(written by Eddie Rabbitt, Even Stevens & David Malloy)
Eddie Rabbitt (#1 country, #1 pop, 1981)
On October 24, 1980, Eddie Rabbitt’s “Horizon” album became his first
LP to land at #1 on Billboard’s country album chart. Bolstered by
“Drivin’ My Life Away” (which had reached the top on August 23rd) and
the forthcoming single, “I Love A Rainy Night,” the album was hailed as a
modern-day throwback to rockabilly, with some justification.
Prior to launching the “Horizon” project, producer David Malloy had been
working on an album for the British rock group Badfinger. During those
sessions, band member Tom Evans told Malloy of England’s growing
fascination with rockabilly. Two weeks later, David caught an article in
Billboard Magazine explaining just what Evans was talking about. A few
days before Malloy, Even Stevens and Eddie Rabbitt began composing the
music for “Horizon,” David purchased the Sun Records collection, played
it for his two buddies, then they started writing.
At the time,
Rabbitt had an old Army foot locker which contained tapes of old songs
and fragments of ideas. One day he was digging through it and at the end
of one of the tapes, he discovered a repetitive melody with the phrase,
“I love a rainy night.” Eddie suggested that they try to form a song
around it.
Two weeks earlier, Malloy had gotten an idea for a
rhythm pattern using alternating finger snaps and handclaps, and that
concept became the centerpiece for the record. The “snaps and claps,”
however, proved to be a nightmare in the recording studio. Malloy,
Rabbitt and Stevens all tried to do the pattern in various combinations
with little success. They even tried a tape loop, but that didn’t work.
The main problem was that they weren’t consistent enough to get the
correct sound every time. The handclaps would sound different each time
when they would alternate back and forth. Finally, producer Malloy hired
percussionist Farrell Morris to handle it. In about three hours, Morris
laid down two tracks of snaps and two tracks of claps which solved the
problem.
“I Love A Rainy Night” received a boost when Rabbitt
signed a deal with Miller Beer. He filmed a commercial with the song on
November 29, 1980 in Tucson, Arizona. On New Year’s Day, the ad
premiered at halftime during the Rose Bowl telecast and the additional
exposure helped propel “I Love A Rainy Night” to the top of both
Billboard’s country singles chart (on January 17, 1981) and Billboard’s
Hot 100 pop chart. In March, Rabbitt received official designations from
the RIAA certifying “Drivin’ My Life Away” and “I Love A Rainy Night”
as million-selling singles, the only ones of his career.
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