In the early 90s, I used BBC Radio 2 as a Horlicks substitute. One winter night I was just nodding off to sleep when, coming out of the midnight news bulletin, I heard something that sounded like a clanging firebell with an insistent one-note melody over the top. “MAAAAYBE!” screamed the radio. “Maybemaybemaybe I love you.” What the hell was it? Two minutes without pause, pure energy, a relentless falsetto, indecipherable lyrics. “Apparently that was called She Sold Me Magic,” frowned the DJ over the fade, “and it came from Lou Christie.”
She Sold Me Magic had been a top 30 hit in early 1970. He had been shocking listeners awake for almost a decade by then, his greatest success having been in 1966 when Lightnin’ Strikes, a Beach Boys/Motown amalgam, had been a US No 1. In the late 50s, when he was 15, Lou Christie had been to an audition in the crypt of his local church where he met Twyla Herbert, a red-haired Gypsy more than twice his age. He later told Goldmine magazine: “She was wearing an emerald green dress, had on all this gold, and was built like Marilyn Monroe.” Herbert was known as a local eccentric, but would become Christie’s writing partner for the next two decades.
Their hits came in bursts: the early, Four Seasons-in-a-shed stylings of The Gypsy Cried and Two Faces Have I (a US top 10 hit in 1963); the Lightnin’ Strikes era when, at one point in 1966, he had five records on the US charts; a spell on Buddah Records that produced his biggest UK hit, the bubblegum I’m Gonna Make You Mine in 1969; and his left-turn to country with Beyond the Blue Horizon in 1974, a single that ended up on the Rain Man soundtrack and became a holiday advert staple. It was almost as if the public could only take Christie’s intensity in short, concentrated bursts. Christie was one of the few acts in the 60s who genuinely confused people – Was he serious? Was he gay? Why was he urging us to go Back to the Days of the Romans? – without it being any kind of put-on. He cut one of the finest records Phil Spector sidekick Jack Nitzsche ever produced, a teen psychodrama called If My Car Could Only Talk, which was such an involved and enigmatic tale that MGM felt the need to print a picture sleeve with the lyrics on. He was also responsible for one of the strangest of all the 60s girl-group 45s when the Tammys cut his raucous, thoroughly untamed, ethnologically inaccurate Egyptian Shumba.
Yet another side of Christie emerged in 1971 when he cut his masterpiece, Paint America Love, a Polish/Italian/American take on What’s Going On. Orchestrated state-of-the-nation pieces (Look Out the Window, the extraordinary Wood Child) compete with majestic instrumentals (Campus Rest) and childhood reminiscences (Chuckie Wagon, the Sesame Street-soundtracking Paper Song) in a gently lysergic whole. Online reviews compare it to Richard Ford and John Steinbeck: fans of Jimmy Webb are urged to seek it out. Christie’s personal life has been equally peripatetic. He lived in his manager’s Frank Lloyd Wright-designed pad off Sunset Strip in 1966, where I’m guessing he picked up some lyrical inspiration. At the turn of the 70s, he moved to Hampstead, where he was neighbours with Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, and married Francesca Winfield, a Miss United Kingdom. Disillusioned by Paint America Love’s failure, he quit the music business in the mid-70s and moved back to the US, where he took work as an offshore oil rigger, then a carnival roadie, and then a truck driver. I like to picture him singing Beyond the Blue Horizon to himself as he drove from Phoenix to Albequerque. Today, he still plays a couple of hundred shows a year and posts new songs on his website. His fans include actress/director Asia Argento, who regularly tweets links to Christie obscurities, and he is blessed with a talented super-fan called Harry Young who has written a raft of effusive and entertaining sleevenotes for Christie’s reissues over the years. I really can’t improve on Young’s description of the Lou Christie experience as “berserk with energy”.