Eddie Money- Can’t Hold Back

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 was, but the tragi-comic back story that it was ever 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