Miller
Baby I Got News for You b/w The Girl With the Castle
1965, Columbia
Herman Melville once wrote “To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme. No great and enduring volume can ever be written on the flea, though many there be that have tried it.”
Melville died in 1891, well before rock ‘n’ roll and well before we figured out that, yeah, you can write something great on the flea as long as it rocks.
Enter Miller’s “Baby, I Got News for You”, a song so dumb that I must lose a hundred brain cells every time I hear it. Each spin of this 45 is a fresh concussion and I love it. It might be my favorite rock single of all time, or at least it has an easy spot in my top 10.
It begins with a single crashing chord that sounds like Godzilla knocking over the tallest building in Tokyo. Then the biggest nerd you’ve ever heard sings about how he plans to win over a girl, while that Godzilla guitar keeps destroying the city. Our narrator boasts that he’s gonna buy her new shoes, a new dress and a mansion and also give her children by the millions. He could be a creepy stalker, he could be a legit lover; we don’t know (though he sounds more like the creepy stalker).
The overall message of the song is fairly clear, but it took me awhile to figure out what Miller means when he closes every verse with “And I don’t care if I do the right thing by you”.
For years, I thought it was something sinister (“in order to get you these things, I may have to do bad things to afford them”), but now that I sit down to write about it I think that the line is an “If loving you is wrong, I don’t want to be right” statement.
People are trying to keep Miller and his lady apart. They’re telling him that he’s wrong. “They don’t understand us, they just reprimand us”. And you could read ANYTHING into that. Maybe the “old folks” are against them because of class differences or racial differences or because they’re too young to be in love. Or, again, maybe Miller is a creepy stalker.
What would Herman Melville think about it?
What I’m trying to say is that this is a good record that stands the test of time. Some people call it the first English freakbeat record, but I have no idea if that’s true.
B-side “The Girl With the Castle” is a mellow instrumental that fills the space and makes damn sure that no one will ever possibly confuse it with the flip. All the news is on the A-side, but I like to think that title implies a happy ending. Miller’s baby got her mansion.
My copy of this 45 is a BOOTLEG, by the way. I have no idea who put it out, but, according to Discogs, some cool person in 2005 decided that a faithful 7″ reproduction of the hard-to-find OG English pressing (that sells for hundreds of dollars on Ye Olde Ebay) needed to be out there in the world. Also, in the true spirit of a collector, they took care to distinguish their repress from the original by giving it the large-sized American center hole instead of the smaller center hole on European 45s.
I salute them. They helped me get my flithy little hands on one of the Things I Will Keep.