7. Dizzy (Tommy Roe)
This was a rare Pop song with strings. The Beatles used
strings on their 1965 hit "Yesterday," but it wasn't until the Disco
era when strings became common in Pop.
Roe wrote this with Freddy Weller. Weller went on to become
a Country singer after a spell as one of Paul Revere's Raiders.
In 1962, Roe had his first, and only other US #1 hit with "Shelia," which he wrote when he was 14. He had anther hit in 1970 with "Jam Up Jelly Tight," then started recording Country songs.
In 1991 British comedian Vic Reeves teamed up with the band
The Wonder Stuff to record a cover version of this. In Britain it topped the
charts for two weeks, one more week than Tommy Roe's original version.
Tommy Roe: "Freddy Weller and I had known each other in
Atlanta. I was on a TV show with Paul Revere & The Raiders. They had lost
their guitarist and I suggested Freddy as a replacement. He moved to California
to be with them, and we started writing together. I showed him 'Dizzy.' I had
written the chorus but couldn't complete it. Freddy loved it and said, 'Let's
finish it,' and we did that on a tour bus late at night. Jimmy Haskell wrote
the string arrangement and we had Hal Blaine on drums, Joe Osborne on bass, Ben
Benay on guitar and Larry Knechtel on keyboards. You can't get better than
that. It sold 6 million copies, 4 million of them in the States, and it was my
biggest hit of all."