Christie - San Benardino

Out On The YouTube ^

[SamAdams76]

Found this little gem while exploring music that was popular exactly 50 years ago (a hobby of mine).

A good ten years before MTV, there were still music videos being made but they were decidedly amateur in their production. Yet decent little time capsules all the same, that bring back memories of less complicated times.

Christie - San Benaradino

Christie was an English rock band that is better known in the U.S. for their Top 40 hit "Yellow River" from 1970.

They were sort of a "bubble-gummy" band.

Anyway, I think many will get a kick out of this video. It was really low-budget and while the song is about San Bernardino, CA, it is obviously being filmed someplace in England (the cars on the left side of the road and the European license plates kind of give that away).

I got a kick out of that elderly woman scurrying past at the 48 second mark. She was having none of that long-haired hippy-dippy pop music nonsense! Around the 1:30 mark, you have another group of totally befuddled bystanders. "Who are these freaks?" they had to be saying to themselves.

Anyway, they definitely weren't taking themselves too seriously. They were just having a good time making that video clip.

"San Benardino" charted at #100 on the Billboard Hot 100 on January 30, 1971 and dropped off the charts for good the very next week. So not a big hit for them here. But the song did get into the Top 10 in the UK (and a few other countries as well).

[SamAdams76]

[CodeJockey]

ha... When I was a kid we had the song/artist jokes.

One was, Yellow River by I Pee Free

I’m sure some FReepers remember others.

[CodeJockey]

Needless to say, an interesting hobby.

I remember the late sixty’s, early 1970 songs played on Armed Forces radio in Naha Okinawa from 69 thru 70.

[newfreep]

“Under the Grandstands” by Seymour Butts

[lee martell]

Fun video. There was some good guitar work going on.
That song sounds as though it was written a long time ago.
It sounds like a working class Folk Song. It may have also worked as a Country Western performance, but at a slower pace.
I could imagine someone with a booming Johnny Cash type voice doing it.

This song by Christie is one of the few recordings where I can clearly hear the lead’s British accent.
Usually, when Brit’s sing rock, you can barely tell they aren’t American.

[Migraine]

Thanks for posting this. I like the song; have for some time.
As it happens, one of my top 5 songs from the early 70s is this one by the obscure “Christie”, “Yellow River”:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lxu5zyUnVzE

I have never fully discerned his obscurity; but I can lay some of it to lax marketing, and the lack of a band of his own. The few hit records he made were done with backup music by some of the Tremeloes (a really skilled band from the late 60s):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0AbAw6cbu2s

[Migraine]

Yes, a Johnny Cash type, or maybe even Buck Owens or Dwight Yoakam, who balladeered about Bakersfield.

[SamAdams76]

I guess you could say I'm rediscovering my childhood as I started listening to music in the late 1960s.

Back in 1971, my musical tastes still centered on the Partridge Family, Osmonds and Jackson 5. But I remember a lot of the other hits as well as my mother had Top 40 radio on all the time.

50 years ago this week, the Osmonds "One Bad Apple" replaced Dawn's "Knock Three Times" in the number one slot on the Billboard Hot 100.

So I've been basically building a playlist of music from exactly 50 years ago. Just like Casey Kasem, I drop a few each week and add new ones. Except I look at the Hot 100 - not just the Top 40. I also explore album cuts that were playing on AOR radio at the time.

I'll probably maintain this hobby until I die. Fortunately, I'm likely to be dead before I get to the period where everything turned to crap. But in meantime, still a few decades of great 50-year-old music ahead of me.

[Migraine]

“How to Avoid Offending Your Girlfriend”

by I. Bitta Titoff

“Never Mess with Tigers”

by Claude Bawles

[SamAdams76]

You may be aware of this already but Jeff Christie actually wrote "Yellow River" with the intention of giving it to The Tremeloes to record.

However, The Tremeloes determined that the song was "too pop-oriented" for the direction they were headed in so Christie decided to record it for his own band and had much success with it.

Thanks for the video links by the way. The "Yellow River" video was nicely done.

[lee martell]

Here is another song from that era, an obscure song I have always liked, that no one else remembers.

“Love Can Make You Happy” by Mercy 1969.
This song was written by a high school kid during a class.
It took him about 30 minutes.

[CodeJockey]

I remember all of those like it was yesterday. I was around 10 - 11 years old. Living off base then later on base in Naha. Went to school on base. All the hits at the time were played on Armed Forces Radio.

I assume it was Armed Forces radio because why would the play them on local radio? lol Anyhow really puts me back there when I hear those songs today.

[FrdmLvr]

I was a junior in high school at that time and I don’t recall this group or that song.

[Regulator]

That was way fun.

Only remember the band name. Neither song.

Maybe only eclipsed by The Sweet for cheekiness.

[Rollee]

I remember “Yellow River” by I.P. Dailey and “Rusty Bedsprings” by I.P. Knightly. “10 Miles to the Outhouse” by Willie Makeit and Betty Wont.

[SamAdams76]

Now listening to "The Glory Of Love" by The Dells, that debuted at #92 on the Billboard Hot 100 the week of February 6, 1971.

Richard Nixon was president when this happened.