The world according to Dan.

Baby Hold On: Why Eddie Money Was the Patron Saint of Rock Uncool

As he himself would have admitted, Eddie Money was no one’s idea of a conventional rock star. His stage moves were always a little gawky and spasmodic, his borderline hoarse voice in need of a lozenge or two. Emerging during the punk era though never part of it, he preferred the stadium-friendly shout-along choruses of mainstream rock and adopted the suit-and-tie New Wave look while keeping his hair unfashionably long. He was even an NYPD cop — a career move that, while utterly honorable, didn’t jibe with the traditional, anti-establishment rock & roll handbook.

For decades, we’ve been taught that pop stars, especially rock stars, are supposed to embody a certain type of cool. But the accidental genius of Money, who died Friday of heart valve complications at 70, was that he almost never was. Throughout pretty much his entire career, he was rock’s endearing every-palooka, a clumsy, somewhat overwrought guy who was one of rock’s most relatable acts and, during a 45-year career, stumbled onto some of the most enduring radio hits of his era.

From the start, Money seemed out of step. His first album arrived in 1977, the same year that gave us the debuts of the Clash and Elvis Costello, yet Money preferred his rock & roll almost proudly, unabashedly generic. This was the dawn of what came to be known as corporate rock, and so many of Money’s early hits, like “Baby Hold On,” “Gimme Some Water” (“cause I shot a man on the Mexican border”?), and especially “Two Tickets to Paradise,” conformed to many of that genre’s trademarks: big, brawny guitars, a certain vacuum-sealed sound, the music-school guitar solo.

But riding over all of it was that husky, immediately recognizable voice. Money threw himself into songs the way he threw himself into stage shows: with a sloppy passion. Rock lyrics don’t get any more generic than those in the frisky “Think I’m in Love” or his first hit “Baby Hold On” — “the future is ours to see/when you hold on to me” — but Money sang them, and other songs, as if he believed fully in every single word and that his life depended on conveying them with as much intensity as he could.

This was also the era of the pillow-soft sound now called Yacht Rock, a fairly loathsome term dripping with ironic appreciation for the likes of Christopher Cross and Rupert Holmes. But again, Money was never quite right for that moment, either. Hardly a suave crooner, he stood in for every person who was all sputtery emotions, bereft of the polished or articulate gene. As seen repeatedly in his videos, he couldn’t quite pull off the glam-sultry look either, even when he was pretending to be a vampire (“Think I’m in Love”).

Five minutes of bleating desperation, “Take Me Home Tonight,” the 1986 hit that put him back on the charts after a dry spell, remains a wondrous record. As always, he sang it as if his world was falling apart and there was nothing he could do about it — a tension only released when Ronnie Spector emerged to pay homage to her Ronettes hit “Be My Baby” in what may have been the first “live sample” in pop, not cribbing from an old record but actually using the original singer to recreate the part.

That song inaugurated what was Money’s golden era. It’s hard to think of any other Seventies rocker who adapted so well to the sound of the following decade, but Money and his various producers and co-songwriters managed to modernize him while never forgetting his big, over-the-top emotions. “I Wanna Go Back” hit the rock-klutz paydirt, as did “We Should Be Sleeping.” There was nothing remotely subtle about any of those songs or their arrangements, but Money made you root for him, especially since so many of his songs amounted to confessions about how much he’d screwed up in one way or another. And while Money’s discography isn’t exactly filled with buried treasures, plenty of deep cuts are worthy revisiting: the punchy “Trinidad” (especially the live, acoustic version on his Unplug It In EP) and “Another Nice Day in L.A.,” co-written with original Heartbreakers drummer Stan Lynch.

Then there’s “Walk on Water,” which may well be his masterpiece. Again, it’s laden with every sonic bell and whistle from the Eighties: the amped-synth arrangement, the chanting “na-na-na-na” chorus, the extremely intrusive drums. But even as it elbows its way into the room or the radio, it’s an undeniably poignant song. When he hits the word “believe” in the chorus (“If I could walk on water/would you … believe in me … my love is so true!”), he sounds so desperate to save another failed relationship that you can’t help but side with him. Pop was growing increasingly mechanized, but Money, in his heartfelt, let-it-hang-out way, raged against the machine.

Eddie Money, veteran rock singer dead at 70

Eddie Money the veteran rock musician best known for hits including Baby Hold On”, “Two Tickets to Paradise”, and “Take Me Home Tonight”, has died at the age of 70.

Last month, Money revealed that he had been diagnosed with stage 4 esophageal cancer. Money “passed away peacefully early this morning (September 13th),” according to a statement from his family.
“It is with heavy hearts that we say goodbye to our loving husband and father. We cannot imagine our world without him,” the statement adds. “We are grateful that he will live on forever through his music.”

