The date was September 13, 2019. An announcement came to me via Twitter: Eddie Money dead at 70. The news came as a shock, and I immediately started to think about the music he left behind. I’m sure I’m not alone in reflecting upon the music and life of musicians at the news of their death. However, as a music blogger, I tend to think about the possibility of writing a post in Weekly Music Commentary. As usual I tend to wait a while to write about the artist after a death. Many times I want to make sure that there are no issues surrounding the death that were not initially reported. Therefore here we are almost three months after his death, with a post about Eddie Money.
Most of Eddie Money’s musical success came during the 1970s and 1980s. He delivered music that still plays on radio stations around the globe. When I sat down and gave it a little thought, I found that Eddie Money delivered much more than good music. I wanted to use this post to discuss his musical accomplishments. In order to understand fully, we need to go back to his early life.
Edward Joseph Mahoney was born into a large family of Irish Catholics in Brooklyn. His parents were Dorothy Elizabeth (née Keller), a homemaker, and Daniel Patrick Mahoney, a police officer. He grew up in Levittown, New York, on Long Island, but also spent some teenage years in Woodhaven, Queens. Money was a street singer since the age of 11. As a teenager, he played in rock bands, in part to get dates from cheerleaders. He was thrown out of one high school for forging a report card. In 1967, he graduated from Island Trees High School.
When I look back at Eddie Money’s early years, I don’t see anything out of the ordinary for a young man during the 1960s. Add to that growing up in a middle class family in New York, and you can see there could have been a sit-com made about his life. Think “Happy Days” perhaps? The rock bands, the cheerleaders during high school sounds like the normal New York way of life in the 1960s. There’s more to the story.
At the age of 18, he tried to follow in the footsteps of his police officer grandfather, father, and brother as a New York City Police Department trainee. However, after working as a clerk and typist, he left in 1968 to pursue a career in music, as the police did not allow him to grow his hair long. “I couldn’t see myself in a police uniform for 20 years of my life, with short hair,” he later said. His band mates also fired him because they did not want a police officer in the group. His father was not happy with the decision to play music and tore the Jimi Hendrix posters from his wall.
That was a strange position Eddie Money found himself in as he tried to make his way into the music industry. What would you do if in a similar place? Many might find a barber, stay with the police force and make amends with dad. Eddie Money went in a different direction.
In 1968, Money moved to Berkeley, California. There, he studied with vocal coach Judy Davis, and took on the stage name Eddie Money, dropping a few letters from his name and sarcastically referencing the fact that he was always broke.
The California move proved to be a good one, although it took a while to develop. Eddie Money became a regular performer at clubs in the San Francisco Bay Area. After some years of performing he secured a recording contract from Columbia Records, and released his debut album in 1977. He charted with singles such as “Baby Hold On” and “Two Tickets to Paradise”, about visiting his girlfriend despite not having money.
Eddie continued to enjoy great success into the early 1980s. In 1982, Money took advantage of the MTV music video scene with his humorous narrative videos for “Think I’m in Love”, performed at The Mission Inn Hotel & Spa, and “Shakin'”. In the early 1980s, he appeared on The Midnight Special, Fridays, and Solid Gold. In 1978 and 1984, he appeared on American Bandstand.
Money’s career began to decline following an unsuccessful 1983 album (Where’s the Party?) and struggles with drug addiction. However, he made a comeback in 1986 with the album Can’t Hold Back, which received a music recording certification of platinum. “Take Me Home Tonight”, a single from the album, peaked at No. 4 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart in the United States. Money only agreed to perform the song—which included a line from “Be My Baby”, a song Ronnie Spector performed as part of The Ronettes—after Spector agreed to sing the line herself. In 1987, Money was nominated for a Grammy Award for Best Male Rock Vocal Performance for “Take Me Home Tonight”. “I Wanna Go Back” and “Endless Nights”—two other singles from the Can’t Hold Back album—peaked at No. 14 and No. 21, respectively.
Eddie Money’s battles with drug and alcohol abuse are well documented, and continued throughout his music career. On April 8, 2018, Real Money, a reality television series about Money and his family, debuted on AXS TV. An episode sharing his cancer diagnosis aired on AXS TV the day before he died. The show’s second season was expected to follow Money’s “journey as he tells his family about the disease and undergoes treatment.”
What will be missed most is possibly Eddie Money’s sense of humor. It was constantly on display in his music videos and his interviews. He always joked about not making “big money” during his musical career. In an interview before his death he delivered this gem, “The kids aren’t in jail, they’re not in rehab, nobody’s wrecked the car this week and there’s still milk in the refrigerator. I’m having a good month.”
We are going to miss Eddie Money. There most likely will be more music as he recorded an album that was set for release in 2019. Be on the look out for Brand New Day sometime in 2020.
It seems best to concluded with the words of Mark Cuban, founder of AXS TV: “We are deeply saddened that we have lost the incomparable Eddie Money. Eddie was a true American original and a rock legend through and through. His enduring hits have been the soundtrack for generations of fans, and his one-of-a-kind sense of humor endeared him instantly to everyone he met. We have sincerely enjoyed working with him and his entire talented family on his reality show ‘Real Money’, and we extend our deepest condolences to his wife, Laurie; their children Zach, Jesse, Joe, Dez and Julian; and his many friends during this difficult time. He will be missed immensely by all of those who knew and loved him. But, if we know Eddie, he’s rocking right now in heaven, doing what he always loved.”