Here's a Golden Oldie — Lou Christie with his hit, "Lighting Strikes," as performed on some "oldies" show, maybe even in this century. The original came out in 1965 and I liked it even though I couldn't make out half the lyrics. I just found them online and did a lot of "Oh, so that's what that line was!"
I don't recall seeing Mr. Christie perform it or anything else back then and I think I assumed he was black. He doesn't sound that way in this video but he sounded kinda/sorta like that in the original record which, by the way, I didn't buy back then.
We hear a lot about people bootlegging music in The Era of the Internet. I did it — legally, I'm prepared to argue — back in the sixties and so did a lot of my friends, thanks to these big reel-to-reel tape recorders we all had.
Since I was spending all my money on comic books, I didn't have much to spend on records so I did the following: I would tape hours and hours off of some local radio station that played the hits of the day — usually KHJ, sometimes KRLA. When they played a record I liked, I cut it from the tape and splice it onto a reel I maintained of my favorite tunes. That reel got to be about two hours long and I played it over and over and over and over…
It was great because it was only songs I liked. I had to put up with little snippets of disc jockeys talking over the beginnings and/or ends of some songs but that seemed like a small price to pay for music with no price to pay. One lingering aspect of that reel is that to this day, whenever I hear a song that was on that reel — "Lighting Strikes" by Lou Christie, say — I expect it to be followed by the song that followed it on my reel…in this case, "I Know a Place" by Petula Clark.
I stopped playing the "hits" reel in the seventies because I could afford records. I bought most of the same songs, in some cases on collections of hits from the sixties. Now, of course, I have them on MP3. And I also stopped playing the tape because my reel-to-reel machine died and I didn't really have a reason to replace it. Around 1985, I came across my old reel-to-reel tapes and had a few rarities on them transferred to CDs. The "hits" reel didn't make the conversion though because too many of the splices in it had come undone.
One time a few years back, I was in a casino in Vegas where they played a lot of songs from that time period and I heard "Lightning Strikes" and for a second thought, "After this comes 'I Know a Place.'" And in that one instance, it did. Anyway, here's Lou Christie singing "Lightnin' Strikes."
And I just decided, "Hey, why not?"