Hang On Sloopy – The Best of The McCoys

The Story Behind Hang On Sloopy | The McCoys’ Classic | ‘Hang On Sloopy’ by Ohio Teen Garage Band The McCoys was the first single released on the Immediate Records label, in 1965, and it was the label’s first chart hit, peaking at number five in the UK singles chart listings in September of 1965.

Indeed, Immediate Records MD, Andrew Loog Oldham, then also manager of The Rolling Stones, was so taken with the band’s success that he proceeded to releases six further singles by the band on Immediate, which all manifestly failed to replicate the success of ‘Sloopy’. Hubris, I guess, and if the legend is to be believed, it wasn’t the last time that Oldham was charged with this failing.

In addition to The McCoys, the first three Immediate single releases featured The Fifth Avenue (a cover of The Byrds ‘Bells of Rhymney’), and ‘I’m Not Saying’ by Teutonic chanteuse Nico (the song was penned by Gordon Lightfoot).

So I guess Oldham’s nous was at least finely tuned when it came to The McCoys, even if they’re pretty much remembered for that one big hit, at least as far as the UK is concerned. One presumes that the money that legendarily profligate Oldham coined in for ‘Hang On Sloopy’ was then blown on a load of non-hit singles.

The Story Behind Hang On Sloopy | The McCoys’ Classic

The story behind how The McCoys came to record ‘Hang On Sloopy’ in the first place is interesting enough. The song was originally recorded as ‘My Girl Sloopy‘, by the Los Angeles based vocal combo The Vibrations in 1964, on Atlantic Records, no less. It reached number ten on the Billboard R&B chart listings, and even climbed as high as number twenty-six in the mainstream Billboard Pop chart.

Such was the regional nature of Pop in the USA at that time, it even became a local hit in the Pacific Northwest, in a version by James Henry & The Olympics. However, that prior success was eclipsed when The McCoys took their re-titled version, ‘Hang On Sloopy’, to number one in the USA in October, 1965.

‘Sloopy’ had been penned by songwriter Wes Farrell (who would later be the Mastermind behind the hugely successful Partridge Family musical TV series) and producer Bert Berns, the latter using the sobriquet surname Russell.

The story goes that The Strangeloves, who were then touring the US with the Dave Clark Five, were set to record the song, having incorporated it into their set, and noting how well it was being received, viewed it as a potential follow-up to their then-hit single ‘I Want Candy’.

The Story Behind Hang On Sloopy | The McCoys’ Classic

Matters were somewhat further complicated when the Dave Clark Five said that THEY were going to record it, and had already made arrangements to do so through the songs’ publishers (Clark’s business acumen was in inverse ratio to his drumming skills, and he knew a Good Thing when he heard it).

The touring Strangeloves were basically a front for the production triumvirate of Bob Feldman, Richard Gottehrer and Jerry Goldstein – they’d made up this ludicrously cockamamie tale about how they were three Australian brothers, named Miles, Niles and Giles – but I digress — back to The Sloopy Story.

They surmised —rightly — that were the Dave Clark Five, then (to this scribe somewhat inexplicably) a HUGE phenomenon in the USA, their popularity (briefly at least), almost rivalling that of The Beatles and The Rolling Stones, to cut their own version, it would probably outsell The Strangeloves.

Furthermore, if they rushed the record out whilst ‘I Want Candy’ was still in the charts, they’d be competing against themselves, so a solution was urgently sought. Fate then fell into the Feldman, Gottehrer and Goldstein collective’s hands, when a young, Ohio-based combo called Rick & The Raiders opened (and provided backing) for The Strangeloves in Dayton, Ohio, and their singer — the somewhat callow, then sixteen-year-old vocalist Rick Zehringer (who would be renamed Derringer) was flown to New York to sing the vocal lead over the Strangeloves already-recorded backing track.

Rumour has it that he was also allowed to add the guitar solo, too. Moreover, because of the success of the band Paul Revere & The Raiders, it was decided to change the bands’ name to The McCoys — the name being derived from an old track by The Ventures (this stuff is complicated, innit?).

The Story Behind Hang On Sloopy | The McCoys’ Classic

Derringer’s own recollection of the story strays from this, albeit slightly — particularly in regard to their actually playing on the recording. In an interview on the website Ultimate Classic Rock (itself quoting from a Living Legends Music interview), he remembered how the hook-up happened:

Rick: ” . . . The day that we were going to play as their (The Strangeloves) backup band in Dayton, Ohio, we went out and bought Beatle suits,” Derringer told Living Legends Music. “We all had our little Beatle haircuts, we had our Beatle suits on. They hadn’t found the band that looked like the Beatles yet. And we went out there and they said, ‘One of the songs we’re gonna play is ‘My Girl Sloopy’, and we all went, ‘Whoa, we love that song.”

