Singer-songwriter Eddie Rabbitt and his wife were riding a moped during a Bermuda vacation when Mrs. Rabbitt started admiring the scenery.
Wouldn`t it be nice to live in this beautiful place? she asked. Her husband remembers replying that Bermuda is indeed ”nice,” but he wasn`t sure he wanted to live there. He said he was afraid he`s a hopelessly American boy. ”Then I start thinking as we`re riding on this moped and she`s behind me,” Rabbitt says, in his fast-and-loose, Nashville-ized New Jersey accent.
”I had this little lyric and melody start bouncing around in my head, and I start singing it: `I want to live in a place where they name their kids Billy.` I thought it was a funny line, a redneck line that was almost-not quite-KKK or something.
”Then I went on to `I want to turn on the radio and hear my man Willie. Friday night football, stand up and cheer. . . .` ”
So aboard the moped, with his wife behind him, Rabbitt did something he seems to do more frequently than most other songwriters: He finished a song very quickly.
This one, titled ”American Boy,” graces his forthcoming LP on Capitol Records, an impressive package that is to include the big current Rabbitt hit, ”On Second Thought.”
When it appears in early April, delayed nearly four months by the merger of Universal Records with Capitol, the new album is expected to bear the title ”Jersey Boy,” which also is the title of an unusually autobiographical song in it.
But it could just as appropriately have been called ”American Boy.” It offers a spectrum of the sounds with which country music and Rabbitt have been insinuating themselves into the national consciousness for the last decade and a half.
Opening with the galloping bluegrass-flavored ”Tennessee Born And Bred,” it moves on through the traditional and urgently midtempo ”On Second Thought,” revs up even higher with the truckdriving song ”Runnin` With The Wind,” then proceeds through contemporary love songs, country rock songs and other characteristic Rabbitt fare.
In sum, it`s a traditional-tinged commercial masterpiece of not only writing and singing but also sequencing. It deserves to make Rabbitt, who always has been a high-profile radio artist, a comparable country record-seller as well. Which maybe was the aim.
”I`m continually having to re-establish myself in this country business,” he says. ”Even though I`ve had 20-some country No. 1 records, I still have a hard time convincing a lot of these people in the Country Music Association and the Academy of Country Music that I love country music.
”They`ve always had a hard time categorizing me, it seems, even though most of my stuff is country of one kind or another-usually country spilling over into the old adult-contemporary charts.
”But I guess because we went pop in the `Urban Cowboy` movement there in `80 and `81 (with the huge hits ”Drivin` My Life Away” and ”I Love A Rainy Night”), they just perceived me as a pop act. What I wanted to do in this album was put in everything I do. This is my kind of country, I guess.” Rabbitt`s kind of country is basically any kind a listener could want.
Since the late 1960s, when he went to Nashville from his home state of New Jersey and wrote a minor Roy Drusky hit titled ”Working My Way Up To The Bottom,” he has been writing just about any kind of country songs that sell- most of which, with the notable exceptions of Elvis Presley`s ”Kentucky Rain” and Ronnie Milsap`s ”Pure Love,” he has recorded himself.
He gets bored easily, he says, and his songs seem to bear that out. Tending to be rhythmically and lyrically fast-moving, many of them also are as quickly written as ”American Boy”-or even more so.
”I wrote `On Second Thought` in five minutes in the back of my bus going through Montana,” he recalls.
”My manager, Stan Moress, and my road manager, Bill Rehrig, and I were sitting in the stateroom in the back of the bus talking business one night after finishing a show, and Stan said, `What`re you thinking of cutting on this next album?`
”I said, `Well, the usual things that I write, I guess.` He said, `Why don`t you think about writing one of those old traditional country things like ”Two Dollars in the Jukebox” that you haven`t done in a long time?` There was a little nylon-string guitar sitting there, and I picked it up and, honest to God, said, `Oh, you mean like this?`
”And I sang the whole song, all the words and everything. It just all came right out in that glorious moment. Stan said, `That`s great. When did you write that?` I said, `Just now.` ”
He says another of his big hits, ”Suspicions,” came almost as instantly, written in ”one time through and then just a couple of word changes.”
Asked how he is able to do these things, he says he isn`t able to more often than ”maybe one song in a hundred,” but he adds that it probably comes from his long preoccupation with the songwriting process.
”I`ve always got these little melodies running around in my head, although most of them aren`t worth much, and I understand structure and formulas,” he says.
”So I`ve got all that background information in there, and when I start singing a new song my mind starts working immediately, almost like a computer. I start knowing automatically where it`s going and what the shape of it`s got to be.
”After the first line of `On Second Thought,` I knew it had to be the kind of song that either had a verse, chorus, turnaround, verse, chorus, chorus and out or had a verse, chorus, verse, chorus, turnaround, chorus, chorus and out. Those are the ways the song would have to be because of the structure of the lyric..”
Even though he can`t write songs instantly every time, he grants that most of his come pretty quickly-and that it has to be that way, because of his personality:
”Some songs I write will get close to being finished and then get thrown away, because I get tired of them, get bored with them, lose my juice.
”That`s why I like to write `em as quick as I can, before I go over and over `em so much that I start to lose `em and actually start to dislike `em.” Because of this method, as well as his unwillingness to commit himself to more than one album per year, he never has let songwriting become work, he says. He also appears to be very prolific at it.
In addition to writing or co-writing nine of the 10 songs on the forthcoming LP, he says he has begun work on an album of children`s songs he started writing just to entertain his own offspring.
It was only to entertain his children, he adds, that he wrote the autobiographical title song of ”Jersey Boy.”
”Then my producer, Richard Landis, came over to the house to hear different songs to consider for the album,” he adds, ”and I just happened to play that for him.
”I told him it was just for fun, but after he heard it, he said,
`Whaddya mean, you`re not gonna cut that? It`s a great little song.”`
Asked why, after so many years, he continues to love a discipline that so many other singer-songwriters seem to abandon after they become successful, he stops to consider a moment. Then he recalls once asking an unnamed star-friend, who ”didn`t feel like” co-writing, if he had become ”too rich to write.”
”I think you have to love the music and need to do it for your own mind, your own fun,” he concludes.
”I`d rather put down anything else I`m doing and pick up a guitar or sit down at a piano and write. For me, it`s still like that. The way some people are about eating, that`s the way I am about music.”
