Major Letdowns: Eddie Money, "Right Here"

Eddie Money was fond of describing his sound as "blue-collar rock," and he was right — for awhile, anyway. His early hits "Two Tickets to Paradise" and "Baby Hold On" served up a sort of soft-serve Springsteen that told singalong stories about working-class people without ever getting too worked up for polite society. Like Huey Lewis roughly a decade later, he was a soulful but not exceptional singer; unlike Huey, while he occasionally co-wrote the stray killer single, he was never exactly a fount of top-tier material.

This quickly became a problem for Money, who stumbled into the sort of perfect storm painfully familiar to far too many artists in his peer group. Constant touring, a bunch of bad habits, and management/label reps who were obsessed with producing pop hits led to a steep decline in the quality of his material — a problem compounded by the fact that even his best songs weren't all that distinguished to begin with. Always the type of artist that most listeners were fine with having around, but just as happy to forget, he spent the '80s slugging his way through a series of setbacks and comebacks — appropriate for a guy whose overall aesthetic suggested a parallel-universe Rocky Balboa who grabbed a mic instead of socking a side of beef.

Although three of Money's first five albums went platinum, their chart ceiling stood in the lower reaches of the Top 20, which added to the impression that he was just sort of skating by on untapped potential, and made him more vulnerable to the type of label meddling that became a fact of life for rock acts in his tier during the '80s. After 1983's Where's the Party? was met with disappointing sales, Columbia Records rounded up a bunch of outside material for his next release, 1986's Can't Hold Back, which led to the comeback that carried him through the rest of the decade while simultaneously destroying whatever artistic credibility he ever might have had.

Can't Hold Back's two big hits, "Take Me Home Tonight" and "I Wanna Go Back," both came from outside songwriters, and both of them leveraged the rampant boomer nostalgia that was then generating beer commercial soundtracks and comeback hits for artists like Steve Winwood and Eric Clapton. The former song, a duet with Ronnie Spector, accomplished its goal by adding a voice familiar to millions; the latter assured Money's listeners that they were not alone in being pissed that they peaked in high school. All told, Money had a hand in writing six of the record's ten tracks, but it's significant that most of them were stuffed onto the second side.

Still, Money's songwriting output wasn't really Columbia's concern; record sales and airplay were, and Can't Hold Back did the trick on both fronts, going platinum and peaking at No. 20. Happy to milk a working formula, they repeated those steps for 1988's Nothing to Lose, which spawned another Top 10 pop hit with "Walk on Water" while suggesting that diminishing returns were right around the corner.

At this point, the label did what labels tend to do in this sort of situation, which is commission a greatest-hits record with a few new tracks to further entice buyers. All three of those songs came from outside writers: "Stop Steppin' on My Heart" was a Diane Warren track, while "Looking through the Eyes of a Child" was written by Andy Hill, Albert Hammond, and former King Crimson lyricist Pete Sinfield; the last one, "Peace in Our Time," was a Hill/Sinfield number that gave Money his last big hit, thanks in no small part to the fact that it was released right around the time the Berlin Wall came down.

To his credit, Money started to get restless around this point. While audiences in general couldn't have cared less whether he was writing his own songs, he seemed genuinely unhappy about serving as a well-paid sock puppet, and those feelings were really driven home for him after the release of that best-of set, the admittedly cleverly titled (if accidentally brutally honest) Greatest Hits: Sound of Money.

"I was allowing myself to be force-fed material," Money mused in an interview with the Montgomery Advertiser. "After realizing I didn't like my own greatest hits album, I decided what I had to do was go back to doing what I do best."

Of course, like a lot of artists, what Money felt he did best wasn't necessarily his actual strongest suit. Although he wasn't wrong when he pointed out that he was still the guy who'd written "Two Tickets to Paradise" and co-written "Baby Hold On," he was staring right past the fact that he was also the guy who'd written reams of back-half filler. No one ever bought an Eddie Money album to see how he'd grown as a songwriter, and by the late '80s, that was truer than ever; at that point, even his biggest fans most likely just wanted stuff that would keep them in a good mood while they were busy doing something else.

On the other hand, it's only fair to point out that the difference between Money's original material and the songs he was handed was generally not that great. I mean, you can quibble about the songwriting gap between the chintzily stirring sweep of "Peace in Our Time" versus meat-headed fluff like "Where's the Party?," but in the end, they accomplish similar goals; bow to stern, his records consist of mildly catchy, mildly entertaining middle-of-the-road rock 'n' roll with a handful of gems sprinkled in.

To put it another way: The shot in the arm that Eddie Money got from outside writers wasn't injected because his style of music had fallen out of fashion (like, say, Jefferson Starship) or because his newer original material had grown noticeably tired (like Chicago or Cheap Trick or Heart). He was just always an artist that, for a variety of reasons, prompted a lot of bet-hedging from the people managing his career and/or signing the checks.

All of which is to say that when Money decided he was determined to co-write the bulk of his next record, 1991's Right Here, the results were pretty much in line with the two albums that came before it. This is neither an insult nor a compliment; if anything, it's an illustration of how the relatively minor yet crucial difference between a C-plus and a B-minus can sometimes come down to circumstances tantalizingly beyond our own control. (It's probably also worth noting that even when he put his foot down, the label's bottom line still managed to wriggle out: "Run Right Back," the one song he didn't have a hand in writing, was another Diane Warren number.)

