The White Album 50 Project: "Why Don't We Do It In the Road?"

The fact that the title of this song is phrased as a question, rather than as a title, on the track listing in the White Album's gatefold (only the first word starts with a capital letter) shows how serious the Beatles were about the song's bawdy premise.

Let's cut to the chase.  "Why Don't We Do It In the Road?" is a song about sex, pure and simple.  Comprised of lyrics with only fourteen words ("Why don't we do it in the road?  No one will be watching us!") and lasting just over a hundred seconds, it follows the songwriting philosophy that John Lennon assumed toward the end of the Beatles' partnership - don't use flowery language to say something, just say it.  And sex is something John was good at making a point on quite clearly. Except that "Why Don't We Do It In the Road?" is Paul McCartney's song.   

Paul wrote "Why Don't We Do It In the Road?" in India after seeing two monkeys copulating in the middle of a street (Brits refer to an urban thoroughfare as "the road" the way Yanks refer to it as "the street").  He marveled at how they engaged in a sexual act and were done with it so soon after they started, and he wondered why human beings can't simply have sex without all of the emotional and psychological turmoil.  So he wrote this song to propose that humans could learn from animals when it comes to sexual activity.  Paul wrote and performed the song the way those two monkeys copulated - quickly, with little drama.  It certainly had a lot less drama than Elvis Presley's 1968 single "A Little Less Conversation."

The appeal of "Why Don't We Do It In the Road?", though, is less in the composition than in the performance.  Based on a twelve-bar blues structure, "Why Don't We Do It In the Road?" is the only flat-out rocker on the White Album's second side, and Paul rocks out without any of the heavy electric guitar riffing or the hyperkinetic drumming that began to characterize rock in the late sixties.  The muscle and bite of this song is achieved through a barrelhouse-style piano, augmented by handclaps and bass with an electric guitar line that is mixed so low you almost don't notice it - but its subtlety adds to the straight-rock vibe of the track.  Paul plays all of the instruments here except the drums, which are played by Ringo Starr, who doesn't try to overwhelm the track with the sort of assault-style rock drumming commonly associated then with the Who's Keith Moon (and later associated with Led Zeppelin's John Bonham or Family's Rob Townsend).  He's happy enough to keep time and anchor the music.  (It was originally thought that Paul played the drums here as well.)

And to top it all off, Paul delivers the lyrics with raucous bravado and menacing machismo.  There's no other way to describe it; Paul assumes a perfectly unvarnished blues style in his voice to give "Why Don't We Do It In the Road?" a gritty, blues-based feel and to make it sound more risqué than it already is.  While his regular pop vocal style has inspired singers like Billy Joel, here Paul tries to sound more like Mick Jagger.  It seems appropriate, therefore, that when Billy Joel attempted to sound like Mick Jagger on songs like "You May Be Right," he sounded like Paul McCartney imitating Mick Jagger.

Long after enduring the torture (for him) of recording "Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da," John heard "Why Don't We Do It In the Road?" and was quite pleased with it.  He later admitted to being displeased, though, that Paul hadn't asked him and George Harrison to help out with the recording of it.  "I can't speak for George," John said in 1980, "but I was always hurt when Paul would knock something off without involving us. But that's just the way it was then."  Paul denies that he and Ringo recorded "Why Don't We Do It In the Road?" as a duo to slight John.  "It wasn't a deliberate thing," he told Hunter Davies in 1981.  "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.'"

Still, it's fair to say that "Why Don't We Do It In the Road?" must have been an influence on John's later songs, such as the similarly simple "I Want You (She's So Heavy)", the recording of which was begun just four months after the White Album's release.

"Why Don't We Do It In the Road?" had a divided effect on Beatles fans, with author Mark Hertsgaard suggesting in his Beatles book "A Day In the Life: The Music and Artistry of the Beatles" that it was a good track that could have been a great one had it been a full-band performance, with others taking issue with the explicit nature of the song and the repetitiveness of the lyrics - as well as the simple lyrics themselves.  When illustrator Rick Griffin interpreted "Why Don't We Do It In the Road?" for the book "The Beatles Illustrated Lyrics," he turned the song into a hilarious adult comic strip (below - click on it to enlarge) that featured a parody of its single, thrice-repeated verse:

Why did they do it the road?
They got no sense, they should have knowed,
Why did they do it in the road
Right where the dump truck dropped its load?
The driver did not see them there -
Oh, why did they do it in the road?

Weird Al Yankovic would love this. :-D

In the 1979 movie 10, Dudley Moore's songwriter character George Webber laments that dirty sex songs like "Why Don't We Do It In the Road?" are more important to teenagers than a professionally composed romantic song.  But of course, Paul McCartney was also capable of producing a romantic song; in fact, "Why Don't We Do It In the Road?" is followed on the White Album by one of them.  We'll look at that one next week. :-)