Sloopy Wives-Fact and Fiction

***Update: Since this article first appeared in fall 2021, new information has come out that verifies the accuracy of this original report. For example, on November 21, 2022 Rick Derringer provided the answer fans had been waiting for. On his Facebook page he identified the dancer in his 1975 “Hang On Sloopy” music video as Lisa: “Sloopy Girl” dancer Lisa Leonard Dalton. This mystery had been originally solved in 2021, with a documentary video and an article featured here at QZVX (the Pacific Northwest’s leading website for media news). Just the same, it was great to get a confirmation from Rick Derringer himself. Lisa Leonard Dalton is 100% the dancer in the classic Sloopy Girl music video.

Also, when this story came out many people were falsely under the impression that Liz Brewer, a party planner in London, was the female dancer. In proving that wrong, it was essential to establish that Brewer was in fact more than a decade too old to be the young dancing girl. That part of the article required extensive research to prepare and that information has been left as it was, so readers can follow along. However, recent and definitive government records, establishing that this QZVX story had Brewer’s age correct to the very day of her birth, has been released and that verification of authenticity has been added to this story.

When the McCoys had a giant hit with “Hang On Sloopy” in 1965, nobody would have guessed that 56 years later some 40 million viewers would be arguing about the short music film shot by Rick Derringer in 1975. Rick, the former lead singer of the McCoys and a prominent guitarist, was re-releasing the Sloopy song adding steel drums and a marimba. The two covers of the same song, along with other versions performed by Rick over the years, have create confusion. For those detectives who wish to investigate this further, the sped-up reggae version of “Hang On Sloopy” came out on Rick Derringer’s 1975 album called Spring Fever and the Sloopy song track was released as a single at that time. The main attraction, more so than the cover of the classic song, was the mysterious and previously unidentified “Hang On Sloopy” dancing girl. (Click HERE to watch the video).

Many curious people know that QZVX has been involved in searching for the true “Hang on Sloopy” dancer for about a year. The results of that investigation were released here, and in a YouTube video, two weeks ago. As expected, the video revealing that Lisa Leonard Dalton is the “Sloopy Girl,” has gone viral. Views escalated to several thousand hits per day.

Fans have accepted that the “Hang On Sloopy” dancer is the one and only “Sloopy Girl,” Lisa Leonard Dalton. Music websites and YouTube channels are changing titles and labels to reflect that new information. Yet, there is another myth getting in the way of the truth. Unfortunately, many bloggers, as a result of lack of research, have created a rumor that Liz Brewer, the etiquette expert and party planner in the U.K., married Rick Derringer in 1969 (a marriage lasting 22 years) and that she was the noted rock and pop culture journalist identified as Rick Derringer’s wife. That is false. Inaccurate data has been spread online and in social media. Add to that, the wrong information has been circulating for ten years. And please, don’t read this article and suggest that Lisa Leonard Dalton was married to Rick. She was not!

Two Lizzes Confused With One Another

As far as Lizzes go, fact is it was another Liz, not Liz Brewer in the U.K., who was married to Rick Derringer. Liz “Agriss” Derringer, an American from New York, married Rick in 1969. The marriage lasted about 22 years. If that story sounds familiar, that is because the general scenario has been told before…but with the wrong Liz as Rick’s wife. What a muddled mess.

The real life Liz Derringer was Rick first wife, and his ONLY wife with the name Liz. Let’s establish he has been married only three times. Fifteen years ago, the Sarasota Herald-Tribune interviewed Rick and they reported the following:

“Derringer and his “third and last wife,” Jenda, are born-again Christians who clearly would rather not dwell on past rock ‘n’ roll excesses and successes.” (June 24, 2006)

Below is documentation of the first marriage. Ricky Zehringer (birth name) married Liz “Agriss” Derringer in 1969. This Liz, not the Liz in the U.K., is also a close friend of Bebe Buell (a famous groupie and the mother of Hollywood actress Liv Tyler).

If Rick Derringer had only three wives, who were the other two? This information comes from public records. The left photo below is Liz “Agriss” Derringer, in the early days and married to Rick (picture was on her Facebook page). Photos of the real Liz Derringer are often attributed to the wrong Liz. Next to that photo is a shot of Liz “Agriss” Derringer and Rick posing together about ten years ago. The bottom left shot is the late Dyan Buckelew Derringer and Rick at their 1991 wedding. She was wife number two. And the bottom right photo is Rick’s current wife, Jenda, whom he married in 2000. You will notice that the Brit, Liz Brewer, is conspicuously absent from this list.

