Paul – lead
vocals, guitars, piano, bass, drums
Ringo – drums
‘Why Don’t We Do It In The Road’ (the LP sleeve erroneously adds a question mark to the title) has an affinity with the minimalism of John’s later compositions – most notably ‘I Want You (She’s So Heavy)’. As with the Carnival Of Light recording and ‘Revolution 9’, Paul’s song predates John’s and it is now Paul who is coming up with new ideas and concepts. In this case however, Paul acknowledged that it was inspired by John’s development. “It was a very John, the idea of it, not me. I wrote it as a ricochet off John.” Nevertheless, it was something John had not specifically tried.
Probably because of this, John liked the song, and sometimes quoted it as his favourite McCartney song. In fact he was caught on tape singing a version of it during the Get Back sessions – “Why don’t you put it on the toast”. But he did mention the song as a specific example of how he was hurt by Paul’s off-hand treatment of him during the White Album recording sessions. He told Playboy, “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.”
Paul’s response to this is in the reprint of Hunter Davies’s The Beatles. Davies reports how Paul rang him in 1981 and wanted to get a lot of grievances off his chest about the press treatment of him as the villain of the group, with John, after his murder, as the newly canonised Beatle. Paul points out that he and Ringo were hanging around, and so he suggested they go and record something, but that it was not a deliberate policy to exclude John or George.
As for the contrast with the following track on the album, Paul said at the time, “It’s me feeling both of them, the same feller, and I wrote both. I can’t explain it, but there we are.”
Paul recorded five takes of the track featuring guitar, piano and drums (introduced by thumps on the back of his guitar), with a variety of vocal styles. He recorded these in the cavernous Studio One, with Ken Townsend acting as engineer while George Martin was busy in Studio Two. The version of the song used for the master was take 5, but Anthology 3 gives an insight into the song’s development by giving an airing to take 4. This features just Paul and his acoustic guitar, but alternating gentle, melodic verses with the familiar strident ones. He then breaks off and asks Townsend, “What do you think of all that? Do you think I could do it better?” We can guess at the response, judging from the style of the released track.
The following day, in Studio Three, Ringo overdubbed an additional drum track to the basic recording of Paul on his own, with more vocals, handclaps (which, for some reason, do not appear on the mono version), bass and an electric guitar. Although not the last track to be recorded for The Beatles (‘Julia’ followed three days later), it was the last to be mixed. At 5 pm on 16 October, John, Paul and George Martin began work on assembling the album. Apart from mixing ‘Why Don’t We Do It In The Road’ for mono and stereo, this involved determining the album’s running order and producing a series of crossfades and edits.
They had a harder task determining the running order than usual, simply because they had twice as many songs as usual to juggle. Of the thirty-two songs recorded over the preceding twenty weeks, thirty made it to the final count – ‘Not Guilty’ was not in the running, having not been remixed, and ‘What’s The New Mary Jane’ was dropped during this session. The final order included banding the acoustic-style songs together on side two, including those with what might loosely be described as an “animal” theme, except ‘Everybody’s Got Something To Hide Except Me And My Monkey’ which joined the hard rock numbers on side three. George’s four tracks were scattered one on each side.
The three also decided to link the tracks à la Sgt Pepper, so that one track began immediately where the previous one left off. Most notably, a crossfade ensured ‘Dear Prudence’ ushered itself in as ‘Back In The U.S.S.R.’ faded out, and ‘The Continuing Story Of Bungalow Bill’ was edited straight into ‘While My Guitar Gently Weeps’. For good measure, George Martin also undertook remixes of ‘It’s All Too Much’ for the up-coming Yellow Submarine soundtrack album. Little wonder the session ended up lasting twenty-four hours. Such a marathon session was a first for the Beatles – and was not to be repeated. The mono discs were cut over the following two days, and the stereo discs two days after that.
‘Why Don’t We Do It In The Road’ itself is a gritty twelve-bar blues number which is all spit and no polish. The vocals take a ride across the range of improvisation, and the song, gloriously and unashamedly, goes nowhere. It was partly inspired by a brief episode witnessed by Paul while in India.
“I was up on the flat roof meditating and I’d seen a troupe of monkeys walking along in the jungle and the male just hopped on to the back of this female and gave her one … I thought, bloody hell, that puts it all into a cocked hat, that’s how simple the act of procreation is, this bloody monkey just hopping on and hopping off. There is an urge, they do it, and it’s done with. And it’s that simple.”
The spontaneity of the song is nicely offset by Paul’s “Mmm” after the third line, which sounds as if he has planned the timing of the whole thing with meticulous care and is cueing his voice. The track, which would have been a prime candidate for excision had George Martin got his way and The Beatles been a single album, stands as a perfect B-side, pre-empting ‘You Know My Name’ as Beatles whimsy.