I Love A Rainy Night And I Like Eddie Rabbitt

by Kevin Burton

   If you’re like most people, when you think of a nice day, you’re thinking about picnic weather, right?

    Well I’m not like most people.

   My nice days have a soundtrack to them. I am a son of the Midwest. What you call spring and summer, I call tornado season.  I’m certainly not pining for twisters, but when the storms come in, that’s way cool.

   Storms cheer me up, calm me down. Lights out, watch the lightning.

   David Malloy, Even Stevens and the performer Eddie Rabbitt wrote the song, “I Love A Rainy Night” I didn’t, but they must have been reading my mind when they wrote it.

   “Well, I love a rainy night I love a rainy night I love to hear the thunder Watch the lightning When it lights up the sky You know it makes me feel good.”

   Couldn’t have said it better myself, unless I said “it makes me feel great!”

   The song goes on in that vein, singing the praises of a refreshing, restorative shower: “Showers wash all my cares away. I wake up to a sunny day.”

   “According to music historian Fred Bronson, “I Love a Rainy Night” was 12 years in the making,” reads the song’s Wikipedia page. “Rabbitt had a collection of old tapes he kept in the basement of his home. While rummaging through the tapes one day in 1980, he heard a fragment of a song he had recorded one rainy night in the late 1960s.”

   “It brought back the memory of sitting in a small apartment, staring out the window at one o’clock in the morning, watching the rain come down,” Bronson wrote in The Billboard Book of Number One Hits. “He sang into his tape recorder, ‘I love a rainy night, I love a rainy night.’”

   Upon rediscovery of the old lyrics, Rabbitt completed the song with Stevens and Malloy.

   Stevens told The Tennessean that whenever the songwriting trio got together, Rabbitt would bring up the “rainy night” song title:

 “He really didn’t have the melody, but he had this little idea,” Stevens said “and he says, ‘I just thought, one night, I wasn’t depressed during a rainstorm. I was really happy, and I put this little thing down. We ought to write that.’”

    Note to songwriters: keep those fragments!

   Rabbitt began learning guitar from a boy scout troop leader, according to Bronson, while his family was living in East Orange, New Jersey. He learned only two chords before the man left town. He learned on his own after that.

   “Eddie was already interested in music thanks to his father Thomas Rabbitt, a refrigeration engineer who played fiddle and accordion,” Bronson wrote. 

   He began entering talent contests and got jobs singing in small clubs. After a few years of that he figured he wasn’t going to be discovered singing country music in New Jersey.

   That’s when Rabbitt, as so many others have, got on a Greyhound bus headed to Nashville. 

   Once there, he checked into a hotel and took a long bath, according to Bronson. “While soaking in the water, he wrote a song, “Working My Way up to the Bottom.”

   A publisher bought it and Roy Drusky recorded it,  and Eddie thought songwriting was going to be a sinch,” Bronson wrote.

   “Several months of rejection slips followed and Eddie took a staff job at Hill and Range Music Publishing, earning $37.50 a week.

   His first big break came from another song about rain. Rabbitt’s song “Kentucky Rain,” performed by Elvis Presley, put him on the map as a songwriter.

   “That legitimized me,” Rabbitt told the Los Angeles Times. “The doors that had been closed to me before were opened.”

   Other artists, including Ronnie Milsap and Dr. Hook recorded his songs. He hit the Hot 100 for the first time in 1976 with “Rocky Mountain Music” and followed up with chart hits “Every Which Way but Loose” and “Suspicions.”

   “I Love a Rainy Night” was the second single  released  from his album “Horizon.”  It reached number one on Feb. 28, 1981 and stayed for two weeks. 

   It was the follow-up to “Drivin’ My Life Away” which was number one country, number five Hot 100 and a personal karaoke favorite of mine.

   It was Rabbitt’s only Hot 100 number one. But his crossover success continued with “Step by Step” and “You and I” (the latter a duet with Crystal Gayle).

   Rabbitt died on May 7, 1998, in Nashville from lung cancer at the age of 56. No media outlets reported the death until after the burial at the family’s request, according to Wikipedia.  The news came as a surprise to many in Nashville, including the performer’s agent, who “had no idea Eddie was terminal” and had talked to him often, remarking that Rabbitt “was always upbeat and cheerful” in the final months of his life.