The “primitive” Beatles song that hurt John Lennon in 1968: “He even recorded it by himself”
Tensions were high while The Beatles worked on their eponymous 1968 double album.
As relations between band members became strained, all four members worked in different studios at different times, trying to bring their visions to life. Paul McCartney was the worst offender in this regard, recording four of the album’s tracks without any of the other Beatles.
By the time sessions for The White Album were underway, The Beatles were functioning less like a unified band and more like four increasingly independent artists sharing the same name.
Personal tensions, business disagreements and diverging creative interests had begun eroding the collaborative spirit that defined their earlier years, with each member becoming more protective of their own material. The result was an album that often feels fragmented but also remarkably adventurous, capturing the sound of a group simultaneously pulling apart and expanding creatively.
That atmosphere helps explain why seemingly minor recording decisions could later become sources of resentment. In earlier years, a quick session between McCartney and Starr might not have registered as unusual, but by 1968 every exclusion carried symbolic weight.
Lennon’s frustration over ‘Why Don’t We Do It In The Road?’ reflected a growing paranoia within the band that partnerships and loyalties were shifting behind the scenes, even as each Beatle was increasingly guilty of pursuing their own individual vision whenever the opportunity arose.
“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’…Anyway, he did the same with ‘Revolution 9’”
Paul McCartney
One song that was almost a McCartney solo piece was ‘Why Don’t We Do It In The Road?’. Featuring just McCartney and Ringo Starr, the plaintive blues track was written by McCartney while The Beatles were studying Transcendental Meditation in India. When McCartney saw an impulsive act of fornication between two animals, he was inspired to write down the simple track.
“I was up on the flat roof meditating, and I’d seen a troupe of monkeys walking along in the jungle, and a male just hopped on to the back of this female and gave her one, as they say in the vernacular,” McCartney explained in the book Many Years From Now. “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 had been some mild disturbance but thought, ‘Huh, I must have imagined it’, and she wandered off.”
“And 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,” McCartney added. “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 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. ‘Why Don’t We Do It In The Road?’ was 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.”
On October 8th, 1968, three of The Beatles were working on mixing ‘The Continuing Story of Bungalow Bill’ and ‘Long, Long Long’ (it was John Lennon’s birthday, perhaps explaining why he wasn’t present). As these songs were getting attention, McCartney grabbed engineer Ken Townsend and recorded a few solo takes of ‘Why Don’t We Do It In The Road’. The next night, after John Lennon and George Harrison added strings to ‘Piggies’ and ‘Glass Onion’, McCartney and Starr finished ‘Why Don’t We Do It In The Road’.
“We were mixing in Studio Two, which was really the dedicated Beatles studio at Abbey Road, and I was getting a bit fed up sitting around,” McCartney said in his book The Lyrics: 1956 to the Present. “Everyone had gone home, but we were still there at ten o’clock, eleven o’clock, midnight. There was no one else around except for a security sergeant, maybe somebody on the door. So I slipped into Studio Three with Ringo, just him and me. I wanted to do a let-it-all-hang-out song based on little more than a mantra.”
Lennon was resentful that he was excluded from the song’s recording. Although he wound up recording ‘Julia’ on his own four days later, McCartney was still present, giving Lennon advice from the control room. During one of his final interviews, Lennon misremembered ‘Why Don’t We Do It In The Road’ as a McCartney solo recording and explained his position.
“That’s Paul. He even recorded it by himself in another room. That’s how it was getting in those days,” Lennon told David Sheff in 1980. “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.”
But Macca disagreed. “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’…Anyway, he did the same with ‘Revolution 9’,” McCartney insisted to Hunter Davies in his book The Beatles: The Illustrated And Updated Edition. “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.”
Check out ‘Why Don’t We Do It In The Road’ down below.
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