Rick Derringer was living the rock-and-roll dream in 1973, riding a top 40 hit with his “Rock and Roll, Hoochie Koo” after charting in the 1960s with his group the McCoys and “Hang On, Sloopy.” He parlayed that success into guitar gigs on albums for Steely Dan, Alice Cooper and Todd Rundgren. He was also a producer, masterminding Edgar Winter hits “Frankenstein” and “Free Ride.”
But all that rock cred went out the window, he claimed, after he began working as a producer for “Weird Al” Yankovic. It’s not that the partnership didn’t pay off — Derringer took home his only Grammy Awards for producing Yankovic’s hits, “Eat It” and “Fat.” But that success came at a cost.
Derringer, who passed away earlier this year at age 77, ditched Yankovic “after six albums, two Grammys and two stars on a Hollywood Walk of Fame. He’s done very well. But here’s the bottom line: I thought that it would help my production career,” he told Guitar Player in 2024, as reported by Parade. “Suddenly I became known as a novelty producer. As much as I love ‘Weird Al’ — he’s a good guy, very talented and a hard worker – he single-handedly ruined my production career.”
Derringer said he didn’t think anything of producing Yankovic’s music at the time, although his music producer peers raised eyebrows at the gig. “A lot of people were like: ‘What’s Rick doing?’ You know, I had a pretty good production career going for myself, so it didn’t strike me as unusual to work with ‘Weird Al,’” Derringer explained. “I grew up in a family that liked novelty music. They had 78s of Spike Jones and stuff like that.”
As a business decision in a vacuum, hooking up with “Weird Al” was a slam dunk. After Derringer produced his first song for Yankovic, he asked if the comic musician had any more parodies they could record. (Spoiler alert: Yankovic had a ton of them.) “I said we should do a whole album. I thought if we can make a success of his songs, it would have no competition. Because there wasn’t anything like his stuff out at the time.”
The result was the self-titled “Weird Al” Yankovic, an album sold to a start-up label that made it an out-of-nowhere hit.
After Derringer hooked up with “Weird Al,” his subsequent producing career did have a novelty feel. His biggest success was likely the World Wrestling Federation’s The Wrestling Album and its rough-and-tumble follow-up, Piledriver: The Wrestling Album II. Cue the raised eyebrows from other rock producers.
Derringer walked away from rock entirely in his later years, becoming an Evangelical Christian and switching focus to recording Christian songs with his third wife, Jenda. He became heavily invested in conservative causes, appearing on InfoWars to promote a right-wing remake of Hulk Hogan’s theme song with new lines like, “Best not mess with my U.S.”
Sounds like Derringer learned something about goofing on song lyrics from “Weird Al” after all.
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