As it happens, the record was released on the Bang label, which was co-owned by Bert Berns, one of the writers of ‘My Girl Sloopy/Hang On Sloopy’, of course, ensuring that Berns’ bread was lavishly buttered and both sides.

Berns had earlier a hand in writing ‘Twist And Shout’ for The Isley Brothers, and enjoyed huge success when The Beatles recorded it for their first album — ‘Hang On Sloopy’ is a close cousin of that song, based on the same three-chord progression, of course, and also with the same sort of build-and-release device.

The Story Behind Hang On Sloopy | The McCoys’ Classic

Rick: “So we played the heck out of it, because we knew it and loved it. So of course afterwards, it was the last show on their tour and they hadn’t found that band yet. They brought us backstage and they said, ‘Would you like to come to New York tomorrow and record ‘Hang On Sloopy?’”

He continued, “So we hitched a U-Haul trailer on the back of our car and followed the Strangeloves to New York City the next day and went in the studio the next week and recorded what was soon to become known as ‘Hang On Sloopy’ and the engineers jumped up and down in the control room and yelled ‘Number one! Number one!’ and within a few weeks it was.”

Originally written and recorded with three verses, the newly re-titled “Hang On Sloopy” was edited down to two verses for the single and resulting Hang On Sloopy album. The unedited three-verse version first appeared on the 1970 Bang various artists compilation Bang & Shout Super Hits (BLPS-220), and features here.

So, The McCoys beat the Dave Clark Five to the ‘Sloopy’ punch – however, The Yardbirds did record it, as ‘My Girl Sloopy’. Anyway, The McCoys made a great fist of the song — its’ teen-love theme is expertly rendered by Zehringer, and his fleet-fingered guitar solo has a real charm to it, too. The breakdown on the “sloopy let your hair down girl, let it hang down on me . . . ” offered great opportunities to stretch out and build up the tension when they played live, too, no doubt.

Beginnings

The McCoys first came together in Union City, Ohio. As the band’s de facto leader, Rick Derringer (born Zehringer — Derringer was basically an Anglicised version of his surname, although some claim that he adopted the name because the Bang Records label incorporated a small-calibre pistol a Derringer – as part of the label’s distinctive logo) recalled in The Rock Encyclopaedia:

Rick: “I was born in Ohio just across the border from Indiana. My brother Randy played drums and I played guitar when I was nine. When I was in the eighth grade, my family moved twelve miles across the state line and we lived in a town called Fort Recovery. For some time, I’d been fascinated by the electric bass.

In 1958, it seemed the instrument of the future. When I was twelve or thirteen in Indiana, a neighbour named Dennis Kelly said he’d like to play it and if I’d show him how, he’d buy one. He got a brand new Fender bass with amp and I showed a song from the Ventures’ LP The McCoys. While he was playing it, we arrived in wonderland because we realized with him and me and Randy we had a band.”

Although initially the band named itself after the aforementioned Ventures record, The McCoys quickly became the Rick Z Combo, which some promoters thought sounded too much like a jazz group.

Settling on Rick & The Raiders, they performed gigs throughout the Midwest and cut a single for the small Sonic label, titled ‘You Know That I Love You’, which benefited from some local radio airplay. Eventually they beefed up their sound with the addition of organist Ronnie Brandon and began tapping into the big beat of early 1960s pop and soul.

The Story Behind Hang On Sloopy | The McCoys’ Classic

When Kelly left for college, Randy Hobbs took over the bass role — he’d occasionally sat in for Kelly, and his induction was a smooth fit, and saxophone player Sean Michaels was also added to the band ranks. The group’s selling point as an act was the fiery guitar leads of Rick Zehringer, but as a group they were professional enough to appear on the bill with bigger name acts, whom they sometimes upstaged.

When they signed to Bang Records and hit almost instant paydirt with ‘Hang On Sloopy’, they were off and running. Not long after its release, keyboard player Brandon was ousted from the band ranks — the reasons for his departure have become lost in the last fifty years of rock and roll history.

Subsequent singles failed to reproduce the outrageous success of their breakthrough hit, although they made some interesting, often charming records. Their version of the old smouldering Peggy Lee / Little Willie John hit, ‘Fever’, had as its ‘B’ side a Feldman / Gottehrer I Goldstein composition, ‘Sorrow’, which became a UK hit at the time for The Merseys, and in the seventies a smash for David Bowie, from his Pin Ups album of sixties cover versions.

