Old Enough to Forget

As a kid, "Rock and Roll Hoochie Koo" was everything a rock and roll song needed to be. It was big, it was infectious, and it was awesome. It had a lot of guitar. For many years this was all I needed to know about Rick Derringer. Then in the '80s I started seeing his name show up in weird places. Most notably on "Weird" Al records. Of course, being a wrestling fan back in the day when the curtain hadn't been pulled back to reveal the true nature of the business, I watched in awe as Hulk Hogan entered the ring to Rick Derringer's "Real American," and I knew this was Rick Derringer because they were shilling Rocking Wrestling, or The Wrestling Album , I don't know what it was called, and looking it up mid-sentence just seems like a lot of effort. I did know that Rick was involved, and I found that weird and cool at the same time. Recently, as I've been diving into a lot of records, Rick's name kept popping up all over the place, fro...

1972 was a good year for Mister Winter. In the spring he released Roadwork , which I really liked, and then that fall he'd release They Only Come Out at Night with his new band, The Edgar Winter Group. The group would feature a young Dan Hartman on vocals, bass, guitar, and a lot of other stuff (he was a wunderkind; his picture looks like it belongs in a yearbook), and Ronnie Montrose on guitar. A year later Ronnie would leave and start his own band, but it was here that he honed his rock chops. I'll be honest, I got this for two tracks: "Free Ride" and "Frankenstein." If the other eight tracks blew chunks, I'd still feel like I got my money's worth. Then again, I found this in the dollar bin - it was a risk, as who knows what condition this thing would turn out to be in? Turns out that with a little spit and polish, the record looked pretty good, and sounded better. The record leads off with "Hangin' Around," and it's a decent son...

I picked this up in the dollar bin a couple of months ago, and after some TLC, the vinyl cleaned up surprisingly well. I mean really well. The gatefold was in decent shape, but if there were any liner notes, they were lost to time. This was an album that intrigued me, and the song I was most excited to listen to was "Rock & Roll, Hoochie Koo," as I was curious to hear how different this was from the version I was most familiar with: Rick Derringer's 1973 killer from his solo debut album All American Boy . Oddly enough, only a few months after Roadwork was released in 1972, The Edgar Winter Group would release They Only Come Out at Night , and the rest, as they say, is history. That album would yield two of his biggest hits in "Frankenstein" and "Free Ride," both of which would be forever cemented in the foundations of what would become classic rock. However, this isn't about that album. This is about their double live album Roadwork . I was com...