I didn't want to let this pass.
I won't lie -- I wasn't a huge Eddie Money fan. Most of his hits were alright with me, the kind of thing you hear on the radio and don't think much about. But I did really like his collaboration with Ronnie Spector, "Take Me Home Tonight", and I loved that after a kind of traumatic past, Money was responsible for kind of luring Spector back into making music.
And as a fellow Long Islander (because Brooklyn is, geographically at least, part of Long Island) and a fellow New York City boy (I grew up in Queens), I'm proud of what Eddie Money accomplished in his career, even if much of it wasn't necessarily to my personal taste. And all of this is all the more so because I was part of that Long Island Music Hall of Fame Board of Directors that voted Money into LIMHoF's inaugural group of inductees in 2008. (Yeah, I know it looks like he was actually part of the second group of inductees. But we actually voted that whole initial group of 2006 and 2008 inductees in at the same time, and just broke them into two groups pretty much at random.)
So R.I.P Eddie Money.
Ric Ocasek is a different case. The Cars were actually one of my favorite twenty-or-so bands. They were one of the most important links between '70s rock and '80s new wave. I always hoped to see them live one day. Even after Benjamin Orr's death in 2000, I hoped that perhaps the other four members of The Cars would reunite at some point for one last tour. Obviously, now, that can never happen. (I guess the best you could hope for is that maybe Elliot Easton and Greg Hawkes will hook up again someday with Todd Rundgren and company as The New Cars.)
Ocasek, of course, also had a decent little solo career, as well as a career as a music producer.
So R.I.P. Ric Ocasek.
They say these things come in threes. Let's hope that they're wrong. Unless you want to count Rob Zombie film star Sid Haig, who I also admired, and also wish a hard R.I.P. to.
