Rick Derringer Dead at 77

Rick Derringer, the guitarist, songwriter and producer who wrote or contributed to a body of hits spanning decades, died on Monday at the age of 77.

Derringer’s caretaker, Tony Wilson, shared the news on Facebook, and Guitar Player later reported it. The guitarist’s wife, Jenda Derringer, told TMZ he died “peacefully” in his sleep after being taken off life support following a medical episode.

Rick Derringer’s Life and Career

Born Richard Dean Zehringer on Aug. 5, 1947, in Celina, Ohio, and raised in the nearby Fort Recovery, Derringer began his burgeoning music career in earnest when he received his first guitar on his ninth birthday. (“I was a natural,” he told Guitar Player in 2024.) He and his brother Randy Zehringer (later known as Randy Z) formed a band called the McCoys in their teens, with Derringer handling guitar and lead vocals.

The McCoys scored a No. 1 hit on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1965 with “Hang on Sloopy,” which became the official rock song of Ohio. The band scored one more Top 10 hit with a cover of the R&B staple “Fever,” and a cover of Ritchie Valens’ “Come On, Let’s Go” reached the Top 40.

READ MORE: How the McCoys Hit the Top of the Charts With ‘Hang on Sloopy’

In 1970, the McCoys backed Texas blues-rocker Johnny Winter on his album Johnny Winter And, which also served as the group’s name. Derringer soon began working with Winter’s brother, Edgar Winter, contributing to the Edgar Winter Group’s multiplatinum 1972 debut album, They Only Come Out at Night.

Derringer appeared on several more Edgar Winter Group albums as he readied his solo career, releasing his debut solo album, All American Boy, in 1973. The LP contained Derringer’s version of “Rock and Roll, Hoochie Koo,” which first appeared on Johnny Winter And. The solo version became Derringer’s signature song, reaching No. 23 on the Hot 100 and showcasing his incendiary guitar chops. (It later appeared on the soundtrack to the 1993 stoner comedy Dazed and Confused and season 4 of Netflix’s Stranger Things.)

All American Boy marked the peak of Derringer’s solo success, but he continued to work with a variety of hit-making artists in the years that followed. He played guitar on a handful of Steely Dan tracks — Countdown to Ecstasy’s “Show Biz Kids,” Katy Lied’s “Chain Lightning” and Gaucho’s “My Rival” — and became a frequent collaborator of his neighbor, Todd Rundgren, playing on several of his records.

Despite Donald Fagen and Walter Becker’s reputation for merciless perfectionism in the studio, Derringer said he “didn’t have that kind of experience with them. They pretty much just played me the song — ‘Here you go, Rick. We want it to be a blues kind of thing.’ So that’s what I did.”

The 1980s saw Derringer make several notable contributions to rock and pop hits, including Air Supply’s “Making Love Out of Nothing at All” and Bonnie Tyler’s “Total Eclipse of the Heart.” (He cited the former as one of his favorite guitar solos he ever recorded.) He wrote and recorded for Meat Loaf, Cyndi Lauper, and Barbra Streisand during this time, as well as producing the 1985 World Wrestling Federation release, The Wrestling Album.

READ MORE: 18 Musicians Who Secretly Performed on Kiss Albums

Perhaps most significantly, Derringer produced the first six albums by platinum-selling parodist “Weird Al” Yankovic. Their partnership netted Derringer two Grammys for the Michael Jackson parodies “Eat It” and “Fat.” The former featured a scorching guitar solo from Derringer to approximate Eddie Van Halen’s contribution to the original — a full-circle moment, he explained.

“What’s interesting is, Eddie told us that he copied that style from listening to us,” Derringer told Guitar Player. “The guitar player in the Rick Derringer band was Danny Johnson, and I asked him to play with us because he was one of the first people I ever saw who did that style. That was one of the reasons he got the gig. Eddie Van Halen said he was a big fan of that band, and he came to see us play regularly.”

Derringer’s career slowed in the ’90s. He became a born-again Christian near the end of the decade and released several Christian music albums with his family in the 2000s. He toured with Ringo Starr & His All-Starr Band from 2010-11 and took part in Peter Frampton’s 2013 Guitar Circus alongside B.B. King, Don Felder, Leslie West, Steve Lukather and more.

“People would like me to continue playing the music that I played when I was a teenager or when I was in my twenties,” Derringer told Guitar Player in 2024 while discussing his most recent album, 2023’s poppy, ballad-heavy Rock the Yacht, which he recorded with his wife Jenda. “They want me to rock ‘n’ roll over and over like a young guy. But I’m not a young guy — I’m 76, so we do grow older and our musical tastes change a little bit.”

Yet even as Derringer’s tastes changed, his musical philosophy remained the same. “As far as musicianship, that comes from your heart,” he told Jazz Weekly. “Good songs are good songs.”