The stretch limousine pulls up outside the backstage door at the Westbury Music Fair in Long Island, New York on a warm Sunday evening in early April. And Eddie Rabbitt, 6’3,” skinny as a rail and clad in tight jeans and cowboy boots emerges. Fans lean over the rail to be kissed and have their hands shaken and Eddie smiles good-naturedly, signing autographs and joking to the crowd. He’s delighted to be back up north where the people all talk like him, he says laughing. The scene seems a little out of place for Long Island. Grandmother-types with cowboy hats mix with teenagers—one girl, almost swooning, is led away by her friends, “I held his hand, he kissed me,” she says. But the crowd all have one thing in common.
They love country music and Eddie Rabbitt, from the neighboring state of New Jersey, has come home.
In 1968, Eddie Rabbitt took a Greyhound bus to Nashville, Tennessee, with his guitar, a thousand dollars, and a dream. Eddie wanted to be a star and to quote a line from his latest song “Jersey Boy,” “I remember thinking long ago and telling a bartender named Stewart, I don’t think I’ll ever be discovered singing country music here in Newark.”
Well, Eddie became a star all right, but he was no overnight sensation. “I spent two or three years before I even had one song recorded,” he says. He signed with a publishing company, “for a whopping $37.50 a week, drawn against future royalties.” He paid $80 a month for an attic apartment, and with the rest, he says, “I just got food.” Nashville is where all the best musicians in the world gather, and Rabbitt says, “I was in competition with every one of them. But I made it work.”
To say that Eddie Rabbitt “made it work” is an understatement.
He has twenty-five number-one country hits, eight Top 40 pop hits, a pair of gold albums and a triple-platinum to his credit. In addition, Elvis Presley recorded three of his songs and one of them, “Kentucky Rain,” became his fiftieth gold album. Willie Nelson, Ronnie Milsap and the Oak Ridge Boys have all had hits with songs written by Rabbitt.
“Jersey Boy,” his latest album, is being touted by the critics as an artistic comeback. Not that Eddie has been away exactly. But a shattering personal tragedy forced him to take some time out.
In 1983, his son Timmy, was born with severe medical problems.
For the next few years, until Timmy’s death, Eddie and his wife, Janine, devoted most of their time to his care. Eddie admits that he only “toured enough to keep the band going.” In the mean-time, his accountant made some bad financial moves, almost managing Eddie into bankruptcy and forcing him to sell the rights to all the tunes he had written in the past thirteen years or face financial ruin.
“I guess it’s okay to go through hell as long as you don’t have to stay there,” is how he describes it.
All of that is behind him now. His current single, “I’m an American Boy,” reached the top 10, and as for his latest album, “Jersey Boy”— “Even Rabbitt doesn’trealize how good some of the new songs are,” says one reviewer.
“Jersey Boy,” the song, is a musical autobiography and goes like this, “My mommy and my daddy came from Ireland in 1924, they settled in New Jersey, they bought a house with a big front porch. I went to school down on the corner, my old scoutmaster taught me the guitar, and I still can smell those autumn leaves a burnin’ in my old backyard…”
“Music,” Rabbitt says, “is in the family. I believe it’s in the genes, actually,” he adds, leaning back on the couch, his long legs stretched out in front of him. He is relaxed and seems to be totally unconcerned that in less than an hour he will be on stage.
He talks about the Rabbitt family back in Athenry in Galway.
“Everybody, I mean literally everybody, plays music over there. I have a picture at home of a bunch of relatives all together and they’re all holding a musical instrument. Even the little 3-year-old is blowing on a recorder.” It’s an unusual name, Rabbitt?
“Yeah, I guess. I looked it up in the Vanderbilt Research Library down in Nashville one time and Rabbitt goes back to the Gaelic and changes into O’Cuneen and Cuneen. So I don’t know where Rabbitt came from. A lot of them over there spell it with an ‘E’ at the end.” Eddie is not going to offer me any humorous anecdotes on his name. Actually, Eddie I read somewhere that it means “counselor to the chiefs,” but we’ll leave it at that.
“Why the interest in country music?” I ask.
