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."