It’s The Nineties: Number Ones from Eddie Rabbitt, Joe Diffie, Rick Trevino, Anita Cochran & Steve Wariner

By Jonny Brick

1990 Eddie Rabbitt – On Second Thought

Rabbitt, who died in 1998, is in danger of being forgotten, or for only being remembered for Loving a Rainy Night. He was a pivotal figure in the Urban Cowboy era who put together a run of 32 country top tens between 1976-88, but he topped the chart in the first year of the new decade with this song.

It is so traditionally minded that it could have come out in 1962, 1982 or 1992. Self-written, it sets an apologetic lyric to a honky-tonk shuffle: ‘you’re the only one I’ll always be in love with’ underscores how his narrator has reasoned with himself for ‘half thinkin’ and saying ‘some things that hurt you’. In a very chaste manner, the moment of crisis comes when Rabbitt’s narrator ‘saw you dancing with him’, which prompts him to storm out of wherever the pair are. Happily, he ends up ‘back into your arms where I belong’ and the fiasco is averted.

1996 Joe Diffie – Bigger Than The Beatles

Back in 1996, The Beatles were back in fashion: they’d just released their first song for 25 years, Free as a Bird, to tie in with the Anthology project. Diffie offered a namecheck and a musical homage on this naggingly catchy song, his last number one, which promoted his fifth album Life’s So Funny.

A singer who ‘struts and sings to his drum machine’ and a waitress/aspiring actress who thinks the singer ‘looks like Elvis’ work at the same hotel, and their love for one another is even bigger than the beat combo from Liverpool: indeed, in another rock’n’roll reference, it ‘takes ’em higher than the Eagles’. The middle section includes the line ‘all you need is love’ and some Beatlesque woohs, with some yeahs added during a minute-long coda that borrows heavily from the end of She Loves You.

Jon Pardi and Old Dominion added their voices to a version that was on Hardy’s 2024 Hixtape dedicated to Diffie.

1997 Rick Trevino – Running Out of Reasons to Run

Here’s a grinning man in a hat, who was born Rick Treviño and would be allowed to keep the ‘ñ’ these days. Thanks to the patronage of Columbia Nashville, the Austin-born singer actually recorded a Spanish-language country album in 1993 for which he needed lessons because he wasn’t actually fluent in the language (different times).

By 1997, as Rick Trevino, he was midway through a streak of six top ten hits; this was his sole number one, and it sounds like plenty of other songs from the mid-1990s, many of them sung by Rhett Akins. Trevino adopts a Garthian vocal delivery with which he delivers a hooky melody. The guitars are chunky and very of their time, and the song feels like MOR rock’n’roll thanks to the heavy backbeat; the pedal steel solo locates it very squarely in country, though.

The lyrics are very banal: the narrator no longer has a ‘restless feeling’, ‘no need to chase that setting sun’ thanks to his beloved’s smile and general aura. Dan + Shay or Brett Young could have reset the words to a contemporary arrangement and had a hit with a song whose second verse describes ‘sunlight shinin’ through your hair’.

Back as Rick Treviño, he has since played in Los Super Seven alongside heavyweights of Texas music such as Flaco Jiménez, Raul Malo and David Hidalgo.

1998 Anita Cochran & Steve Wariner – What If I Said

In the Wikipedia page that links people to each year of country music’s number ones hits, 1998 is denoted by the stunning fact that ‘four female acts top the chart for the first time’: Jo Dee Messina, Terri Clark, the band then known as the Dixie Chicks and the woman born Anita Cockerham.

Harking back to the days when Dolly and Loretta wrote their own hits, although contemporary act Pam Tillis did the same, Anita wrote this song herself and also produced it. It enjoyed a week at number one in between a gargantuan run for Just to See You Smile and a fortnight at the top for Round About Way, by Tim McGraw and George Strait respectively. Wariner himself had been uncredited on Longneck Bottle, Garth’s chart-topper.

Opening with some diminished chords from the piano, the song sets up a conflict between a pair of friends who share secrets and time together; it transpires that they are friends rather than lovers, but perhaps the time is right to unite and enjoy ‘a little happiness’. ‘It’s what’s meant to be,’ Wariner croons in a very Vince Gill way, but Anita underlines that it might be tough to ‘cross that line…would I lose a friend?’ The song is five minutes long, and it feels like it.

Would it surprise you, given everything you know about Music City, to learn that this was Anita’s only hit, from her only charting album?

Follow Jonny through The Nineties episode by episode.

For more country music evangelism, go to countrywol.com where you can read Monday essays, Friday reviews and Sunday Hymn Sheets. Follow Jonny’s Country Music Calendar at the Country Way of Life Facebook page (facebook.com/acountrywayoflife).

Any Given Songday and Stuck at Two, the pair of series which celebrate the centenary of the Grand Ole Opry, can be found at CountryWOL.com