Why Don't We Do It In The Road?

Song facts

From Wikipedia:

“Why Don’t We Do It in the Road?” is a song by the English rock band the Beatles, released on their 1968 double album The Beatles (also known as “the White Album”). Short and simple, it was written and sung by Paul McCartney, but credited to Lennon–McCartney. At 1:42, “Why Don’t We Do It in the Road?” comprises 34 bars of a twelve-bar blues idiom. It begins with three different percussion elements (a hand banging on the back of an acoustic guitar, handclaps, and drums) and features McCartney’s increasingly raucous vocal repeating a simple lyric with only two different lines.

Background

McCartney wrote the song after seeing two monkeys copulating in the street while on retreat in Rishikesh, India, with the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. He marvelled in the simplicity of this natural scenario when compared to the emotional turmoil of human relationships. He later said:

A male [monkey] just hopped on the back of this female and gave her one, as they say in the vernacular. Within two or three seconds he hopped off again and looked around as if to say “It wasn’t me!” and she looked around as if there’d been some mild disturbance … And I thought … that’s how simple the act of procreation is … We have horrendous problems with it, and yet animals don’t.

Recording

On 9 October 1968, while John Lennon and George Harrison were working on two other songs for the album, McCartney recorded five takes of the song in Studio One at EMI Studios. Unlike its heavy blues result, the song began as an acoustic guitar number with McCartney alternating by verse between gentle and strident vocal styles. On this first night, McCartney played all the instruments himself. This version of the song can be found on the Beatles’ Anthology 3.

On 10 October, McCartney and Ringo Starr finished the song, Starr adding drums and handclaps, McCartney adding more vocals, bass guitar, and lead guitar. Lennon and Harrison were again occupied, supervising string overdubs for “Piggies” and “Glass Onion“.

Lennon’s reaction

Upon learning about the recording, Lennon was unhappy that McCartney recorded the song without him. In his 1980 interview with Playboy, he was asked about it:

Playboy: “Why Don’t We Do It in the Road?”
Lennon: That’s Paul. He even recorded it by himself in another room. That’s how it was getting in those days. We came in and he’d made the whole record. Him drumming [sic]. Him playing the piano. Him singing. But he couldn’t—he couldn’t—maybe he couldn’t make the break from the Beatles. I don’t know what it was, you know. I enjoyed the track. Still, I can’t speak for George, but I was always hurt when Paul would knock something off without involving us. But that’s just the way it was then.
Playboy: You never just knocked off a track by yourself?
Lennon: No.

“Julia” was recorded four days after the first session for “Why Don’t We Do It in the Road?,” and is a solo performance by Lennon (double-tracked lead vocals and acoustic guitar), though McCartney was present for the recording, as he can be heard talking to Lennon from the control room after a take on the Beatles’ Anthology 3.

In a 1981 conversation with Hunter Davies, who had written a biography of the Beatles in 1968, McCartney responded to a Yoko Ono interview where she said McCartney had hurt Lennon more than anyone else, by saying, “No one ever goes on about the times John hurt me … Could I have hurt him more than the person who ran down his mother in his car?” He then brought up Lennon’s comments about “Why Don’t We Do It in the Road?”: “There’s only one incident I can think of that John has mentioned publicly. It was when I went off with Ringo and did ‘Why Don’t We Do It in the Road’. It wasn’t a deliberate thing. John and George were tied up finishing something and me and Ringo were free, just hanging around, so I said to Ringo, ‘Let’s go and do this.'”

McCartney also expressed some lingering resentment about a similar incident with “Revolution 9“, recorded in June 1968, a few months before “Why Don’t We Do It in the Road?”: “Anyway, he did the same with ‘Revolution 9’. He went off and made that without me. No one ever says that. John is the nice guy and I’m the bastard. It gets repeated all the time.” […]

We’ve always been a rock group, The Beatles. It’s just that we’re not completely rock ‘n’ roll. That’s why we do ‘Ob-La-Di’ one minute and this the next. When we played in Hamburg, we didn’t just play rock ‘n’ roll all evening, because we had these fat old businessmen coming in – and thin old businessmen as well – and saying play us a mambo or a rumba. So we had to get into this kind of stuff. We just haven’t got one bag, you know, in The Beatles. On one hand you’ll get ‘I Will’, which is pretty smoochy stuff, and then you’ll get ‘Why Don’t We Do It In The Road’. It’s me feeling both of them, the same fellow, and I write both of them.

Paul McCartney – about “Why Don’t We Do It In The Road?”, from New Musical Express, November 30, 1968

From The Usenet Guide to Beatles Recording Variations:

[a] mono 16 Oct 1968.
UK: Apple PMC 7067 white album 1968.

[b] stereo 16 Oct 1968.
UK: Apple PCS 7067 white album 1968.
US: Apple SWBO 101 white album 1968.
CD: EMI CDP 7 46443 2 white album 1987.

Mono [a] lacks handclaps in the intro.

Paul McCartney first played the song live at Desert Trip in 2016, joined on stage by Neil Young.

Last updated on September 26, 2021

Lyrics

Variations