The Beatles mostly recorded their music with all four members contributing. However, sometimes a member wouldn’t be present, or someone would take on a song solo. Paul McCartney recorded one song for 1968’s The White Album without John Lennon and George Harrison, and Lennon wasn’t too pleased that he recorded without them.
John Lennon was ‘hurt’ that Paul McCartney recorded ‘Why Don’t We Do It in the Road?’ without him
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“Why Don’t We Do It in the Road?” debuted in 1968’s The White Album and was written and performed by Paul McCartney. At 1:42, it’s one of The Beatles’ shortest and simplest songs with very few changes in its lyrics. McCartney recorded the song with drummer Ringo Starr and producer Ken Townshend while Harrison and Lennon finished another track. However, Lennon was still upset that McCartney decided to record the track without them.
“That’s Paul. He even recorded it by himself in another room,” Lennon said in his 1980 interview with Playboy. “That’s how it was getting in those days. We came in and he’d made the whole record. Him drumming. 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.”
McCartney said it ‘wasn’t a deliberate thing’
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The White Album was the first sign that The Beatles were beginning to move in opposite directions. It’s not exactly a cohesive album and is more a collection of songs written by each member with a diverse range of genres and sounds. However, Paul McCartney said the omission of Lennon and Harrison was not “deliberate.”
In The Beatles: The Illustrated and Updated Edition by Hunter Davies, McCartney explained that he and Starr had some time to kill, so they decided to knock out “Why Don’t We Do It in the Road” while waiting for the other two to finish.
“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 explained. “Anyway, [Lennon] 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.”
‘Why Don’t We Do It in the Road?’ has a bizarre backstory
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Despite Lennon being left out of it, he was still a fan of the song, even if it is overly simplistic. The title sounds like it references people getting intimate in the car, and that’s almost exactly what it’s about. In Many Years From Now, McCartney explained that inspiration for the song arose after watching monkeys quickly doing the deed, then moving on with their lives as if nothing happened.
“There is an urge, they do it, and it’s done with,” he shared. “And it’s that simple. We have horrendous problems with it, and yet animals don’t. So that was basically it. ‘Why Don’t We Do It In The Road?’ could have applied to either f***ing or s****ing, to put it roughly. Why don’t we do either of them in the road? Well, the answer is we’re civilised and we don’t. But the song was just to pose that question. ‘Why Don’t We Do It In The Road?’ was a primitive statement to do with sex or to do with freedom really.”