A frequent presence on rock radio throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Money had 11 Top 40 hits to his name. His first two singles, “Baby Hold On” and “Two Tickets to Paradise”, each cracked the top 25 in 1978. A year later, he dropped “Maybe I’m a Fool”, which peaked at No. 22.

Money’s dominance continued into the 1980s with songs like “Think I’m in Love”, “Walk on Water”, and “Take Me Home Tonight”. The latter, a duet with Ronnie Spektor, proved to be his most successful single, hitting No. 1 on the US rock charts and earning him a Grammy nomination for Best Male Rock Performance.

Since 2018, Money and his family were the subject of a reality TV series called Real Money on AXS TV. Money revealed his cancer diagnosis in a recent episode of the show. “I thought I was going in for a check-up and [the doctor] told me I have cancer,” he explained. “We found out that I had cancer and that it was stage 4 and that it was in my liver and my lymph nodes and a little bit in my stomach… It hit me really, really hard.”

“What I don’t want to do is I don’t want to keep the fact that I have cancer from everybody,” Money added. “It’s not honest. I want to be honest with everybody. I want people to know that cancer [treatment] has come a long way and not everybody dies from cancer like they did in the Fifties and Sixties. Am I going to live a long time? Who knows? It’s in God’s hands.”

Actress Valerie Harper, of Mary Tyler Moore Show and Rhoda fame, dead at 80

Valerie Harper, who scored guffaws and stole hearts as Rhoda Morgenstern on back-to-back hit sitcoms in the 1970s, has died. She was 80.

Longtime family friend Dan Watt confirmed Harper died Friday, adding the family wasn’t immediately releasing any further details.

Harper was a breakout star playing the lovable sidekick on The Mary Tyler Moore Show, then as the funny leading lady of the spinoff series, Rhoda.

She won three consecutive Emmys (1971-73) as supporting actress on The Mary Tyler Moore Show and another for outstanding lead actress for Rhoda, which ran from 1974-78. Beyond awards, she was immortalized — and typecast — for playing one of television’s most beloved characters, a best friend the equal of Ethel Mertz and Ed Norton in TV’s sidekick pantheon.

Fans had long feared the news of her passing. In 2013, she first revealed that she had been diagnosed with brain cancer and had been told by her doctors she had as little as three months to live. Some responded as if a family member were in peril.

But she refused to despair. “I’m not dying until I do,” Harper said in an interview on NBC’s Today show. “I promise I won’t.” Harper did outlive her famous co-star: Mary Tyler Moore died in January 2017. Ed Asner, Cloris Leachman and Betty White are among the former cast members who survive her.

In recent years, Harper’s other appearances included American Dad!, The Simpsons and Two Broke Girls.

Harper was a chorus dancer on Broadway as a teen before moving into comedy and improv when, in 1970, she auditioned for the part of a Bronx-born Jewish girl who would be a neighbour and pal of Minneapolis news producer Mary Richards on a new sitcom for CBS.

It seemed a long shot for the young, unknown actress. As she recalled, “I’m not Jewish, not from New York, and I have a small, shiksa nose.” And she had almost no TV experience.

But Harper, who arrived for her audition some 20 pounds overweight, may have clinched the role when she blurted out in admiration to the show’s tall, slender star: “Look at you in white pants without a long jacket to cover your behind!”

It was exactly the sort of thing Rhoda would say to “Mar,” as Harper recalled in her 2013 memoir, I, Rhoda. Harper was signed without a screen test.

Of course, if CBS had gotten its way, Rhoda might have been a very different character with a much different actress in place. As The Mary Tyler Moore Show was being developed, its producers were battling a four-point decree from the network, which insisted that the nation’s TV viewers would not accept series characters who were (1) divorced, (2) from New York, (3) Jewish or (4) have mustaches.

The producers lost on having Mary Richards divorced — instead, she had been dumped by her long-time boyfriend — but with Rhoda they overrode the network on two other counts.

The show that resulted was a groundbreaking hit, with comically relatable Rhoda one big reason.

“Women really identified with Rhoda because her problems and fears were theirs,” Harper theorized in her book. “Despite the fact that she was the butt of most of her own jokes, so to speak … her confident swagger masked her insecurity. Rhoda never gave up.”

Neither did Harper, who confronted her own insecurities with similar moxie.

“I was always a little overweight,” she once told The Associated Press. “I’d say, ‘Hello, I’m Valerie Harper and I’m overweight.’ I’d say it quickly before they could … I always got called chubby, my nose was too wide, my hair was too kinky.”

But as The Mary Tyler Moore Show evolved, so did Rhoda. Rhoda trimmed down and glammed up, while never losing her comic step. The audience loved her more than ever.