If Right Here is bog standard in terms of the rest of Money's major-label output, so is the story he told while promoting it. Following in the trail of countless aging rockers who'd scrounged up a bit of additional career fortune on the adult contemporary charts and were desperate to be seen as tough and vital again, Money insisted that this album was a back-to-basics affair, even going so far as to say he eschewed modern technology to the extent that he recorded it on a 16-track console. As he put it, "I figured if the Beatles could do Sgt. Pepper on a four-track, I should still be able to make a pretty decent album on a 16-track."

This all sounds nice, and apparently at least part of Right Here does stem from 16-track sessions, but one look at the booklet is enough to let you know he was wildly obfuscating the facts. The album was recorded at no fewer than eight different studios, and that list includes the Record Plant and the Power Station; meanwhile, there's an army of personnel in the credits, including session ringers like Randy "Dawg" Jackson, delightfully named liner notes mainstay Bob Glaub, and Mr. Mister vet Steve Farris.

The point here is not really that Eddie Money had the spirit of a car salesman, although reading the above might be enough to convince anyone of that. No, the point is that in spite of his fact-adjacent protestations, Right Here was an album made in the spirit of the '80s — and one that had the misfortune of being released mere moments before that spirit curdled into commercial anathema. And even if grunge hadn't come along to serve as the scapegoat for a decade of disappointing sales numbers for a certain type of artist, there's every reason to think Right Here would have been the end of the major-label road for Money anyway. He was now on the wrong side of 40 at a time when that was still a big deal for some people, and acting twice as cranky as his age.

"MTV's catering to these kids with hair extensions who are all skin and bones. I mean, who the fuck is FireHouse? The only reason I bought Rolling Stone with Skid Row on the cover was that I thought [Sebastian Bach] was a chick," he groused in an interview with the Californian. "I thought there might be a centerfold in there or something."

Ultimately, for all his efforts to shake off the label's constraints, break the formula applied to recent releases, and get back to doing what he did best, the reviews that greeted Right Here suggested that few could hear the difference. One snarked that Money "is a musician the way someone else might be a banker or a shoe salesman," while another predicted, "If Eddie Money lives to record three dozen albums, it's doubtful any one of them is likely to sound much different from the others."

Sadly, Eddie Money did not live to record three dozen albums. Sadder still, the ones he recorded after Right Here could not, by and large, be accused of sounding the same as the ones that came before it. Although Right Here gave him his final Top 40 hit with the No. 21 ballad "I'll Get By," the album itself rose no higher than No. 160, so it came as no surprise when he was dropped following an unplugged tour in support of the record. (That tour was commemorated with a contract-fulfilling release, but in a likely reflection of Columbia's diminished interest in flogging Money product, it was only an EP.)

In 1995, Money resurfaced as the flagship signing at Wolfgang Records, a short-lived revival of the Bill Graham-led imprint that signed him at the beginning of his career. The difference this time around was that Graham was dead, Wolfgang no longer had major-label distribution, and it was a lot harder to break a heritage rock act, particularly one widely seen as well past his prime. Still, Money's sole Wolfgang release, Love and Money, stands as a towering work of multiplatinum genius compared to the stuff that came next.

After Love and Money stiffed, Money did what everyone else his age was doing and signed with CMC International, the label that spent the back half of the '90s scooping up rock acts that had been cast off by the majors. If you've ever bought, heard, or even seen a CMC release, you know they weren't inclined to spend a lot of money on things like recording budgets or album artwork, and 1999's Ready Eddie is a perfect case in point. After blowing past his budget by more than $50,000, Money paid the difference out of his own pocket, which meant he was twice as unhappy about being strongarmed into including a couple of tracks he thought were subpar. None of it mattered with that hideous album cover, though; Ready Eddie may not have been specifically designed to collect dust in spinner carousels on truck stop countertops, but it sure looks like it.

After that, it was basically all over but the crying, although Money did manage to self-release a covers album (sad trombone) featuring vocals from his daughter (sadder trombone) in 2007. He was working on his next collection of new material when he died due to complications of a heart valve replacement in September of 2019; ever the road dog, he was barely back from his most recent tour dates when he passed away. An EP titled Brand New Day was released posthumously, and apparently, plans still call for Money's estate to put out the rest of the material he was putting the finishing touches on before he died.

That's all admittedly a bummer note to end on — a (cough) major letdown, if you will — so let's reframe the narrative a bit by going back to the beginning. You know, the part where Eddie Money liked to describe his sound as "blue-collar rock"? In a lot of ways, I think his life and career arc reinforced that. He isn't the first, third, or probably even 15th artist someone will name if called upon to list acts known for making that type of rock 'n' roll, but in its own way, that's pretty blue-collar too. He was never a critics' darling, he never had a No. 1 single on the Hot 100, he's rarely on the list of artists that people argue should be in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and he lost his only Grammy nomination to Robert Palmer's "Addicted to Love." Even at his most commercially successful, he was a lunchpail guy.

And when the hits stopped coming and the major-label cash dried up, Eddie Money did what a lunchpail guy would do: He found his opportunities where he could and he never stopped touring, which, by the way, really was what he did best. I was at the San Jose stop on that unplugged tour, and Money and his band rocked the joint so hard that the people in the balcony actually caused structural damage with all their jumping around and carrying on.

That line about Money being a shoe salesman of an artist was intended as an insult, but I think it was also apt in ways the critic didn't intend. You don't go to a shoe salesman expecting them to dazzle you with something you've never seen before; you go to a shoe salesman so they can bring you what the fuck you went there for, and that's what he did for his fans, basically right up until the end of his life. The value of the product is always up for debate, but there's only honor in having the ability and willingness to provide it.