TOMMY ROE – "Dizzy"

Hey, I liked this! Not 9 or 10 liked but 7 liked!

In the 1980s when the song resurfaced in an inferior version sung by somebody else (I forget who but somebody will remind me) I astonished the children of friends by being able to sing it word-for-word (but not necessarily note-for-note – the bird I sing like is a laryngitic raven). It never occurred to them that it had an earlier incarnation!

My dad is a huge fan of Tommy Roe. I don’t really like “Sweet Pea” but it’s by far the pinnacle of this guy’s career, as all of his other ones hurt oh so bad. His voice is so thin, and the key changes so forced.

Slighty better than the Archies, I think–that doesn’t say much for it. It’s just one aspect of the general smarminess that overtook US pop at the end of the 60s–when the more interesting music was on LPs and got played on FM radio, where you’d never hear something like this. I suspect there was a lot more of this perpetrated in the US than in the UK, even though you got your share of it.

As to this being “the pinnacle of this guy’s career,” Tommy Roe actually made a credible record, “Sheila,” back around 1963. (It was either a Buddy Holly cover or a Holly knockoff.) Then he vanished until he plunged head-first into the bubblegum vat with “Sweet Pea.” I’d say that “Sheila” was the best thing he ever did, his artistic–if not commercial–pinnacle of his career. At least it proved that he didn’t really have to resort to that nasal whine that permeates his later stuff.

Roe had three big UK hits in the pre-Beatles ’60s – Sheila, The Folk Singer and Everybody. As with the Sarstedt brothers, he seems to have bided his time and waited for the Beatles to come and go before coming back (I think the Beatles even supported him on one British tour).

Personally I would have greatly preferred Lou Christie’s “I’m Gonna Make You Mine” which is about as great as this brand of pop gets (#2 in the UK that autumn).

I didn’t connect Tommy Roe with “Everybody.” That was actually a pretty good record, probably better than “Sheila.”

A lot of the US pop performers who came back at the end of the 60s had been around for quite a spell, many of them being displaced from their first 7.5 minutes of fame by the British Invasion. So they came back for their remaining 7.5 in the bubblegum fad (a form of artistic death in and of itself) just as the Beatles came to the end of their road, only to vanish once again (thankfully, in most cases) when they’d hit the fifteen minutes Andy Warhol said we would all get. (Nowadays, thanks to reality television, it’s probably down to fifteen seconds of fame.)

It’s rather a sorry matter that bubblegum became America’s way of winning back the charts–but then the Brits created a better brand of bubblegum. More on this when we come to Edison Lighthouse, ere long.

lol

I don’t think of this as bubblegum, which tended to be more salacious and hysterical. What this feels like is 1966-era pop displaced into 1969 and given an inexplicably mild performance. In the vid he’s dressing like Glen Campbell. (My explanation for the inexplicable is that he’s not going for the teenybopper audience but for the adults who never got comfortable with the ’60s but who still wanted a little rock ‘n’ roll in their pop.)

I know not this Vic Reeves of which you speak, but I know the dark Bonaparte bogeyman babes of Boney M, who are typically half-detached and half-lunatic as they cover this on 1,000 Lightyears.

I was Roe’s first bass player here in Atlanta when he was working frat parties and joints. Let me assure you that he has plenty of “stones” and was singing Hank Ballard stuff before it was “trendy” to do so.
He knew one of the oldest rules of show business though..”Find out what the public wants and then give it to them”. And he did just that.
He did a helluva song called “The Room” (with the Tams as backup vocals). But, alas, it was never pushed or released.
That is also me playing harmonica on “The Foreman”.
Had lunch with him a few months ago when he was here and we enjoyed going over the old “gig stories”.
Just a comment from an old rocker here.

I’m just impressed that in basically one year Tom has managed to go from a cover of Tommy James and The Shondells to a cover of Tommy Roe, in covering 66 #1s.

Could we get Tiffany and the Wonderstuff together to cover something else – preferably by another Tommy?

I remember selecting this on a jukebox in 1969 on my first holiday in Europe. My mum and dad took our family to Denmark to see my mum’s pen-friend and I played this while staying in a motel outside of Copenhagen. It does sound tailor made for kids – with a simple tune, hook and sound – and with teenagers and twenty somethings moving on to albums we were an emerging audience for singles.

I think this is a fun single. I would award a 7/10.