Time & Perspective Quote by Rick Derringer

Mythmaking in rock usually begins with a conversion story: I saw him, I knew, I was changed. Rick Derringer offers the anti-conversion, and that refusal is the point. By admitting he "wasn't really impressed" the first time he heard Johnny at the Fillmore East, Derringer punctures the hype machine that follows any anointed guitar hero. The venue matters here: Fillmore East wasn’t just a room, it was a cathedral of late-60s rock legitimacy. If you didn’t get it there, under those lights, with that crowd primed to worship, you were supposed to question your own ears - not the legend.

Derringer flips that pressure back onto the social dynamics of taste. "He had come on the scene with everybody telling me how great he was" is a small line with big bite: it frames acclaim as a preloaded script. The subtext is about expectation as distortion. When you walk in already instructed to hear genius, your listening becomes a loyalty test. Derringer is confessing he failed the test - and daring you to admit you might have, too.

There’s also a musician’s realism embedded in the shrug. Greatness isn’t always instantly legible, especially in a live setting where sound, mix, and nerves can blur the signal. By anchoring the moment in his own unimpressed reaction, Derringer isn’t denying Johnny’s talent so much as describing how reputations actually land: unevenly, socially, and often after the fact, once the story catches up and rewrites the night.