“Country music really is Irish music. And if you take country music all the way back, you’ll find that a lot of the old fiddle tunes, the jigs and the reels, are almost note for note. When I first heard country music, I just took to it not knowing why. Maybe my genes knew but I didn’t. My dad played the fiddle and the accordion and had his own little trio that played at Irish dances and feiscanna so there was always music in the house.”
While still in high school Eddie entered talent contests in and around his East Orange home, singing and playing country music. One evening in 1964, he and some friends stopped by a club and while they were there the piano player quit. Rabbitt approached the owner, told him he played guitar and sang, and offered to fill in. “I spent the rest of that night at home listening to albums and writing down lyrics to some of my favorite songs,” he says.
“The next night I set up a music stand in the club and started singing. “After a couple of years of playing in such well-known spots as the Hurricane Bar in Newark, Eddie says he was very motivated to go to Nashville because of all the other things he really didn’t want to do the rest of his life. “I had a lot of jobs. I drove a truck. I worked as an attendant in a mental hospital and in a hardware store and I scooped ice cream in Howard Johnson’s. None of which appealed to me as something I wanted to do for the rest of my life.”
Were his parents happy with his eventual success?
“Well, yeah. They never thought I was going to make it. It’s a tough business, you know. My father never said a lot to me. But naturally since he played the fiddle he was real happy to see his kid so interested in music. But me mother now [lapsing into an Irish brogue] always wanted me to have something to fall back on.”
That’s a sort of Irish thing, isn’t it?
“Yeah. So I bought a couch.”
Very funny, Eddie. And have you ever been to Ireland yourself?
“I’ve planned to go every year since I’ve had enough money to go but because I have two young children going to school and my commitment to the road and to a lot of people who work with me, I just haven’t found the time. When I do go over there, I’m going to need at least a month because I’ve got a lot of relatives that I’ll have to see and visit.”
Has Nashville changed much in the last twenty years?
“Twenty years ago it used to be that business was done out of a bunch of condemned houses on music row, as it was called. And now there’s a lot of new buildings going up. Where there’s money to be made you’ll see progress right there.”
So what’s country music all about anyway?
“Country music talks about the everyday working man and his family and his problems. I think it started out as a song about the people of the South. The people who picked cotton and who worked farms. But today, since more people in the North and the West are into country music, it covers a wide range of subjects. Whereas rock and roll these days has such a narrow vision. Eighty-nine percent of the music is just, ‘Baby, I want to get you’ sexual and abusive-type songs. Unlike the old pop music that had stories that went beyond that alone. I think country music serves that purpose. It talks about a lot of different kinds and types of life.”
If Eddie Rabbit wasn’ta singer, he thinks that maybe he would like to be a scientist. “I’m very much interested in outer space and inner space and everything from quasars down to the subatomic quarks. I find what makes up the world all very fascinating and interesting.
Does he think there’s an after-life?
“An afterlife? Yeah. I’m sure there’s cause and effect. We have an effect here, I’m sure there had to be a cause for all this. I’m not sure what it was. I don’t know if any of us really know what caused it all. The fact that there’s over 1,000 religions in the world proves that everybody’s got a different angle on that.”
.. I read you’re interested in history. Are you interested in Irish history?
“Sure. I’m a slice off that piece of bread, aren’t I? I should know about it. I think that the British-Irish thing is like the Palestinian-Israeli thing and like 1,000 other conflicts. And most of it is [caused by] religion. So. I’m not a big one on religion.” On a more local level, Eddie feels that
“it’s a shame that today we don’t have sidewalks [chats] so that people can get to know their next-door neighbor and spit out some of the garbage that’s coming into our children’s lives through television and records or whatever.”
Does he think that American society has changed since he was a kid?
“I think something has happened. It may be just the way of evolution. But I think we’ve developed a rock-and-roll mentality in this country, and it’s a shame. You see a lot of mothers working now when they should be home with their children.”
Eddie admits that it might sound chauvinistic, but he feels strongly that “family has a sense of order to it. It always had, and I guess the man is the one that goes out and kills the animal and drags it back to the cave and the woman keeps the cave warm with the fire and keeps the children dressed. I guess it does sound a bit old-fashioned but I think that’s why our children—one of the reasons our children suffer. They’re all in day-care centers.” And in those day-care centers, Eddie feels, that the kids don’t receive “the love that they really need to grow.”
