Eddie Rabbit – I Love A Rainy Night

The Army Footlocker Tape, The Snaps That Wouldn’t Sync, And The Beer Commercial That Made It Explode

Released in November 1980 from the album Horizon, “I Love a Rainy Night” reached number one on three separate Billboard charts simultaneously in early 1981, topping the Hot 100 for two weeks starting February 28, the Hot Country Singles chart for one week on January 17, and the Adult Contemporary chart for three weeks. The song became Rabbitt’s only Hot 100 number one and earned gold certification on March 10, 1981, for sales of 500,000 units. It succeeded Dolly Parton’s “9 to 5” at number one, marking the last time back-to-back country singles held the top spot on the pop chart. For a song fragment recorded into a tape recorder during a 1960s thunderstorm and forgotten in a basement footlocker for over a decade, this became the defining crossover moment of the Urban Cowboy era.

The triple chart success represented the peak of Rabbitt’s crossover appeal, following his number five Hot 100 hit “Drivin’ My Life Away” from the same album. The Horizon album reached platinum status and peaked at number one on Billboard’s Top Country Albums chart, selling over 1.1 million copies. Critics called it low-stakes mainstream country, a perfectly nice toe-tapper about weather that immediately dissipates once its three minutes are over. Rabbitt didn’t nod toward pop music the way Kenny Rogers and Dolly Parton did with their crossover hits. He simply sang in a blissful haze about a weather phenomenon he thought was cool, channeling the gentle rockabilly of Elvis Presley and Sun Records into something friendlier and cleaned-up for early 1980s radio.

Rabbitt first sang the opening line into a tape recorder in the late 1960s while sitting in his small Nashville apartment during a thunderstorm. He was a struggling songwriter at the time, plugging songs while hanging around with Kris Kristofferson, Billy Swan, and Larry Gatlin. The phrase captured a moment of unexpected joy rather than depression during the rain, but he couldn’t complete the melody. More than a decade later in 1980, while rummaging through an old Army footlocker containing tapes of song fragments and ideas, he rediscovered the recording. He brought it to his songwriting partners Even Stevens and David Malloy, telling them he really didn’t have the melody but he had this little idea. Stevens later told The Tennessean that Rabbitt kept bringing up the rainy night title during their writing sessions until the melody finally clicked during a late-night collaboration.

Producer David Malloy recorded the track in 1980 at Woodland Sound Studios in Nashville and Caribou Ranch in Nederland, Colorado. Malloy had recently worked on an album with British rock group Badfinger and developed a fascination with rockabilly rhythms. He conceived an idea for a rhythm pattern using alternating finger snaps and handclaps that became the song’s centerpiece. The snaps and claps proved extraordinarily difficult to nail down in the studio because the handclaps would sound different each time they alternated back and forth. Malloy hired percussionist Farrell Morris to solve the problem, having him lay down two tracks of snaps and two tracks of claps to create the consistent sound that opens the recording. Those distinctive snaps became instantly recognizable, waking up something primal in listeners’ ears before the electric guitar even entered.

Rabbitt had been compared to a young Elvis Presley by this point in his career, and NBC gave him his own television special on July 10, 1980, featuring appearances by Emmylou Harris and Jerry Lee Lewis. He respectfully declined offers for his own variety series, saying it wasn’t worth the gamble. His career had begun as a songwriter, with Elvis recording his composition “Kentucky Rain” for Presley’s 50th gold record in 1970, and Ronnie Milsap recording “Pure Love” in 1974. Rabbitt signed with Elektra Records in 1975 and scored his first number one country hit with “Drinkin’ My Baby (Off My Mind)” in 1977. By the time Horizon arrived, he was Nashville’s leading crossover artist.

The song received a massive promotional boost when Rabbitt signed a deal with Miller Beer and filmed a commercial featuring the track on November 29, 1980, in Tucson, Arizona. The advertisement premiered on New Year’s Day 1981 during the Rose Bowl halftime, giving the song additional exposure that propelled it to the top of both country and pop charts. Follow-up single “Step by Step” reached number five on the Hot 100 in 1981, and his duet with Crystal Gayle, “You and I,” peaked at number seven in 1982. Alvin and the Chipmunks covered the song for both the original 1981 and 1993 releases of Urban Chipmunk. The track appeared in the video game Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas on the K-Rose radio station and in Family Guy.

Rabbitt continued recording throughout the 1980s but moved away from crossover material as the decade progressed. He was diagnosed with lung cancer in 1997 and released his final studio album, Beatin’ the Odds, in 1998. He died on May 7, 1998, at age 56. Sometimes the greatest songs come from scraps left behind and rediscovered years later when the artist is finally ready to finish them. A tape in a footlocker, finger snaps that wouldn’t sync until a percussionist recorded them four times, a beer commercial during a football game, and suddenly a forgotten fragment becomes the biggest crossover hit of the year. Rabbitt believed country music was Irish music with minor chords giving it that mystical feel. He sang about thunderstorms bringing peace and cleansing, washing away worries with romantic optimism. That’s not calculating pop crossover. That’s genuine joy captured on tape, twice, a decade apart, finally finding its moment when America needed something simple and sincere.