the chagrin & objections of the boys & girls who had waded through the words of Emily Dickinson and Robert Frost for their assignments.
Cut to 2013 – I roadied a show in 2013 for our friend Erica Blinn (and her band The Handsome Machine) when she opened for Rick Derringer at the Columbus Commons. I got to talk to Derringer after his bands’ soundcheck before we set up Erica’s gear and related the above “foo” story to him. He cracked up and mused, “Lordy mama, light my foo. That might actually be better than fuse. I’m gonna sing it that way tonight.”
But he forgot.
Rick Derringer, RIP. It was great talking to you, if only for two minutes.
The first version of “Rock & Roll, Hoochie Koo” from Johnny Winter And, 1970.
A live version with Johnny Winter’s brother Edgar, 1973. (Note Edgar’s key-tar, an unfortunate artifact of the 1970’s.)
Ricki C. is 72 years old. He saw The McCoys live as a teenager in 1965 or so on a bill with Neil Diamond, Every Mother’s Son and The Turtles at Vet’s Memorial in Columbus, Ohio. And - addressing the elephant in the room - though he attended Ohio State University (as detailed above) you are not going to read one word here about “Hang On Sloopy” being incessantly played by the OSU Marching Band, or being “Ohio’s Official State Rock Song,” or any of that guff, because he just treasures it as the cool little rock & roll song he bought on a 45 rpm single when he was 12. And with that, we bring you this…..