For anyone who might doubt that Rick was married to this American Liz, go to Facebook and search for Elizabeth Derringer. She has a public page with lots of information, photos of rock stars, pictures with Rick and rock and roll stories. She lives on the East Coast USA. Her current husband informed QZVX that his wife was the only Liz that Rick Derringer was ever married to and that she NEVER had Brewer as a last name. He also said his wife Liz told him she was NOT the “Hang On Sloopy” dancer. Liz said the dancer was a studio backlot girl and Rick did not know her. (That leads us back to Lisa Leonard Dalton in L.A. being the mystery dancer, as attested to by more than 20 witnesses.)

If you’re still doubting these facts, consider this: While Rick was married to Liz “Agriss” Derringer, over on the other side of the pond, Liz Brewer married John Rendall in 1978 (click HERE). She is now divorced, but the dates of the Derringer and Rendall marriages coincided with one another for several years. That precludes any possibility that Liz in the U.K. was one of the “Sloopy Wives.” And remember Rick was only married to one Liz and not two. Bloggers have had these two ladies mixed up for many years. Factually sloppy bloggers (blogging is not news reporting) spew silliness and lazy bloggers repeat unverified fairy tales.

All of the photos below are Liz “Agriss” Derringer. Not one of the pictures includes an image of Liz Brewer from the U.K. Unfortunately the real Liz Derringer has been misidentified in the past. Currently the inaccurate and misleading online webpage “Random Musings” still hosts photos that erroneously identify the real “Sloopy Wife,” American Liz “Agriss” Derringer, as the British Liz Brewer. The webmaster’s comical and amateur errors include mistaking the Brit Liz Brewer as a journalist who once worked with Andy Warhol (that was the American Liz) and he even had the Brit Liz getting hitched to Rick Derringer. All fiction! The confusing and un-vetted website is so far off base that it is amusing in a sad way. The host has taken the liberty to christen himself as the so-called “film inspector.” That statement is as laughable and as false as other reporting found  on that web page.

Dancing Girl’s Age

Lisa Leonard Dalton’s age, 19 at the time of the 1975 Sloopy dance, is easy to document. Born in 1955, Dalton turned 20 in late fall of 1975. She was eight years younger than musician Rick Derringer. He turned 28 in the summer of 1975.

Liz Brewer’s age is more elusive. Her Facebook page has her birthday as June 6th. As is typical, the year of birth is not listed. Genealogy sites lacked further details. Online resources are all over the map. One prominent search engine puts her age at 48 today and it seems she is stuck there. That is clearly wrong: Liz is not that young, and a current age of 48 would negate confirmed facts about her life, e.g., that she moved to Portugal as a teen and, by the mid-1960s, she was back in the U.K. and part of London’s club scene. Further research found a story from 1980 in the Observer, a London newspaper. It reported, and Brewer has verified elsewhere, that she was one of the last of the debutants. The debs were maidens 18 years of age, or at least they were turning 18 in the same year they appeared at the “deb ball.” If Liz was 18 in 1962, her birth year would be thereabouts 1944.

More searching provided more pertinent information. But first, let me digress:  In her online video titled In London & Jimi Hendrix Liz reminisced that she was “about 26,” and operating a London club when Jimi Hendrix had his first British hit, Hey Joe. According to The Book of British Hit Singles that record debuted on the British chart in late December 1966, peaking in January ’67 at No. 6. It remained on the chart for a total of eight weeks.

From Liz’s recollection that she was “about 26” at the time of Jimi’s 1967 hit. That would put her birth year at about 1940. Let us assume she was turning 26 on her June 6th, 1967 birthday. Following a logical sequence, eight years later in 1975, at the time of the Sloopy dance, Liz would have been 34 years old. Clearly, Brewer has been coy about confirming her age over the years. In going through 50 years of British tabloids and newspapers, I’ve seen that the math did not add up in articles that happened to mention Liz’s age. She sometimes got younger, from one article to the next, when instead we would expect her to be aging. That trend was apparent in a tongue in cheek story that appeared in the Evening Standard. In 2003, when she was planning parties and helping publicize Ivana Trump, the London paper teased that Brewer was understating her age. The writer did not believe that she was still in her fifties.

If she had just entered her sixties, which is how one might interpret the sarcastic caption, that would put her birth year as 1943. Taking a deeper dive, QZVX searched way back into the British newspaper archives. Many vintage articles mention Liz Brewer’s activities. Most of the content was informative, but not specific as to her age and, as mentioned before, when ages were present they often did not add up. Most people get older, not younger as the years go by.

