Ah. Irish Setter hairdos and braless babes in hot pants. What’s not to like?
I’m too young for the first go-round of this song. I played in an oldies band many years after this, and it was plenty popular then. The pretty girls all danced in front of the bandstand just like that — just like their moms and aunts and big sisters did for the original. There’s no reason for it, really. The song would have to get a lot more sophisticated just to be considered a trifle. It’s a three-chord raga with lyrics about as compelling as a self-addressed stamped envelope. So what? Soap bubbles wouldn’t float as well if they were made from steel.
That’s the McCoys from Union City, Indiana. They got their name from the extremely B side of the Ventures Walk Don’t Run single. I’ve been in a lot of bands that spent more time trying to come up with a witty name than they did practicing. I’m right there with the McCoys here. Use whatever’s handy and get on with it. Hell, people used to name their children random things by opening the Bible to any old page, placing an unseeing finger on the text, and using the words under their digit. Of course the modern method of using a Boggle game or spilling Scrabble game tiles on a Ouija board is much less silly.
There’s two brothers in the band. The Zehringers. Brother Rick eventually changed his name to something easier to spell, and became Rick Derringer. That song might be as simple enough to be played by a chicken pecking a toy piano, but Rick is no slouch. He played guitar on several Steely Dan records. If you’re familiar with their coterie of session men, you know that they didn’t settle.
This is Rick playing the guitar solos on Chain Lightning:
The McCoys were marketed as a bubblegum pop band by their record label. Sloopy made it to Number One on the Billboard chart, sold a million copies, and was named the “Official Rock Song of the State of Ohio.” I’m not sure if that last one is an encomium or an unintentional diss, but it sure is something.
Most musicians can’t handle that kind of success. The McCoys wanted to make heavier rock and psychedelic music. They quit their music label over it, and signed with Mercury Records, who let them make two unlistenable flopparoos before cutting them loose. Two of the original band members didn’t make it to fifty years old by living the serious musician lifestyle a little too seriously.
Rick Derringer hooked up with a bunch of interesting people like Edgar and Johnny Winter and Steely Dan. He eventually had a hit of his own in the mid-seventies called Rock and Roll, Hootchie Coo, which rivals Sloopy for pedestrian lyrics and a general kind of enthusiasm.
Everybody, yeah, tries to put my Sloopy down, but sometimes the simple things are best.
3 Responses
Official Rock Song of Ohio? As an official Ohio-an I formally reject that assignment.
After all, we had Devo right here in Akron. What more could ever be?
Nah, I’m guessing just about anything by Joe Walsh and the James Gang would be better than that. “Stop” (from the first album), “Walk Away” or “Funk 49”, or heck, just about anything from “Rides Again” would be better than that.
I knew a guy at a language school in Mexico in the ’60s who was a pretty good guitarist. He had recently moved from Ohio to TX. He claimed that he had some sort of association w the McCoys when he was in Ohio. Don’t know, but like I said, he was a pretty good guitarist.