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Growing up in the late ‘60’s to mid 70’s, music was instilled in our minds as far more than just entertainment. It was an education. Most of the messages sent out on vinyl and through performances were of a consistent nature. Stop the war. Love your brother and sister. Rebel against oppression. But what made the message even stronger were the messengers. The ones whose lyrics and music helped shape and define the characters of those willing to see the world through their eyes.

The integrity of these artists was, and is, crucial to me. Had the musicians I have followed all these years never received a recording contract, their vocation would not have changed. We would have been the sorrier for never having heard of them but they would still have played their music. Of the people I write, a regular job was never an option. They had to do what they did. Whether a divine force led them to discover their talents or whether they were victims of circumstance, we are the ones who have benefited.

The list of those who defined the ideals of millions runs into the hundreds. After much consideration, I narrowed the list to four chapters. There are so many more to discuss but I will use that as incentive to continue with my writing. This group of artists caused me to run to record stores and watch my weekly allowance disappear. The rare occasion that these artists would appear on television, you would litter your belongings with notes of that date and time. When these bands came to town, it was an event. The ingestion of the announced date. The procurement of guaranteed entry. The day before the show. The day of the show. Going there. Entering the hall. The “click of the switch” when the lights went out.

The first time I saw Springsteen. The chill when, after the drum intro in total darkness, the lights kicked in for “Rock ’n’ Roll” by Zeppelin. Having a limited knowledge of Rory Gallagher, I watched as he and his band walked on stage, plugged in and blew my face off. He was the first “rock star” I ever met. And I have been fortunate to have met many others since then. Bruce and Zep don’t need me to tell the public about them but the artists compiled in this book deserve my respect. Enough so that I’ve made it a passion to remind those of us who followed them. And to introduce them to a new generation that will never be lucky enough to have experienced what I did and at a time that shall never be repeated for more than the obvious reasons.

These are four studies of some of the most blessed of human characters.

GALLAGHER, MARRIOTT, DERRINGER, TROWER

“ROCK CHRONICLES”

A four-part biography that deals with the lives and careers of those listed either through personal interviews or research.

RORY GALLAGHER

Rory Gallagher<>Donal Gallagher<>Gerry McAvoy<>Rod de’Ath<>Lou Martin

Wilgar Campbell<>Ted McKenna<>Brendan O’Neill<>Eric Kittringham

Norman Damery<>John Wilson<>Charlie McCracken<>Tom O’Driscoll

Phil McDonnell<>Jack Bruce<>Eric Clapton<>Alan O’Duffy<>Rudi Gerlach

Marcus Connaughton<>Dino McGartland<>Eddie Kennedy<>Joe O’Herlihy

Derek St. Holmes<>Ginger Baker<>Van Morrison<>Chris Wright<>Roy Eldridge

“Excellent work and a great insight into Rory.”

¾ Gerry McAvoy, bassist, The Rory Gallagher Band

STEVE MARRIOTT

Steve Marriott<>Jerry Shirley<>Peter Frampton<>Greg Ridley<>Clem Clempson

Kay Marriott<>Kay Mateus Dos Anjos<>Dee Anthony<>Jerry Moss

Jenny Deardon<>Rod Stewart<>Bobby Tench<>Bill Anthony<>Pam Cross

Ian McLagan<>Kenny Jones<>Ronnie Lane<>George Harrison<>David Bowie

Alan O’Duffy<>Jim Leverton<>Keith Richards<>Rick Derringer

“I was there. And the way Dan has written this book, it’s as if he was there as well.”

¾ Jerry Shirley, drummer, Humble Pie

RICK DERRINGER

Rick Derringer<>Edgar Winter<>Johnny Winter<>Randy Zehringer<>Bobby Caldwell

Randy Jo Hobbs<>Janice Zehringer<>Dan Hartman<>Chuck Ruff<>Teddy Slatus

Ronnie Montrose<>Vinny Appice<>Danny Johnson<>Kenny Aaronson

Liz Derringer<>Carmine Appice<>Steve Paul<>Floyd Radford<>Mike Varney

Steven Tyler<>”Weird Al” Yankovic<>Dennis Kelly<>Ronnie Brandon

Todd Rundgren<>Nevin Doll<>Jack Douglas

“I really have a great deal of respect for Rick. He’s one of the most versatile, complete guitar players that I’ve had the pleasure of working with.”