He goes on to talk about teen pregnancies, teen drug use, about rape being the number-one crime, about the presence of policemen in schools. “Doesn’t that tell you that something’s happening with the youth of this country?” he asks with concern in his voice, adding, “I can’t see how parents can be so stupid as to not see that and stop whatever they’re doing and get back to taking care of their children.”
Any opinion on Madonna’s videos?
“They’re awful. That girl ought to be taken out and shot for leading the children like a female Pied Piper of Hell. That kind of stuff has to be stamped out. If that’s old-fashioned, then so be it. This is a free society but I think that in protecting the First Amendment we’re not weighing-up the moral thinking behind it.”
“Don’t get me on this kick,” Rabbitt continues. “I get really annoyed with parents these days. I watch them go into Block Buster Video and they rent stuff like Friday the 13th for their children. They take little children to see gore and slime and sex and horror. You know, Hulk Hogan is a hero who bothers me. Six- and eight-year-old children watching wrestling matches. They’re unfair fighting. They fight without honor. They’re just disgusting to me. And to think that parents bring their children there as some form of entertainment shows that we’ve got a big problem in this country.”
Well, while we were on the subject, I thought I’d lighten things up a bit and ask Eddie if he thought that more people were going into marriage with the idea that divorce is there as an easy out.
“Sure. Fast-food world, isn’t it? Fast everything, you know. ‘Don’t like it. Let’s get a divorce, thank you very much, good bye.””
Is Nashville a nice place to bring up kids?
“Yeah. It’s a nice place. It hasn’t been hit with the heavy duty big city thing yet. But it’s got its problems too.”
How old are your kids?
“My daughter Gemalaz; it’s an English-Cornish name, is nine. And my boy’s four; he’s named after my dad, Tom.”
Was it difficult being brought up with Irish parents?
“No, because there were lots of Italians and other nationalities— the whole neighborhood was ethnic, and I think that was good because you grew up in a sort of small, little world, in a community of people of all kinds, and you learned a lot.”
Did your parents talk about Ireland at all?
“Sure. My father always wanted to go back. He was sad when he got the letter that his mother had died. He cried when he read that letter. He always wanted to go back but he couldn’t. He couldn’t afford it, he was only making $120 a week in an oil refinery as a boiler keeper. I’m going to get up and keep talking to you but….”
Was your Dad the first of the family to come over here?
“Well, he came over with his brother. He was the shortest of six brothers they were all over 6’2″. He was 5’8″. And I guess I came out of one of those genes from the other side. But,—yeah. He was great. I lost my Dad this last Christmas, on December 23.”
Eddie Rabbitt picks up his guitar somewhat sadly and says he has to rehearse a new number before the show.
Fifteen minutes later, when he comes bouncing down the runway onto the circular stage at the Westbury theater, Eddie Rabbitt, the entertainer, is in top form. He jokes and banters with the audience and for the next hour and a half he doesn’t stop for a second. Rabbitt has incredible presence on stage. And he seems to love, more than love, what he does. He works the audience relentlessly, playing their every request, even when it’s some obscure number called “Pizza Boy,” that his backing group, “The Hare Trigger Band,” never heard of.
The Eddie Rabbitt show is one of unadulterated family-style entertainment.
Many of his songs, such as “Drivin’ My Life Away.” and “I love a Rainy Night.” have the audience stomping their feet and singing along.
His road manager, Bill Rehreg, is persuaded to come on stage to play a couple of classic fiddie tunes such as “Orange Blossom Special,” and “Boil the Cabbage Down,” a spot that Eddie’s father often filled.
So many of Rabbitt’s songs are familiar, that I found myself saying “I didn’t know that was an Eddie Rabbitt song. “It was a pleasure to hear him sing songs like “Who Put My Xs In Texas,” which he wrote for Willie Nelson. The night ends with three encores, and a very happy audience files out of the Westbury Music Fair. Eddie Rabbitt is back, if he ever was away.
Editor’s Note: This article was originally published in the June 1991 issue of Irish America. ♦
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