Credit: Far Out / Alamy
October 26th, 2026 · 10:06pm GMT
During the recording of The Beatles‘ 1968 self-titled album, better known as The White Album, the band members often found themselves working in different studios at different times. That’s never a good sign.
Working relationships were hitting an all-time low, and with the band’s return from India finding them fractured and jaded, it wasn’t uncommon to see only one or two of the once-Fab Four working on a track at any given time.
The biggest offender was Paul McCartney, who recorded ‘Martha My Dear’, ‘Mother Nature’s Son’, ‘Wild Honey Pie’, and ‘Blackbird’ completely by himself during the sessions. McCartney was working so efficiently on his own that he would simply make up songs in the moment and record them, regardless of whether any of his bandmates were around.
For one particularly tossed-off track, McCartney remembered a nature scene that took place during the band’s trip to India. “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 recalled in the book Many Years From Now.
Adding, “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.”
Had Lennon been around, invigorated by his recent exploits in transcendentalism, he may well have dismissed that as far too flippant a song for a band who had only recently waded into the Vietnam War debate to peddle. He would have almost certainly found an ally in George Harrison. But the new constitution of their creative process precluded such an intervention.
Credit: Far Out / Associated Press
McCartney, on the other hand, was working hard, and keen to ensure his inspiration went to good use. “I thought, ‘Bloody hell, that puts it all into a cocked hat, that’s how simple the act of procreation is,” he continued, “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. We have horrendous problems with it, and yet animals don’t. So that was basically it.”
Somehow, perhaps thanks to the influence of the Indian retreat, he had managed to muster a modicum of depth to it after all. “‘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,” Macca added.
Alas, Lennon was more inclined to pen words like “Nothing’s gonna change my world” during the period, and McCartney’s more primordial approach didn’t quite have the mysticism he was going for. “‘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,” McCartney concluded. It seems half the band were at odds with outrage and urges.
“That’s Paul. He even recorded it by himself in another room,” Lennon groused to David Sheff in 1980, firmly distancing himself from it. However, the extent of his disdain was tied to how it came about rather than the silliness of the song itself. “I was always hurt when Paul would knock something off without involving us,” he revealed. “But that’s just the way it was then.”
Lennon was only partly right: McCartney provides almost all of the instrumentation on the record, but Ringo Starr was the drummer of the track. “’Why Don’t We Do It In The Road?’ was just Paul and me, and it went out as a Beatle track too,” Starr clarifies in Anthology. “We had no problems with that.” It seemed as though Starr wasn’t too concerned with not recording songs as a full band the way Lennon was. He wasn’t as fussed about their themes either.
McCartney, meanwhile, was far from ignorant of the situation. He simply said that Harrison and Lennon were busy, so he decided to finish the track in a hurry. After all, the spirit of the White Album was to capture a whole array of their capabilities. He even told Hunter Davies that Lennon did “the same with ‘Revolution 9’. He went off and made that without me.”
“No one ever says that,” he went on. “John is the nice guy and I’m the bastard. It gets repeated all the time.” Yet, there is also a hint that he was burying his head in the sand to some degree. Both ‘Revolution 9’ and his own private endeavours were indicative of a rift rather than testing labour constraints. The vast contrast of the two songs is also indicative of the effects of that rift and the peculiar album it brought about.
Ultimately, ‘Why Don’t We Do It In The Road?’ captures the strange contradictions that defined The Beatles during the fraught ’68 sessions. On one hand, it was a deliberately crude little number, inspired by a fleeting moment in nature and recorded with little of the grand ambition associated with the band’s most celebrated work. On the other, its creation exposed the growing distance between four musicians who had once seemed inseparable, right down to their shared love of crude little numbers.
It seems daft that such a song could signpost their impending demise, and there is little doubt that its creation also accelerated the arrival of their final chapter. Yet, its appeal also makes sense of the picture. It was a spontaneous burst of irreverence made at a time when spontaneity within the band was becoming increasingly difficult to come by.
Silliness had always been part of the band’s lore. Now, things had clearly gotten too serious.
ADD AS A PREFERRED SOURCE ON GOOGLE 
The Far Out Beatles Newsletter
All the latest stories about The Beatles from the independent voice of culture.
Straight to your inbox.