Lou Christie

Lou Christie's piercing, high-register falsetto stood out sharply amid the pop landscape of its day, yet he also ranked among the earliest rock-era solo acts to write his own songs and deliver several of the decade's most enduring smashes.

Lugee Alfredo Giovanni Sacco came into the world in Glenwillard, Pennsylvania, on February 19, 1943. As a teenager he earned a scholarship to Moon Township High School, where he trained in music and vocal method before singing with a local outfit known as the Classics. From 1959 through 1962 he issued a string of singles on tiny Pittsburgh imprints while backed by area groups, gradually adopting the performing name Lou Christie. He soon crossed paths with Twyla Herbert, a classically schooled pianist and self-described mystic two decades his senior; the pair began writing together and, in 1962, completed "The Gypsy Cried," which Christie captured on a two-track recorder in his garage. The track quickly caught fire locally, prompting Roulette to pick it up for wider distribution and sending it to number 24 on the national pop chart in 1963.

After settling in New York and taking on background vocal sessions, Christie composed and cut the follow-up "Two Faces Have I," which climbed into the Top Ten before he entered the Army for a two-year hitch. When he resumed his career in 1966 he struck immediately with his biggest success, the sweeping chart-topper "Lightnin' Strikes." His next hit, 1966's "Rhapsody in the Rain," drew attention for its unusually frank sexual content. Short stints at Colpix and Columbia preceded a move to Buddah, where he registered one final Top Ten entry in 1969 with "I'm Gonna Make You Mine."

During the early 1970s Christie divided his time between New York and London, issuing the concept album Paint America Love in 1971 and a self-titled country record three years later. By the 1980s he was performing on oldies package tours, then returned to the studio in 1997 with Pledging My Love, his first collection of new songs in more than twenty-five years. On October 21, 2003, he took the stage at New York's Bottom Line for what proved to be one of the venue's final concerts; selections from that evening later appeared on the 2004 Varèse Sarabande release Greatest Hits Live at the Bottom Line.