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Eddie Money, who died on Friday, Sept. 13 at the age of 70, can not be qualified by any conventional rock star or roll star. His face was fleshy, his eyes heavy, he did not move gracefully. He looked and resembled what he was: a former cop who had decided to risk everything in his dreams of rock'n'roll.
From home in New York, he moved to the west coast, settling in Berkeley, California, and traded his birth name, Edward Joseph Mahoney, to Eddie Money. California may have been the place where it got introduced to the world of music, but Money has never been able to shake its New York roots.
His character skilfully synthesized Bruce Springsteen's blue-collar rock-roll crusader and Billy Joel's ignoble pop pop showman, two artists who happened to be colleagues on the Money & # 39; s label on Columbia Records. Where Springsteen and Joel were writers, Eddie Money never sought to be anything but an active musician, happy to play for crowds who were happy to see him.
Over the decades, Money has never lost this audience. Year after year, he attracted a sizeable crowd across the United States – in Detroit, he was an institution and kick-off of the summer concert season at the DTE Energy Music Theater (formerly Pine Knob) – and he cultivated a cottage industry around his personality that eventually led him to reality TV. This lasting success relies on a handful of hits, no more than ten Top 40 singles and rock album standards arrived between 1978 and 1988. Money's hit series debuted at the top of the rock album radio and s & Is pursued through the glory years of MTV. which meant that his greatest singles were coming when there was an ecosystem to transform songs meant to capitalize on current trends to adapt them to modern standards.
Looking at the records that Eddie Money made at its peak, it's striking that this album-oriented rocker rarely made consistent albums. At the time, record buyers recognized this deficiency, as they seemed to alternate between kissing their discs and moving away from them. His eponymous debut was a platinum since 1978, thanks to the stylish "Baby Hold On" and the song "Two Tickets to Paradise", which goes no further than the No. 22 Billboard Hot 100. To his exit. The money could hardly come out of the top 40 with the years 1979 Life to take, an underperformance that continued with the 1980s Play to keep them.
But he rebounded in 1982 with No control. Benefiting from a tight production of Tom Dowd who is elliptically tackling the new wave, No control was Money's best album and included two of his biggest singles: the hits "Think I'm In Love" and "Shakin's", from the Mainstream Rock Songs group, were stuck at 63 on the Hot Money's manager, Bill Graham, was convinced The underperformance on the chart was due to the fact that the singer had sneaked the line "her breasts were shaking" in the chorus – an assertion probably correct, but it was not the same. Money's juvenile humor (or, as Graham called him, his "fucking bullshit of sophomorics"), the singer's caller was intrinsic: with his dirty jokes, his rubber mug and his sentimental side, he seemed to be the maniac of the next door who succeeded.
Like many of his peers, Eddie Money cleaned up his art at the height of the Reagan years – and in doing so, he found himself with his biggest hit: "Take Me Home Tonight," a thrilling anthem whose nostalgia was tempered. modern synths and a stellar cameo from Ronnie Spector. "Take Me Home Tonight" had a cousin tinged with sepia in 1986 Can not remember with "I Wanna Go Back", whose crying saxophone highlighted Money's debt to Bruce Springsteen. But its brightly lit and sharply defined production meant it did not sound like the E Street Band: it was clean and neat, the epitome of popular pop from the mid 80s. "I Wanna Go Back" is also became his first song to appear in the Adult Contemporary Songs chart, and although "Walk On Water" of 1988 is not on AC, it became his last top 10 Hot 100 hit, beginning to period as a hitmaker at his end .
Label problems prevented Eddie Money from staying out of the 1990s. He broke away from Columbia and wandered in the wilderness before re-appearing on the classic rock label CMC International in 1999 with Ready Eddie. At that time, Money was essentially a game of chance that relied on these hits of the '70s and' 80s, which earned him fame and earned him his fame.
A deep dive in Money's catalog might not attract many lost classics – although "Gimme Some Water", his saga of outlaws on the run Life for the taking, is pretty good, and he has good installations with rockers backed by an R & B – but his song collection is so powerful that his albums were not deep. When it is heard in a collection, its great successes fit into a mini-history of the rock album era. "Baby Hold On" and "Two Tickets To Paradise" are shiny and refined objects from the time of the high-end professional studios, "Shakin". and "Think I'm In Love" are nervous, elegant calculations with the new wave, and "Take me home tonight" and "I Wanna Go Back" on the big MTV wave. Each one sounds distinctly from its time, but they are united by the irrepressible spirit of Money.
While listening to Eddie Money, whether on record or in concert, it was hard to deny the enthusiasm he brought to his performances. During his salad days and his stint on the circuit of old classic rockers, Money seemed to really rejoice to have been lucky enough to be a rock star and his fans could feel this gratitude. This open heart did not exist only on stage. After the death of Money, Paul Collins, the cult hero of pop power, wrote on Facebook that Money was a powerful reminder of Collins's Beat: "You've told me that we, the New- Yorkers, were to stay united in California, how would you pay attention to me, And later, how did you tell everyone that you knew how much you liked my songs until the day you got me? had CBS and Bill Graham and Burce Botnick sign for us, all in one, you did it all for me, you never asked for one thing. "
Maybe this generosity was not widely known in Eddie Money's time of life – but it was certainly at the heart of his best music and was an essential part of his legacy.
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