A spinoff seemed inevitable. In 1974, Rhoda was dispatched from Minneapolis back home to New York City, where she was reunited with her parents and younger sister in a new sitcom that costarred Nancy Walker, Harold Gould and Julie Kavner.

She also met and fell in love with the hunky owner of a demolition firm.

The premiere of Rhoda that September was the week’s top-rated show, getting a 42 per cent share of audience against competition including Monday Night Football on ABC. And a few weeks later, when Rhoda and her fiance, Joe, were wed in a one-hour special episode, more than 52 million people — half of the U.S. viewing audience — tuned in.

But Rhoda couldn’t maintain those comic or popular heights. A domesticated, lucky-in-love Rhoda wasn’t a funny Rhoda. By the end of the third season, the writers had taken a desperate step: Rhoda divorced Joe. Thus had Rhoda (and Harper) defied a third CBS taboo.

The series ended in 1978 with Harper having played Rhoda for a total of nine seasons.

She had captured the character by studying her Italian stepmother. But Harper’s own ethnicity — neither Jewish nor Italian — was summed up in a New York Times profile as “an exotic mixture of Spanish-English-Scotch-Irish-Welsh-French-Canadian.”

And she was not a Gothamite. Born in Suffern, N.Y., into a family headed by a peripatetic sales executive, she spent her early years in Oregon, Michigan and California before settling in Jersey City, N.J.

By high school, she was taking dance lessons in Manhattan several times a week. By age 15, she was dancing specialty numbers at Radio City Music Hall. By 18, she was in the chorus of the Broadway musical Li’l Abner (then appeared in the film adaptation a year later). She also danced in the musicals Take Me Along (starring Jackie Gleason) and Wildcat (starring Lucille Ball).

She found comedy when she fell in with a group of Second City players from Chicago who had taken up residence in Greenwich Village. One of these improv players was Richard Schaal, whom she wed in 1964. (They divorced in 1978.)

Harper and Schaal moved to Los Angeles in 1968. Two years later, in a theater production, she was spotted by a casting agent for the role of Rhoda.

During The Mary Tyler Moore, Harper appeared in her first major film, the comedy Freebie and the Bean, and later was cast in Blame It on Rio and an adaptation of Neil Simon’s play Chapter Two.

In 1986, she returned to series TV with a family sitcom called Valerie. While not matching her past critical successes, the show proved popular. But in the summer of 1987, Harper and her manager, Tony Cacciotti, whom she had married a few months earlier, were embroiled in a highly publicized feud with Lorimar Telepictures, the show’s production company, and its network, NBC.

In a dispute over salary demands, Harper had refused to report for work, missing one episode. The episode was filmed without her. She was back on duty the following week, only to be abruptly dumped and replaced by actress Sandy Duncan. The show was renamed Valerie’s Family and then The Hogan Family.

Meanwhile, lawsuits and countersuits flew. In September 1988, a jury decided that Harper was wrongfully fired. She was awarded $1.4 million US compensation plus profit participation in the show (which continued without Harper until 1991).

“I felt vindicated,” Harper wrote in her memoir. “I had beaten Lorimar and reclaimed my reputation.”

During the 1990s, Harper starred in a pair of short-lived sitcoms (one of which, City, was created by future Oscar-winner Paul Haggis) and made guest appearances on series including Melrose Place, Sex and the City and Desperate Housewives.

She reunited with Moore in a 2000 TV film, Mary and Rhoda. In 2013, there was an even grander reunion: Harper and Moore were back together along with fellow MTM alumnae Leachman, White and Georgia Engel to tape an episode of White’s hit comedy, Hot in Cleveland. It was the ensemble’s first acting job together in more than 30 years and during a news conference Harper cited a valuable lesson: The character of Rhoda, she said, pointing to Moore, “taught me to thank your lucky stars for a fabulous friend.”

Kevin Hart suffers ‘major back injuries’ in car crash

Actor-comedian Kevin Hart has been injured in the crash of a vintage muscle car in the hills above Malibu.

A California Highway Patrol (CHP) collision report says the 40-year-old Hart was a passenger in a 1970 Plymouth Barracuda that went off Mulholland Highway and rolled down an embankment around 12:45 a.m. Sunday.

The report says Hart and the driver, 28-year-old Jared Black, both suffered “major back injuries” and were taken to hospitals.

Another passenger, 31-year-old Rebecca Broxterman, only complained of pain.

The CHP report says the car immediately went out of control as it turned from a canyon road onto the highway.

The report says the driver was not under the influence of alcohol.

A Hart representative did not immediately reply to messages.

The crash was first reported by TMZ.