¾ Edgar Winter, musician

ROBIN TROWER

Robin Trower<>Derek Sutton<>James Dewar<>Reg Isidore<>Bill Lordan

Rustee Allen<>Matthew Fisher<>Gary Brooker<>Jack Bruce<>Davey Pattison

Chris Wright<>Geoff Emerick<>Keith Reid<>Terry Ellis<>Patrick Rule

Livingstone Brown<>Roy Eldridge<>Wilf Wright<>Richard Watts

“I have known Robin Trower for over 30 years and managed him for the last 18, but I learned a whole lot from this chapter. I really enjoy the way Dan has woven differing points of view on each of the major events in Robin’s career into a consistent narrative. A great read!”

¾ Derek Sutton, manager, Robin Trower

“After reading the chapter on Rick Derringer, I can honestly say that this book will appeal to not only Derringer fans but fans of 70s rock and roll. This is a must read.  Dan Muise has painstakingly yet successfully captured the essence of the 70s music business, and this book answers a lot of questions regarding why these incredible musicians never made it as big as some of their (inferior) contemporaries.  If you, like me, grew up as a fan of these great guitarists, you’ll love the book!”

Tom Guerra
Guitarist - Mambo Sons
Contributing Writer - Vintage Guitar magazine
www.tomguerra.com

This excerpt from the Rick Derringer chapter is a portion of the “construction” of The Edgar Winter Group.

Edgar Winter: “Dan Hartman was the first. That was through a demo tape that he sent Steve Paul. Which when I heard it, I thought, ‘This guy’s great. A real talent.’ And there were hundreds of tapes from Dan! I flew all over the country looking for people. Ronnie Montrose I knew from when he played with Van Morrison and Boz Scaggs. And he had previously played in a band with Chuck Ruff. And he recommended Chuck. And for a while Dan Hartman was playing guitar. Dan and Ronnie on guitar and Randy Jo Hobbs was playing bass.”

Rick Derringer: “Dan Hartman (b. Dec. 8, 1950) was one of the more talented people, musically, that I have ever worked with. He really is right up there with the best of them. He came from a really positive, healthy family in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. They taught him the power of positive thinking. Great writer. Great producer. He used to send a demo and a letter every week and timed it so that it would arrive at Steve Paul’s desk on Monday morning. Every week (laughs)! I mean, he thought about it that consciously. It had a little heart logo on it. He was just a kid. He was working at a bank in Harrisburg and playing high school gigs and stuff. Steve finally listened to one of them one day and liked what he heard. He brought it over and said, ‘What do you think?’ And the demo that he played for me included ‘Free Ride’ almost note for note like the way we recorded it. The song ‘Autumn’ was on there. A lot of the stuff that ended up on ‘They Only Come Out At Night’ existed on that demo, almost note for note like we ended up recording them. He was an amazingly talented guy.”

Edgar Winter: “It was a five-piece group. And before we did the first album, Johnny Badanjek from Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels was playing drums. He played on ‘Free Ride.’ The first two songs we did before we actually went in to do the album were ‘Free Ride’ and ‘We All Had A Real Good Time.’ Then we decided to switch Dan to bass.”

Chuck Ruff: “So they flew me out to New York and I auditioned. I never really got a firm contractual offer but I was there and learned Dan and Edgar’s tunes and learned the show.”

Edgar Winter: “I really liked Chuck. He had real good energy and he seemed to be the right drummer. And that’s when we finalized the group. I felt that a four-piece was more focused. And I thought, stylistically, Randy Hobbs was a different kind of player. I was looking for people with more of a universal feel as opposed to people who had a niche or a particular kind of groove. And Randy is a great groove player. But I thought it would be a more focused group with guitar, bass, keyboards and drums. That’s just what I thought it should be.”

Author: Was Rick your immediate choice to produce “They Only Come Out At Night?”

Edgar Winter: “Oh, yeah. I wasn’t looking for any other producer. I didn’t see any reason to change. We had a great relationship and I knew he understood everything I was doing.

“ ‘They Only Come Out at Night’ was definitely calculated to be a successful album. It was the one that I said, ‘OK, you guys. I’m gonna give you the album that you’ve been asking for. This should be the one.’ And I just did all of the obvious stuff on it and it worked. I love the album. I think it’s got a lot of great songs on it. We put everything that we had into it as a group to try to make it something that would have that kind of appeal. And it ended up being very successful. For which I’m very happy.”

Rick Derringer: “Edgar had done some dates for ‘They Only Come Out At Night,’ but for some reason there was a little dissension in the ranks. There were some problems between Edgar and Ronnie, personally. In fact, Ronnie had stopped playing with the band.”

