Rock singer, reality TV star dies at 70

Eddie Money, whose string of rock hits in the late 1970s and ’80s included “Baby Hold On” and “Two Tickets to Paradise,” died Friday in Los Angeles. He was 70.

His family announced the death in a statement. Money, whose birth name was Edward Mahoney, had announced last month that he had esophageal cancer.

He and his family have been the focus of a reality television show on AXS TV, Real Money. The episode in which he discussed his cancer was broadcast the night before he died.

Money, son of a police officer, was headed for that career when he dropped out of the New York Police Academy to move to San Francisco in pursuit of rock stardom. He found it in 1978 when “Baby Hold On,” from his self-titled debut album, reached No. 11 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart.

Then came “Two Tickets to Paradise” and “Maybe I’m a Fool,” among other hits, but in the early 1980s Money struggled with drugs. He staged several comebacks, however; his hits later in the 1980s included “Take Me Home Tonight” and “Walk on Water.”

Edward Joseph Mahoney was born March 21, 1949, in Brooklyn, N.Y.

He abandoned his law enforcement aspirations before he was 20 and headed to the West Coast. Eventually promoter Bill Graham took him under his wing, and soon he had a contract with Columbia Records and was opening for top acts, including the Rolling Stones.

“Money’s determination is only matched by the scope of his talent,” Steve Morse wrote in The Boston Globe in 1978. “He is not going to be stopped.”

But a year or so later, he was almost stopped.

“One night after a show, I got loaded on vodka,” he told the Lubbock Avalanche-Journal of Texas in 2009. “Then I took a really bad barbiturate by mistake, when I thought I was actually doing cocaine.”

Money ended up in a coma, and when he came out of it he found that he had damaged his sciatic nerve; he couldn’t walk for months. His 1982 album, No Control, constituted what he considered his first comeback.

Money’s survivors include his wife of more than 30 years, Laurie, and five children, Zachary, Joseph, Desmond, Julian and Jesse.

AXS TV said it would broadcast the remaining five episodes of Real Money in their usual Thursday slot.