Lou Christie: "Lightnin' Strikes"

February 21, 1966 (1 week)

"The hardest part was that we had too many ideas. If we wanted to write a song, it would never stop".

— Lou Christie

What must have been going through the mind of a fifteen-year-old Lugee Sacco when he first laid eyes on Twyla Herbert? Was it "finally, someone who understands me!"? Or "gosh, who is this red-headed dame who insisted on telling me my fortune before hearing me play"? Or "I can't wait to start collaborating with her!"? Or "I am scared for my life!"? Or was it all a little of all of them?

Sorry, I'm projecting here. Of course I have no way of knowing how the future Lou Christie reacted to first meeting his lifelong collaborator, I can only imagine how I would have taken it all in. To encounter this oddball bohemian woman in her thirties would have been interesting and then to discover that she was my musical kindred spirit would have made it thrilling but I would have come away also somewhat freaked out. That said, that's what separates the successful from people like me: they dive right into the pool while I pass on going for a swim entirely because I happen to see a band-aid on the floor in the shower.

Chris Pine Lou Christie was born just six days before George Harrison, the youngest member of The Beatles. Yet, he seemed to be in the unenviable position of somehow still representing an older generation of pop star while the Fab Four had already cleared the decks of all those Frankie Avalon, Fabian and Paul Anka sorts. Bob Dylan may have sneered at The Beatles themselves for giving in to the teenybopper crowd with songs like "Yesterday" and "Michelle" (more on that one next time) but it was nothing like the matinee idol pop royalty that Christie seemed to come out of.

Like Anka, Christie was a songwriter in his own right. A high school music teacher tried to sway him in the direction of the classics but meeting Twyla Herbert gave him the chance to have an older mentor who didn't simply encourage his pop aspirations but conspired along with him to bring them to reality. As The Beatles would discover in the classically-trained George Martin a few years later, the right kind of creative partner brought out the best in Christie by adapting her skillset to him rather than the other way around.

I really like the story of Christie and Herbert but I'm cooler towards what they created together. To be sure, "Lightnin' Strikes" is good but I must admit I find myself admiring it while not necessarily enjoying all of it. The song opens like a grandiose Motown number. The pace speeds up and slows down at will with the session crew at New York's Olmstead Studios earning every penny of their fee. Christie's smooth delivery shifts dramatically into an astounding falsetto in the chorus, a sound I initially assumed to be that of the backing vocalists. Frankie Valli couldn't have done better.

The quotation above does give away the one real criticism I have for "Lightnin' Strikes", there's just too much going on. Christie and Herbert couldn't stop, couldn't quit piling details upon details. While unquestionably a gas to have on, it's also exhausting after a while, an unstoppable locomotive of sound. It gets to be too much yet at the same time it's also what makes it stand out. Had Christie and Herbert written something much more conventional, it likely wouldn't have stood a chance at even a modest spot in the charts, much less the number one spot on both the RPM chart and Billboard's Hot 100. A fantastic song that just has to hammer the point home about how freakin' unreal it is at every opportunity — and that's both it's chief selling point and the one thing stops me from really raving about it.

As a postscript, Herbert passed away in 2009 at the age of eighty-seven while Christie lived on until just this past June. The two forged a partnership that seems unlikely to be replicated nowadays which is both a shame and, frankly, inevitable: the right people aren't always the ones we expect. In fact, we're better off if our expectations go out the window.

Score: 7