Edgar Winter: “I didn’t know why Ronnie wanted to move on. After talking to him years later, he felt that he was unappreciated. It had nothing to do, as far as I was aware of, with me. I think that Steve Paul’s vision of the band was that the strength in the band lay in the co-writing between Dan Hartman and myself and he was not encouraging Ronnie to participate in the overall direction of the band. I never felt that way but evidently Ronnie had gotten that idea. He never voiced it to me. I got along great with Ronnie and I always liked him. The thing I liked most about Ronnie was he had this sort of rebellious outlaw vibe that I liked. And that was the main thing in comparison to Rick, who is a very disciplined and organized player. Ronnie was the total opposite. Very unpredictable.”

Chuck Ruff: “Ronnie left because he and Steve Paul did not get along at all. Ronnie wanted more of a cut. He had been working on a bunch of songs with Edgar and only one of them got on the record. So he was kind of pissed off about that. And he felt like he was being slighted and not being treated the way he wanted to be.

“We were on the road in Houston, Texas, opening for West, Bruce and Laing. Ronnie and I were roommates. And I happened to have overheard a conversation between Edgar and Steve Paul. Steve was running Ronnie down left and right. I didn’t like it at all because Steve was saying all this shit behind his back. ‘We’re gonna fire that guy.’ It was Steve Paul backstabbing and saying, ‘This guy said this about you,’ and ‘That guy said this about you.’ Just a real shit-disturber. One of those guys that shakes your hand with one hand and stabs you in the back with the other one. I immediately told Ronnie that they were gonna fire him. So before they could do that, he quit.

“They were gonna call a big meeting and lay down the law to Ronnie, that he was gonna get fired. So one day, as we’re walking through an airport, he just quit. And as soon as he did that they all started looking at me. ‘Hey, asshole, why did you tell him all that shit?’ But they should have known better to talk about that kind of shit in front of me. He was my best friend. What was I supposed to do?

“I ended up getting the new guitar player into the band. A friend of mine from high school, Jerry Weems. He was a really good guitar player and a really good singer. He recently passed away from liver failure. Rick was producing us and kinda playing guitar with us once in a while. It was a weird situation. We did a taping of ‘The Midnight Special.’ We played ‘Frankenstein’ with Jerry, whose hair was really short. And Rick came out and joined us on ‘Rock ‘n’ Roll Hoochie Koo.’ Anyway, we were in Winnipeg and Jerry and I took a few days off to go back to Reno. And while we were in the airport Jerry disappeared off the face of the earth. Nobody knew where he was. Turns out that for two weeks he had been held in solitary confinement in a military stronghold. The whole time he was on the road with us he was AWOL from the Army National Guard. So they cut all his hair off. Then he hooked up with us in L.A. and we did that program.”

Rick Derringer: “I then decided I’d like to go out and play some music and capitalize on the success of ‘Rock ‘n’ Roll Hoochie Koo’ and that album. I was able to call up Edgar and say, ‘Look, since I played on some of the stuff and produced it, doesn’t it make sense that we do it together?’ And rather than create a band of my own that I didn’t have, I simply went out and worked with Edgar. I had worked with Dan Hartman and Chuck Ruff and Edgar making that record. And even helping him put together the band. So it really felt like my band as much as Edgar’s band. We called it ‘The Edgar Winter Group featuring Rick Derringer.’ And I was able to go out on the road and support ‘All American Boy’ and 'Rock ‘n’ Roll Hoochie Koo' at the same time as helping Edgar with his music.”

Edgar Winter: “I always enjoyed working with Rick in whatever band it was. I thought he was great in White Trash. I knew he would be great in the new band. A great strength of his is his versatility. I tried to balance that. We’d do an album. Dan would write three or four. I would write three or four. Rick would write three or four. And we tried to keep that balance going so that everybody would feel that they were being given the opportunity to contribute.”

Author: Was your joining the group contingent on being able to support your album as well as supporting theirs?

Rick Derringer: “We didn’t have to make any contingencies like that. ‘Teenage Love Affair,’ ‘Rock ‘n’ Roll Hoochie Koo’ and some of the songs from that album were successful enough that Edgar wanted to do that.”

Edgar Winter: “I told him that I knew of his interest in his solo career and there was no reason why he couldn’t continue to work on that and be in the band.”

Rick Derringer: “We really did enjoy being out there and being successful. That’s part of it. It’s not only the music. When you’re a young man and you’re involved in the spill-over from Beatlemania and just the phenomenal success of the music business at that time, it really is that much fun. It doesn’t just look like it’s that much fun. And then the other part of success is, all of a sudden, you have lots of money to spend. We were buying outrageous clothes to perform in, spending money creating musical instruments. Basically living your dream! I couldn’t wish a better thing for any young male than to be living that kind of experience.”

This book can be purchased for $24.95, personally autographed by Rick. (Retail $19.95) shipping 4/29