Rediscovering Paradise: EDDIE MONEY

Rediscovering Paradise: EDDIE MONEY

13th PRECINCT STATION HOUSE

Plays If Straight And Takes Control Toby Goldstein

characters blend to form the individual who has just appeared

Several characters blend to form the towering individual who has just appeared in the faded-grace lobby of the Gramercy Park Hotel. First, there's Eddie Money, rock 'n' roll star, still getting his bearings in mid-day, thinking about breakfast. Thanks more about this performance in New York this night. Swaggering, bold, oblivious to the horrified stares his booming voice, black leather jacket, “Twilight Zone” cut-off T-shirt, tight leather jeans and high How about two tickets to Moose Jaw instead? boots draw from the hotel’s largely conservative clientele.

"You don't have to be rich to get drunk and drive off a bridge.

Eddie Money is enough to intimidate me, and after 11 years in this business, I don’t embarrass easily. I think of that gravelly voice carrying loudly over the lunchtime chitchat of office workers at some nearby coffee shop, and turn us around mid-block. How about dining in the hotel? Little do I know what an experience that will be.

Money makes every place he hangs his hat a home. He sings scales as we eat, loosening up his vocal cords for the Ritz show. He wonders if one of the adjoining diners might part with a cigarette, because he doesn’t want to buy a whole pack. Delicately, I suggest that he try an alternate plan, since the other guests appear more uncomfortable than chummy in our presence. With relief, I watch Money disappear briefly to the bar and return, cig in hand. After all, he has already commented a bit too loudly about the hotel’s use of teabags instead of the fresh stuff, drunk the contents of my water glass as well as his own, and called our black waiter, “bro.” Did you ever want to slide under a table and hide until it was all over?

Fortunately for my conscience, which dictates that I owe it to myself to only speak with people who I like or can give a modicum of respect—Eddie Mahoney is also present during the conversation. Eddie Mahoney, who was modestly raised in Woodhaven, Queens and later in Brooklyn, who loves his family and wants them to be proud of him, who dreamed that the way out of his humble environment was by transforming himself into a rock ’n’ roll sthr. Mahoney was the wideeyed kid who started singing in bands by the time he was 11; Money was the alter ego who pushed the kid to the edge; “always smashing up the old man’s car” is the way he put it. Mahoney was the boy in a two-generation police family who tried to walk the straight line; Money was the wild youth who needed to taste every bit of life beyond those perimeters.

But when The Accident, the third ingredient of this peculiar persona, came along, threatening to permanently destroy both of our hero’s identities, a decision had to be made. Who’s boss? After spending an hour listening to a chastened man accept full blame for his excesses and point proudly to the stabilities of his life—a fiancee, hard work, his family—I’ve chosen to believe that Eddie Mahoney is again running this show. A basically good lad who found out the hard way that “getting” is not necessarily better than “wanting,” Mahoney-Money’s honest evaluation of his life is a lesson to be well-learned.

I didn't believe how much pain there was In the world until It hit me.

Pretending bravado about his New York homecoming, Eddie Money later admits to me, of course he’s scared! Very nervous. It’s two years since he last played here, and the Ritz will be crammed with friends and family. Even his parents get to stay up late for the occasion. Money’s brief visit home has been filled with calls and drop-ins by old buddies, many of whom probably thought they’d never see Eddie again, except maybe a wheelchair.

You see, Eddie Money didn’t spend the last two years glorying in some extended vacation on a Pacific island. Eddie Money spent the last two years relearning how to walk. He constantly refers to his lost years as The Accident, ■'•personalizing the tragic event he brought upon himself as if it was an evil entity. The shadow of death is a pretty accurate depiction of his images.

“You don’t have to be rich to get drunk and drive off a bridge,” Money says pointedly, referring to the crash his overindulgences brought about. “I don’t wanna be the new freak show in town, because I had an accident. That’s not why I write my music. It’s just unfortunate that it happened to me. But at least I’m hot like the lead guitar player in the Pretenders; at least I’m around to talk about it.

