Eddie Rabbitt is back on the road, again writing his own songs, seeing his records go to No. 1 and looking for police protection from his screaming female fans.
The tall crowd-pleaser appears to have picked up where he left off when he dropped abruptly out of high-profile circulation three years ago.
But not exactly.
The difference? The genial, laugh-loving singer appears quieter and more reflective, and no wonder. In the last three years, he has taken and survived his career`s biggest risk.
”They told me, `You`re putting it on the line here, and you could just lose it,` ” he remembers, referring to certain advisers.
”They pointed out that everything`s real fast these days, and if you`re not on the charts for six months or a year, you could become one of the old guard, the people in old country star magazines.
”But I said, `It doesn`t matter. The right thing right now is to be home.` ”
The second of Rabbitt`s three children, a boy named Tim, was born with birth defects that finally, after a two-year struggle, claimed his life a couple of years ago. Rabbitt, his wife, Janine, and their daughter, Demelza, now 7, were devastated.
The performer virtually stopped performing. He says he also went into debt trying to keep his band on a payroll.
”But I needed to be with Janine then,” he says. ”She needed a lot of support, as I did.
”A man probably accepts (such) things as fate and either looks up and curses the skies or doesn`t look up at all. But I think a woman who has carried a baby who has a birth defect takes that kind of thing to heart and keeps it longer, thinking it`s her fault, wondering if it was something she ate or some cold she got that caused it.
”I also wanted to be with our daughter, to try to explain and help her understand what happened to her brother. She had gone to the hospital with us every day, got in the crib and played with him, walked around the halls with him, everything.”
Rabbitt, Janine and their daughter were at Vanderbilt Hospital with the boy ”at least five or six days a week,” he recalls. Afterward, the three of them spent ”many days and nights crying” about their loss.
After consulting psychologists about the problems of children who lose brothers or sisters, Rabbitt thinks he ultimately helped his daughter ”feel like it was OK.
”We talked about Timmy every day,” he adds, ”and never made her feel it was some weird thing you never talk about again. We just said it happens, and he`s in heaven now. And when we felt like crying we just all sat on the bed together and cried.”
It wasn`t the sort of experience from which people emerge unscarred, but the Rabbitts have at least-and at last-emerged. Nearly two years ago, Janine gave birth to a boy named Tommy who, his father says, ”is real healthy and laughs all the time,” making them feel they have ”been paid back double.”
In the last year, Janine has gone on to devote herself to the extensive restoration and refurbishing of an antebellum estate.
Her husband has just as impressively returned his attention to his business. From his current LP, ”Eddie,” two singles-”The Wanderer” and ”I Wanna Dance With You”-have reached No. 1 in the country hit charts. A new one, ”We Must Be Doin` Somethin` Right,” recently entered the Billboard trade magazine charts at No. 66, the highest new single of that week.
”It`s kind of nice,” he says, ”after being out of it for two or three years, to come back and know they haven`t forgotten you.”
Rabbitt is difficult for a lot of fans to forget. Probably best-known for the hypnotic hit ”Drivin` My Life Away,” he makes pop-oriented country music that is alternately hard-driving and slowly sexy. He usually writes or co-writes it himself.
During his absence, RCA Records released just one LP by him, ”Rabbitt Trax,” which contained only three songs he wrote or co-wrote; ”Eddie” more typically boasts eight. And he is once again involved in his music`s evolution from pen to pressing plant.
”A song can go a million different ways once you first get it down on tape,” he says, with a trademark lyrical touch.
Musically, Rabbitt has long since accustomed himself to the expressways. An Irish-American New Jerseyan who began his Nashville career adeptly writing songs for others, he learned early to rely mostly on himself for not only material but also his primary arrangements.
”Eddie” was done in Los Angeles under the supervision of prominent producer Richard Landis, and its cuts, whether fast or slow, have a hot, tight feel that is eminently listenable.
But, like its predecessors, it`s a collection that has no theme binding it together. Rabbitt says he sounds ”like 10 different artists” on it-and that he has begun to regard the variety of his material as ”both a blessing and a curse.
”People, when they buy a pie, don`t want every piece to taste different,” he reasons.
”I write different kinds of stuff, from `Two Dollars In The Jukebox` to
`Suspicions,` that really don`t belong next to each other on an album. Each is totally my writing, but (the variety) causes you not to have the cult following of, say, a Hank Williams Jr. whose music-which I love-all seems to go in the same direction and have the same sound.
But it may be that Rabbitt`s eclecticism is one of the things that enabled him to return to the top of the charts so easily after his layoff:
Because his sound has always been so unfocused, he hadn`t worn out his audience.
He also doesn`t resemble other artists on the country horizon. When he rose to prominence in the late `70s, he became country music`s first big star from the concrete jungles of New Jersey, and he has seemed different ever since.
Walking around inspecting ongoing work at his newly restored mansion several weeks ago, he remembered his old off-the-wall days as a Nashville songwriter, when his roommates included a monkey and a chicken. He was asked how in the world he ever met Janine, who was a researcher at Vanderbilt University.
”Some friend of mine asked me if I would drop by a party he was having,” he recalled. ”I never went to parties for the same reason I never went to clubs, because I had worked so many clubs with a band up in Jersey that I just wasn`t interested in hanging out in places. I usually hung out with my songwriter friends at their places or mine.
”But when 7 o`clock came that night, there was nothing going on, and I thought, `Maybe I`ll take a run over there.` It turned out there were 15 or 20 people, and when I sat down on the couch, on the right there was a girl about four-eleven and a half-I found out later-with long black hair. She looked just like Juliet in the movie of Romeo and Juliet. Real pretty.
”We talked a little bit and then went outside, and I asked her for her number, and she gave it to me.”
To this day, he adds, she still reminds him of their first date, which apparently wasn`t the stuff of which his sex-symbol reputation has been made. He picked her up to go for a drive, and they ended up doing his grocery shopping.
”Hey, I wasn`t into going to movies and stuff,” he says, with a laugh and a shrug.
”She still reminds me now and then: `Great guy you are. Our first date, you take me to Giant Foods.` I say, `Oh, you had a great time. You`re still with the big dummy, aren`t you?` ”
