The Man With No Control, Part 2
The conclusion of my mind-boggling 1999 interview with Eddie Money
“I sold a lot of records, made some mistakes, got hooked on cocaine back when they said cocaine wasn’t addictive. [laughs] And I’ve had my bouts with the booze, and stuff…”
So sayeth Edward Joseph Mahoney, a.k.a Eddie Money, within fifteen minutes of my calling him at home in the spring of 1999 for a BAM magazine interview about his latest album. I hadn’t asked him anything at this point about his legendary propensity for such extra-curricular activities, but that was Eddie Money for ya — no-bullshit, down to earth, and (despite having sold millions of records and scored 11 Top 40 singles) rating refreshingly low on the “popstar delusions of grandeur” scale. It was at this point in the interview where I realized, “Whoa — I can totally ask this guy anything!”
With his bugged-out eyes, shambling gait and perpetually sweaty brow, Eddie Money was the rock n’ roll embodiment of the Über-Schlub — far closer to Rodney Dangerfield than David Lee Roth. And both onstage and in interviews, this was a big part of his goofball charm. If you haven’t already read the first part of our interview, I’d recommend giving it a look to get the full background and context — but I’ll also say that the part I’m about to lay on you is where shit REALLY got real…
As one of my favorite Eddie Money songs goes, “You can’t keep a good man down” — and I always found something incredibly endearing and inspiring about his ability to dust himself off after one personal or career impasse or another, and just get back out there to do what he loved. And he kept on going, almost to the very end; he played his last two gigs less than four months before he passed away due to complications from esophageal cancer.
But it was this interview that really compounded my sense of respect for the man — not just because his love of music and performing was clearly at the heart of his very existence, but also because he was mind-bogglingly open with me during our interview, revealing sides of himself that, had I been in his shoes, I damn well would have thought twice about sharing. If you’d seen my face during our interview, it was probably contorting with the same forehead-grabbing look of shock and wonderment that crosses his visage at the end of the “Shakin’” video, when a pre-Purple Rain Apollonia Kotero is shakin’ her thang in the parking lot of Rae’s Diner.
And ultimately, it made me love “The Man With No Control” all the more. So read on, if you dare, and find out why Eddie called himself “The Pete Rose of Rock” and still held a grudge against Andy Gibb. Like most of the interviews I post here at Jagged Time Lapse, this one’s for my paid subscribers — but I trust you’ll find it more than worth the price of admission…
ME: Lyrically, your new album seems very much in touch with your fanbase. There’s no rock star flights of fancy — it’s all about average folks just trying to get by in life and love.
EDDIE MONEY: A lot of my fans have gotten older, you know? They’re in their early thirties to their fifties [Note: Eddie would have been 50 at the time of this interview], and they come to the shows with their kids, who are big Eddie Money fans because their parents like me. But I lost that Pearl Jam generation — they never came to the shows — and shit like that. But now I’ve got a lot of youngsters who know all the material.
I’m not the type of rock star that runs around with a bodyguard, you know? I give critics my home phone number, and shit like that; I’m very accessible to people. And we’re still getting three or four encores a night. I just played Pine Knob in Michigan, in front of 14,000 people, and the show went over great. Business is good, the new single [“Don’t Say No Tonight”] is holding its own. It reminds me a little of “Baby Hold” and “Take Me Home Tonight,” but the lyric — “I’ve got my band, you’ve got your job/But seven bucks an hour don’t go too far” — I put myself back in the place where I was when I was first coming’ up, when my girlfriend was supposed to be living at the sorority house, but she was actually living with me, and I was using her mother’s checkbook and driving her mother’s car. I didn’t have a pot to piss in or a window to throw it out of, and “Don’t Say No Tonight” is a lot like that.