However, the law of diminishing returns didn’t take long to set in on the McCoys’ recording career. Their singles formula — covers of hits as the ‘A’ side, Feldman I Gottehrer / Goldstein songs on the ‘B’ sides, wore thin. However, the bands’ sixth single, ‘Don’t Worry Mother, Your Son’s Heart Is Pure’, penned by Derringer, was a decent enough stab at making a Garage-Pop single, with some pleasingly Beatlesque Revolver era inflections, including some modal sitar-like guitar doodles, with a hint of The Yardbirds’ ‘Heart Full of Soul’ in Derringer’s guitar line.

The Story Behind Hang On Sloopy | The McCoys’ Classic

Songs such as ‘Runaway’ pillage from The Beach Boys’ ‘Help Me Rhonda’, with the opening line a steal from ‘I’m Into Something Good’, a hit for Herman’s Hermits, of course. ‘Bald Headed Lena’ is an amusing, Jazz-tinged opus, with a fine lead guitar break.

Their last single on Bang, ‘Say Those Magic Words’ had some of a UK Mod feel to it, and had been recorded in 1966 for their second album, but not released until a year later. In the UK, The Birds — a UK Rhythm and Blues / Freakbeat combo who featured future Faces / Rolling Stones guitarist, Ronnie Wood recorded the song in 1966.

In December of 1967, the McCoys’ label, Bang Records, suffered a grievous blow when the label founder, Bert Berns, died. Before his death the label’s principle artists, Neil Diamond and Van Morrison, both departed from the imprint, followed by The McCoys, who signed to the Mercury Records label.

However, The McCoys struggled to shed their Garage Band ‘Teen Idol’ image, and despite two well-received albums for their new label — Infinite McCoys (1968) and Human Ball (1969), in a more contemporary harder style, they were dropped.

Relocating to New York, the band became the house act at The Scene club, and through the venue’s manager Steve Paul, ended up backing the Texas firebrand rock guitarist Johnny Winter, known as Johnny Winter And . . . Derringer would also play in Edgar Winter’s White Trash, and pursue a solo career in the 1970s, as well as becoming a record producer of some note.

The McCoys may have only one really big hit – ‘Hang On Sloopy’— but if that’s all they’re remembered for, that ain’t bad. This collection shows that the band made an underrated decent body of work that stands up well to contemporary scrutiny. (Alan Robinson, October 2017)

The McCoys International Celebrities

Article published in Song Hits, February 1967

Less than a year ago the biggest deal in the lives of Rick and Randy Zehringer and their buddies, Randy Hobbs and Ronnie Brandon, was to accompany touring big-name acts at rock and roll shows when they played in Dayton, Ohio. But that was last summer, before the McCoys were discovered by the Strangeloves in Dayton and brought back to New York City for a recording date – produced by FGG Productions.

The song, “Hang On Sloopy”, went into the number one spot on the charts in the United States, Great Britain, France, Mexico, Japan and six other foreign countries and has made the teenage McCoys international celebrities.

Since then, the McCoys’ album “Hang On Sloopy” became a best-seller and a single of the standard “Fever”, taken from the LP, made the top ten and gave the boys their second smash in a row. Many more hits followed.

The McCoys International Celebrities

“I can’t really believe it, even now,” says the leader of the group, 18-year-old Rick Zehringer. “We’ve seen a heck of a lot in these couple of months.”

After introducing his colleagues; brother Randy (16), Randy Hobbs (17) and Ronnie Brandon (19), he continued, “It’s been an education and it’s fun. We’ve been all over the United States from California to Florida and in Canada and England.”

Rick, like all the others in the group, is multi-talented, playing just about all the instruments ordinarily used by the boys – guitar, drums, bass guitar and organ. He’s also a rather mature young man for his age, perhaps because he and his brother, Randy, have been making the performance scene for almost nine years, actually half their lives.

“My kid brother and I started as a duet,” Rick says, “first when we lived in Ohio and then in Indiana. Then we got a gig in Greenville, Ohio, right over the state line, where we played every Saturday for a year at a record hop. That’s where we met Ronnie. He played piano but we didn’t want a piano, so he learned the organ. It made us a swinging group.

“Then pretty soon Randy Hobbs joined us. Right after that we got the Dayton job and that’s where we met the Strangeloves. Life has been exciting ever since. We’ve had a chance to see and meet and work with stars like the Beach Boys, Gene Pitney, Herman’s Hermits, Len Barry, Freddie and the Dreamers and the Beau Brummels, a whole flock of them. We’re fans of all of them and of all kinds of records.

“But I don’t think we’ve really been influenced by any particular group. I think you learn from everybody you see and hear, sometimes you learn what not to do, but you do learn. And we try to keep right on learning.

“Just like Ronnie Brandon, who likes to work with cars and customize them and race them on dragways. He learns from seeing the other cars and drivers. It’s the same way in the record business. We just want to keep right on getting better and better at what we do.”

The McCoys International Celebrities