Lou Christie, “Lightnin’ Strikes” and “Rhapsody in the Rain” Singer, Dies at 82

Lou Christie, the singer-songwriter who reached No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1966 with the lush “Lightnin’ Strikes” and had another top 20 hit that year with the (for its time) sexually explicit “Rhapsody in the Rain,” died Wednesday. He was 82.

Christie died at his home in his native Pittsburgh after a short illness, his wife, Francesca, told The Hollywood Reporter.

With his signature falsetto, Christie broke out with two songs in 1963 that he penned with longtime collaborator Twyla Herbert — “The Gypsy Cried” and “Two Faces Have I” — and he made it into the top 10 again with “I’m Gonna Make You Mine” in 1969.

“Lightnin’ Strikes,” arranged, conducted and produced by Charles Calello and featuring backing vocals from Bernadette Carroll, Peggy Santiglia and Denise Ferri of The Delicates, was released on MGM Records in December 1965 and made it to No. 1 two months later on Christie’s 23rd birthday.

In a 2016 examination of the tune — it’s sung from the perspective of a guy who’s not faithful — the website Rebeat noted that “When Christie spots ‘lips begging to be kissed,’ his voice mutates into a shrill keen, completely unrecognizable from the charmer he posed as just seconds earlier. The switch from his teen idol croon to the manic, eerie falsetto signifies that he has transformed into some unknown thing incapable of being controlled.”

Lugee Alfredo Giovanni Sacco was born on Feb. 19, 1943, in Glenwillard, Pennsylvania, near Pittsburgh. As a 15-year-old ninth-grader at Moon Area High School, he became friends with Herbert — a classically trained musician who was nearly 22 years older — and they would write hundreds of songs together in the ensuing decades.

“I never worked with anyone else who was that talented, that original, that exciting,” he told Goldmine magazine in 2005. “She was just bizarre, and I was twice as bizarre as her.”

After graduating from high school in 1961, he moved to New York, worked as a session vocalist and was given his stage name by Pittsburgh music exec Nick Cenci, who produced “The Gypsy Cried.” The song made it to No. 24 on the Hot 100 in March 1963, and “Two Faces Have I” peaked at No. 6 three months later.

Christie’s success got him a coveted place on one of Dick Clark’s Caravan of Stars tours alongside Diana Ross and others — he did 32 one-nighters in a row, often sleeping on the bus — but then spent two years in the U.S. Army.

When he and Herbert presented MGM Records with “Lightnin’ Strikes,” label head Lenny Shear “threw it in the wastebasket and said it was a piece of crap!” he recalled. “So we put up our own money to get it played around the country, and it started taking off once it got played.”

Christie followed in spring 1966 with “Rhapsody in the Rain,” about a teenager having sex in the backseat of a car during a rainstorm with the windshield wipers going. That one jumped to No. 16 on the Hot 100, even though many radio stations banned it because of the line “our love went much too far.” (A “cleaner” version would follow.)

With backing vocals by Lesley Gore and others, Christie scored again at No. 10 in October 1969 with “I’m Gonna Make You Mine,” and he had yet another hit in 1974 with a version of “Beyond the Blue Horizon” after going country.

Christie, whose résumé also included “Outside the Gates of Heaven,” “Are You Getting Any Sunshine?,” “Big Time” and “She Sold Me Magic,” recorded his last album in 2004 and more recently toured with Frankie Avalon and Fabian as a member of Dick Fox’s Golden Boys.

In addition to his wife, a onetime British beauty queen whom he married in 1971, survivors include their daughter, Bianca. Their son, Christopher, died in 2014 at age 46 in a motorcycle crash.