In a nearly 60-year-old Daily Mirror, I located a photo and an article about the former Brit debutante Elizabeth Brewer. She was photographed in a swimsuit in the Algarve, Portugal (where she lived and started a club). The paper was dated August 17, 1964, (so published about 2 months after her June 6 birthday) and she was listed as being 21 years of age. Crunching the numbers, her year of birth would again be 1943. Therefore, on June 6, 2023, she will turn 80 years old. A copy of that newspaper clipping is below. To make it easier to read, I re-pasted a magnified version of the caption.

That birth year is believable and it makes sense. Liz’s physical appearance in 1964 fit that of a 21 year old girl. Also, several other articles were in agreement with this timeline. That birth date works with the general details of her teenage journey to Portugal and her return to London approximately seven years later. Remember that the 1964 newspaper photo of 21-year-old Liz predates the Sloopy dance by 11 years. She would have been older, turning 32 in 1975. Comparatively, Rick Derringer turned 28 in 1975 and Lisa Leonard Dalton turned 20 in autumn of 1975. So even back in 1964, when she was very young, Liz was still older than the real Sloopy Girl dancer would be when she filmed in the dance in ’75.

That’s a 12-year age difference or “generation gap” between Liz Brewer and Lisa Leonard Dalton. Brewer was born near the tail end of what is referred to as the Silent Generation. Dalton was born smack dab in the middle of the Baby Boom Generation. Not surprisingly, most viewers refer to the youthful Sloopy Girl dancer as the “dancing girl.” The dancer looks more like a 19- year-old girl than a 30-something woman.

This revelation precludes any supposition that Liz Brewer was the dancing girl. That is not unexpected. Remember that historically other verifiably false rumors had been spread by unreliable sources and trolls. Examples: U.K. Liz Brewer was a Rick Derringer groupie, she was tight with Andy Warhol, that she was a pop culture journalist, that she was married to Rick, and/or that she was the dancer. All parts of that scenario that are correct apply to the other Liz, the real Sloopy Wife: American Liz “Agriss” Derringer. Extensive research never found any link between Liz Brewer and Rick Derringer. And there is no evidence that Liz in the U.K. had any role in the 1975 “Hang On Sloopy” dance film.

Many interested “Sloopy Girl” fans, who’ve been following this case of mistaken identity, have asked what Liz Brewer in the U.K. has been doing with her life since the 1960s. Those answers can be found in the British Newspaper Archives. QZVX has collected a number of interesting clippings and photos (Click HERE to view those Liz Brewer files).

Government Records

For a number of years it was difficult to find specific information about Liz Brewer. But, by 2024, the British government began putting many business records online. There are several such documents relating to Liz Brewer Limited, Liz’s entertainmenr and PR company. Those official documents list pertinent information and that includes Liz’s birth date. Her birthday (red highlight below) confirms as QZVX had reported previously, that Brewer was born on June 6, 1943. Suffice to say, Liz Brewer had no connection to the 1975 “Hang on Sloopy” dance.

 

The Real Liz Derringer is NOT British

In the early days of the dance video, I can see how a casual online researcher might have misidentified the two ladies named Liz — the real American wife who always denied that she was the dancer, and the other Liz in Britain who likes publicity a lot and hinted around that she might be the dancer…..but maybe not. It is now abundantly clear that the two women are not one and the same. The real Liz Derringer is an American from the East Coast and she does not have a British accent. It’s more of a New York dialect. Other than being blonds in most of their photos, the two ladies do not look much alike. On a podcast, the real Liz Derringer in the U.S. was interviewed with her close friend Bebe Buell (a famous groupie, muse to Steven Tyler and mother of actress Liv Tyler).

Here is a short segment of Liz Derringer and Bebe in a promo video for the podcast. This Liz is the rock journalist who was actually married to Rick for 22 years. Liz and Bebe also speak of their time at clubs in New York City with Rick Derringer and Todd Rundgren (Bebe’s romantic interest at the time). Liz Derringer states that she was the rock journalist affiliated with Andy Warhol. This interview is irrefutable proof that American Liz “Agriss” Derringer is not Liz Brewer in the U.K. The video is hosted at Vimeo. Click below to go to Vimeo. Once you’re at Vimeo, click on the start button at the lower left on the player. When it is done playing, return to this article by clicking on the back arrow on your device.

Liz Derringer (the real one) on the right and Bebe Buell on the left

Finally, should anyone still doubt that there are two misidentified Lizzes, here is a video of the Brit Liz Brewer describing the protocols to be adhered to when attending a royal wedding. Case closed: Liz Derringer the real wife of Rick Derringer is not and never was Liz Brewer! To watch this BBC video, click below to go to to Vimeo. Once you’re at Vimeo, click on the start button at the lower left on the player. To return to this article, click the back arrow on your device.

Liz Brewer

That’s all folks. Lisa Leonard Dalton was and is the “Sloopy Girl” dancer!