In 1968, The Beatles released their iconic self-titled album, also known as The White Album. The record featured George Harrison’s best work on ‘While My Guitar Gently Weeps’, the John Lennon-Paul McCartney favourite ‘Dear Prudence’, and the melancholic ‘Blackbird’. But between the album’s most iconic songs, The Beatles nestled a short, strange track titled ‘Why Don’t We Do It in the Road?’.
The song was written and recorded by McCartney alone. Though this fact would later irk his songwriting partner John Lennon, it’s understandable when you hear the material. ‘Why Don’t We Do It in the Road?’ has just two lines, repeated throughout the one-minute 42-second runtime. With rugged vocals, McCartney asks, “Why don’t we do it in the road? No one will be watching us”.
McCartney once explained the inspiration behind the song during an interview with Barry Miles for Paul McCartney: Many Years from Now, noting that it was inspired by an experience he had while on a Transcendental Meditation retreat in Rishikesh, India. The trip inspired a number of The Beatles’ well-known tracks.
For this one in particular, the Beatle, as he recalls it, was “up on a flat roof meditating” when he saw some monkeys walk by. He watched a male monkey as he “hopped on to the back of this female and gave her one, as they say in the vernacular. Within two or three seconds he hopped off again”. The speed and simplicity of the act shocked McCartney: “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.”
McCartney was stunned at how this simplicity contrasted with the complexity of human sexual relations and was inspired to write ‘Why Don’t We Do It in the Road?’. He concluded, “We have horrendous problems with it, and yet animals don’t. So that was basically it.”
Though it was inspired by this specific experience, McCartney went on to state: “‘Why Don’t We Do It In The Road?’ could have applied to either fucking or shitting, 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.”
The iconic songwriter summarised the track as “a primitive statement to do with sex or to do with freedom really. I like it, it’s just so outrageous that I like it.” It certainly is an outrageous track while also matching the simplicity of its subject matter sonically.
