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 "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 schilling 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, from Bonnie ...

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 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 - that being 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, as 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 about their double live album Roadwork . I was c...