SO, start at the beginning: The universe is created.
Millions of years later, the city of Rome is founded. Thousands of years after that, the guitar is invented. Then electricity. Then Rock n’ Roll. Then Eddie Money himself is born, joins the NYPD, quits to pursue a recording career. Somewhere in there my wife is born. Somewhere in there I am born. I am vaguely aware of Eddie Money and the five or six songs that always got played on the radio when I was a kid. I grow up. I meet my wife. We get married. And one day she emails me and says, BTW I just bought us two tickets to see Eddie Money in New York in May.
And I say, holy shit, you’re kidding.
And my wife is not amused.
So there I am on a Saturday night with a glass of whiskey seated uncomfortably at a table with The Duchess and three other people. It’s a packed house, which is amazing. Up until a few weeks before I had assumed Eddie Money was either dead or working at a Wal Mart somewhere. I mean seriously: Eddie Money.
The show is, however, kind of fun. Eddie is 64 and looks it, and he dances and moves on the stage in a way that frequently alarms. You sit and watch him and every now and again you wonder if he’s going to just fall to the floor and start twitching, because his stage moves are the kind you imagine older folks perform when stroking out. But god bless him, because he puts on a decent show and there are actually more hits than I remember.
I’m not a big Eddie Money fan. I don’t actually own any of his songs, despite hearing so many of them at least a thousand times each over the course of my lifetime.
But it’s kind of impressive in general that he’s still making a living from his songs. And from a really embarrassing commercial currently on TV, too. But still: If I’m able to make money from my art several decades from now, that would be amazing. So good for Eddie Money. Not so good for me. Because now when someone asks, with raised eyebrow, Who in the world goes to an Eddie Money show? You can point at me and say “He does.”
So, I still put out a little zine called The Inner Swine, although instead of printing out 1200 copies, stapling and folding them, and then spending a million dollars on postage in the hopes of getting two wrinkled dollar bills back in the mail five years later (the standard zine business model) it’s now only available as a Kindle or Nook book, with free PDFs one issue behind available on the web site.
