‘Dizzy Miss Lizzy’: The iconic Beatles cover that derails ‘Help!’
By the mid-1960s, the entire world was in the throes of Beatlemania. The Liverpudlian lads had won over their home country, broken America, and were well on their way to becoming the biggest band in music history. With the masses already on-side, The Beatles would soon venture off into more experimental sonic territory, pulling in elements of psychedelia and pioneering sampling. But, before then, they would unveil Help!
Sharing its name with the iconic second single from the record, Help! marked the Beatles’ fifth full-length offering and would be one of their final, more straightforward, pop-rock efforts. Though it wasn’t quite as out-there as some of their later work, it was another stellar collection of songs that would cement the rise of Beatlemania, from the desperate first track to soft love songs like ‘I’ve Just Seen a Face’.
Most of the songs, as always, were penned by the main songwriting partnership between Paul McCartney and John Lennon, but the album did make space to show off George Harrison’s talents with a pen, too. He contributed two songs to Help!, the quaint ‘I Need You’ and the confident ‘You Like Me Too Much’. The record also demonstrated the Beatles’ increasing understanding of curating a tracklist from start to finish.
Kicking things off with the title track, a sonic SOS from newfound fame, Help! falls into a natural momentum. ‘The Night Before’ retains some of that rock and roll energy but softens it ahead of the softer love songs still to come. Tracks like ‘Another Girl’ and ‘I Need You’ begin to push into this section of the album while maintaining some of that anxious energy.
The love songs become more and more bare and beautiful, with ‘It’s Only Love’ and ‘I’ve Just Seen A Face’ charting feelings of early love, while a cover of ‘Act Naturally’ provides a more sombre offering and returns to the idea of stardom. The record concludes perfectly with a song that is potentially McCartney’s magnum opus, ‘Yesterday’, a melancholic meditation on regret.
It was the perfect conclusion to the album, bringing it to a soft end at odds with the chaotic beginning. Only it wasn’t the conclusion to the album. After the final hums and strings of ‘Yesterday’ ring out, the Beatles bookend the album with a cover of ‘Dizzy Miss Lizzy’ by Larry Williams, returning to their rock and roll roots.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s not a band cover. In fact, it’s an excellent rendition of the song and a reminder that the Beatles’ penchant and talent for rocking is just as prominent as their tendency towards love songs. With screeching vocals and twangy guitars, the cover shows off a more exciting side to the band, but it completely shifts the tone of Help! in its final moments.
An almost perfectly sequenced tracklist, moving from fears of fame to discussions of regret and melancholy, is offset by a track about “just a-rocking and a-rolling” with dizzy Miss Lizzy. Although it’s a perfectly fine cover, an excellent one, in fact, it just isn’t quite in alignment with the running order and general feeling of Help!
Perhaps this was the goal: to provide a moment of relief, rock and roll, after a series of wonderings about love and regret. But next time you listen to Help!, maybe hit pause after that final McCartney offering, allow yourself to sit with it, and marvel at the track and all that came before it.
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