Just before Christmas 1989 Eddie Money joined me In the Studio to discuss his roller-coaster career and first “best of” compilation, The Sound of Money. Alternately hysterically funny and harrowing, in my classic rock interview Eddie Money shares the real backstories behind “Two Tickets to Paradise”, “Baby Hold On”, “Gimme Some Water”, and “Trinidad” from his first three albums; his life-threatening drug overdose and comeback with “Shakin’ “, “Think I’m in Love”, and the autobiographical “No Control”; relapse and rehab while recording “Take Me Home Tonight” and “I Wanna Go Back”; and as the Eighties closed and the Berlin Wall fell, redemption with the hits “Walk on Water” and “Peace in Our Time”.
From the archive, the late Eddie Money was my featured guest In the Studio on the best of The Sound of Money. -Redbeard
Before his death in September 2019, Eddie Money was always a delightful conversationalist, a real pleasure. Because he loved people, he loved to tell stories, and Eddie had a million of ’em. As I prepared dual anniversaries for two of the late Eddie Money’s best selling albums, Eddie Money debut in October 1977 and the big breakthrough, No Control five years later in June 1982, it occurred that one of the less recognized aspects of the brief but all-important Punk Rock trend in the latter half of the Seventies is how it aided and abetted countless upstart bands at the same time, some of whom were not necessarily a part of that CBGB Club New York City punk scene.
Regardless of whether you liked The Ramones, Television, New York Dolls, Patti Smith, Iggy and the Stooges, Dead Boys et al enough to actually buy their records and see their live shows, there is no doubt that the stirring of the rock crock pot by the Punks in the mid-Seventies caused a lot of interest in new bands in general, particularly for the New York City-based record labels and rock press. Singer/songwriter Eddie Money may have been in San Francisco when he convinced legendary concert promoter Bill Graham to manage him, but both Money and his mentor were Big Apple natives, which didn’t hurt when Columbia Records offered Eddie a deal for his self-titled debut in 1977. The often hilarious, sometimes harrowing, always colorful rags-to-riches-to-rehab story of Eddie Money’s first four albums, with several stops at the top of the charts including the 1982 million-seller fourth album No Control , includes “Two Tickets to Paradise”, “Baby Hold On”, and “I Wanna Be a Rock’n’Roll Star” from Eddie’s unadorned yet impressive 1977 debut Eddie Money. – Redbeard
It was just before Christmas 1989, and after almost being permanently paralyzed and unable ever to walk again only seven years earlier, rock’s Mr. No Control and Where’s the Party, Eddie Money, showed up for our In the Studio interview…with a cooing little baby girl. “Now I’m buying a house out in suburbia,” Eddie Money revealed. “I’m forty years old and I figured it’s time for me to start having some kids, ya know?…I went from a quarter ounce (of cocaine) a day to having babies!” Eddie chuckled.
Over the years you may have forgotten just how deep a well of great songs Eddie Money’s 1986 collection Can’t Hold Back is, and how popular the subsequent response to it was. But the tragi-comic back story that it was even made at all, or that Eddie lived to enjoy its success, sounds like the over-active imagination of a pulp fiction writer. But in this In the Studio archive classic rock interview, the late Eddie Money ‘fesses up warts and all while sharing “Take Me Home Tonight”, “I Wanna Go Back”, “Endless Nights”, “One Chance”, and the blistering rocker “We Should Be Sleeping”. Eddie Money’s sojourn with his most popular album Can’t Hold Back took him from the top of the charts in 1986 with “Take Me Home Tonight” back to the hospital where his drug overdose six years earlier had paralyzed his leg. “The first time I heard ‘Take Me Home Tonight’ on the radio, I was doing the dishes in rehab,” Eddie tells us incredulously. “I said to myself, ‘What’s wrong with this picture?’ ” (Eddie Money with Ronnie Spector)
Can’t Hold Back yielded two more hits, “I Wanna Go Back” peaking at #14 and “Endless Nights” at #21, in addition to “Take Me Home Tonight” reaching #4, all the while the real-life Edward Mahoney torpedoed his marriage, his health, and almost cost him his singing career as well as his freedom. Eddie Money joined me here In the Studio for this often funny, yet at times harrowing, classic rock interview. We received word in September 2019 that Eddie Money passed away with stage four esophageal cancer. May God give him a real one-way ticket to heavenly Paradise that never expires. –Redbeard
Just before Christmas 1989 Eddie Money joined me In the Studio to discuss his roller-coaster career and first “best of” compilation, The Sound of Money. Alternately hysterically funny and harrowing, in my classic rock interview Eddie Money shares the real backstories behind “Two Tickets to Paradise”, “Baby Hold On”, “Gimme Some Water”, and “Trinidad” from his first three albums; his life-threatening drug overdose and comeback with “Shakin’ “, “Think I’m in Love”, and the autobiographical “No Control”; relapse and rehab while recording “Take Me Home Tonight” and “I Wanna Go Back”; and as the Eighties closed and the Berlin Wall fell, redemption with the hits “Walk on Water” and “Peace in Our Time”.