“It was no vacation when you can’t even walk. I got out of the hospital, they gave me a brace, I looked like one of the Jerry Lewis kids, I said, ‘this can’t be for me.’ He said, ‘is your name Mahoney?’ I said yeah. He said, ‘this is yours.’ I just flipped out. I had doctors talking to me, telling me I was neyer gonna walk again. When I first started this album (No Control) I walked from my bedroom to my music room with one of those walkers that the old ladies use.

“I’d come home from the fuckin’ hospital, cryin’ my ass off, like a baby, like, ‘what the fuck did I do to myself?’ Plus, you hurt a iot of people when you have an accident. You don’t just hurt yourself. You hurt your parents, you hurt Bill Graham (his manager), you hurt CBS Records, you hurt your friends, you hurt your band. They’re not working. It was really bad. I just pulled my goddamned piano player out of a pen factory to come back to work again. He was selling pens to doctors over the phone...”

How did a 30-ish, sturdy looking, fasttalking man, reduce himself to a tearful pile of rubble? Eddie Mahoney was fine, if a little crazy, all the time he stayed in his Brooklyn blue-collar neighborhood. He ate lots of pizza, tracked down the best egg creams, watched Mets games, and idolized the cream of the mid-’60s New York rock crop. “Eddie Brigatti, Felix Cavaliere from the Rascals. I just loved them to death. Used to go see them when they were still playin’ high schools. And the Vagrants-. Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels”— Eddie breaks into a frenzied, guttural Ryder imitation: “ ‘Somebody out there stole my wallet. You can have the money back but I got a letter in there from my mothaF That’s the kind of guy I am. Don’t fuck with me, these arms can kill,” he boasts, exhibiting a pair of fierce-looking biceps, the result of conscientious body building.

When he wrecked his father’s car, Mahoney took supermarket jobs to pay off his debts. Before long, he followed the family tradition and enrolled in New York’s Finest. The Mahoney family is no slouch in its police legacy. Now a mailman following his retirement, the senior Mahoney was an area patrolman for many years. 34-yearold Danny is a highly-acclaimed member of the “repeat offender” squad—those risktaking guys who spend their nights slamming the lid on N.Y.’s human garbage that beats up 85-year-old women for fun.

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But trainee Mahoney washed out of the force. “I got bounced off the department,” he openly admits. “My father has had a hard time holding his head up with a son like me. Everybody else lives really close to the house. Nobody smokes pot. Everybody’s straight—my three sisters, my brother’s a cop and I’m a maniac. But they do love me,” smiles Eddie, knowing what his family’s gone through because of him. “They love their baby boy.” These days, Danny’s fellow police officers tease him about his brother, the rock star.

After shaming his father, Eddie moved to San Francisco, where he fell in with someone he describes as “a very satirical young lady. That’s when I wrote “Two Tickets To Paradise,’ ‘Baby Hold On’ and all that other stuff. 1 had a really big following in the East Bay, and I had no money. She says, ‘why don’t you call yourself Eddie Money?’ and it sounded like a good idea.” Auditioning for Bill Graham, who sensed the potential of the displaced New Yorker, got Money a management contract. Those tunes he’d written helped him get his deal with Columbia. Eddie Money, his first album, made money—lots of it. More than a kid with his dreams could handle. The illegal and just plain stupid activities Eddie had indulged in to fund his wild living did him in—as simple and as pointless as that.

“I just wasn’t used to having too much money to buy exotic drugs,” Money says flatly. “All of a sudden, I had it. I’d had barely enough money to buy a can of Chef-Boy-Ar-Dee ravioli. Then all of a sudden, bang, I’m famous. Wango—got a Mercedes-Benz, brand new house with a 36-foot swimming pool, ducks in the backyard. Big fuckin’ deal, I hadda go out and get high and blow it all. Self-destructive son of a bitch.” Money slaps his forehead with an anguish that’s painful to watch. His memories are apparently as painful as his lengthy recovery.

