Christie – San Bernadino

The Misspelled City They’d Never Even Visited

Released in October 1970 as the follow-up to their chart-topping debut “Yellow River,” “San Bernadino” reached number seven on the UK Singles Chart and hit number one in Germany and Switzerland. The song peaked at number 100 in the United States, barely scraping the Hot 100 on January 30, 1971. For an English soft rock trio from Leeds and Bromley who had never set foot in California, the song’s eventual fate would prove stranger than any chart position could suggest.

The single sold strongly across Europe, reaching the top ten in Austria, Belgium, and the Netherlands. In France, singer Joe Dassin recorded a French-language version titled “L’Amérique” that became a substantial hit in its own right. The debut album Christie stayed on the US Billboard 200 for ten weeks, while Long John Baldry had initially wanted to record “San Bernadino” himself before the band kept it. At their commercial peak, Christie were selling 80,000 to 90,000 records per day.

Jeff Christie wrote the song within three or four months of completing “Yellow River,” triggered by a headline in the Daily Express about riots at a San Bernardino prison. Something about those words sparked something. He went upstairs, grabbed his guitar, and the song emerged using a similar chord sequence to his previous hit, mixing majors with minors in that distinctive melancholic-but-hopeful way. The title was misspelled from the start. Initial pressings dropped the second ‘r’ from Bernardino, and by the time anyone noticed, recalling the singles was too expensive. The typo stuck permanently.

Legendary session drummer Clem Cattini played on the track at the original sessions, though Jeff Christie had to overdub his drums because they weren’t loud enough in the mix. Guitarist Vic Elmes and drummer Mike Blakley, brother of Tremeloes member Alan Blakley, rounded out the trio. The production captured that warm, country-tinged soft rock sound that made Christie feel simultaneously British and Californian, despite none of them having crossed the Atlantic. CBS ran advertisements claiming Christie’s music ran deeper than “Yellow River,” but audiences wanted more of the same sunny escapism.

The song appeared on their self-titled debut album, also known as Yellow River in some territories. The album mixed Christie originals with that distinctive early 1970s country-rock-pop hybrid. Follow-up single “Man of Many Faces” earned rave reviews in Melody Maker and Sounds but died commercially in Britain while charting in Germany. “Iron Horse” came close to breaking through, reaching the low forties before mysteriously dropping out while Johnny Nash’s “I Can See Clearly Now” climbed past them despite lower sales figures. Christie never cracked the formula again.

The song has been covered extensively, with versions recorded in German by Roberto Blanco, in Spanish by Los Mismos, and in Estonian by Jaak Joala as “Suvemälestus” (Summer Memory). Australian band Harry Young and Sabbath released their version in 1970. In December 2005, the San Bernardino City Council voted to adopt the misspelled song as their official city anthem, with 85 percent of readers supporting the decision in a San Bernardino Sun poll. A city councillor led the campaign, embracing the tune about a wanderer who searches the world but finds peace only when returning home to San Bernardino.

There’s something perfectly absurd about it all. A Leeds songwriter reads about prison riots in California and writes a nostalgic homecoming ballad for a place he’s never seen. The title gets misspelled and nobody fixes it. The song flops in America but becomes beloved across Europe. Then 35 years later, the actual city votes to make it their official anthem anyway, typo and all. Jeff Christie still tours, still sings about a California dream he imagined from a newspaper headline in England. Sometimes the places we’ve never been feel more like home than anywhere we’ve actually lived.