“Nobody was gonna tell me,” he says with fierce intensity, “after I worked my ass off for years to become famous—nobody was gonna take that away from me! I did therapy six days a week, three to four hours a day. And nerve generation is very, very painful. It’s like having cancer of the bone, but while that’s disintegrating, you’re achieving. But it’s the same fuckin’ pain. It was horrible.

“I didn’t believe how much pain there was in the world until it hit me. But I was good. I knew that God had given me a ‘gift,’ as the Jewish people say. My mother says, ‘you have a gift, don’t misuse it.’ Besides, I was goin’ broke, and a New Yorker goin’ broke, don’t make sense,” he bounces back with authentic chutzpah. “I couldn’t even get a job as a waiter, for Chrissakes, because I had a bad leg. I couldn’t do anything but be a rock ’n’ roll singer.”

No Control is the fruit of the discipline producer Tom Dowd imposed on Money, a captivity Eddie obviously needed. He’s delighted with the product, and overjoyed that the man who wasn’t going to walk again has been on a national tour for over three months. No longer do the easy pickings impress Money, who insists that his secret desire, if the fans ever desert him, is to lie in bed, in front of the TV, and get fat eating. “You know, like Yoko and John.” Sure, he’s met the glitterati. Yeah> he owns real estate as a tax shelter. It’s meaningless, he says.

“I’ve done Interview magazine (Andy Warhol’s mouthpiece), whoop-de-do. They gave me a suit that I fuckin’ advertized for them on the album cover and they wouldn’t let me keep it. I wanted to buy the suit and they wanted $600 for it. I said, ‘get it off my back immediately! Now!’ I’d rather shop at Robert Hall’s,” he jokes, dredging up a long-departed discount house. “See how old I am,” Money declares, adding that he was one of the wet throng in tents at Woodstock. “And I didn’t see anything.

“I own an office building. It’s boring. They won’t let me sleep there and I can’t party there with the boys in the band, so what the fuck do I own it for? I’d love to go to the building one time, drunk (the longings for the bad old days persist) and go ‘I’m the owner! All you girls, take your clothes off! All you men, split...I’m nuts.’ But if they gave me the money, I wouldn’t know what to do with it anyway.”

. If Eddie Money is held down to earth by anything other than his will to not fuck up again, it’s by his fiancee. Highly protective of the young lady, who he plans to marry in June, Money happily described how their eyes met across a crowded concert hall—one of, his gigs was her first rock ’n’ roll show. “I flew her up to the Money Manor and tried to talk her into failin’ in love with me. Which took a while, believe me. A really straight little girl, that’s what I needed.”

Shepherding his lady around New York has given Eddie the chance to show off the only type of toughness he really needs—neighborhood smarts. After the girl was teased by a bunch of local women in a restaurant ladies’ room—as New Yorkers are prone to do anyone from California—Money told her honestly, you gotta be tough. New York is a tough town. Get used to it. When he’s home, several miles outside Oakland, Eddie hangs around with “exodus people,” other Eastern refugees who stop him from playing too fast and loose with reality.

And surely, the Mahoney family would be encouraged to know that some good things never change when it comes to their “baby boy.” “I was in a Honda with three other people in Fargo, North Dakota,” recalls Eddie, “and this maniac came up on the shoulder doing about 70 in a Mercury Monarch. Compare a gigantic piece of metal to a Honda, that looks like a roller skate with four wheels on it. He sideswiped us and ran head on into this iron light pole.

“I stepped out of the car, said ‘is everybody all right?’ and before I knew it I was back in the police department, directing traffic. ‘Come on, this ain’t no circus, let’s move it, don’t touch the victim, name and address of people who saw the accident.’ It took 20 minutes for the cops to come out because it was pourin’ rain, but I handled the .whole thing. People said, ‘isn’t that Eddie Money? Didn’t you do a show here?’. ..Back on the job for one night.”

I hope that the little Mahoney kid with the big mouth but a heart of gold sticks around to keep the rock star powered by the right kind of fuel—natural enthusiasm. And tells the people who can’t stand to see anyone famous in control of their own soul, to go back to hell.