137. What You're Doing
A wall of sound track that's missing the wall of sound. Or maybe it's a Byrds prototype. In either case, it still manages to sound pretty good.
One of the things that’s most incredible about the Beatles is the consistent alignment between their vision and their execution. It’s not just that they could dream melodies or harmonies that had never been heard before, but that they could then turn them into reality.
One night, Paul would hear a piccolo trumpet in the symphony. The next day he’d be in the studio requesting the trumpeter come in to play a solo in Penny Lane. They wanted Tomorrow Never Knows to “sound like the Dalai Lama chanting from a mountaintop, miles away” and somehow managed to achieve it on a 4-track tape recorder. They were absolutely bursting with influences (from R&B to girl groups to Dylan to Brian Wilson to sludge rock to music hall) and could write in all the genres. And not just produce songs that fit the style, but which actually stamped something new and distinct on top.
That skill is what makes songs like What You’re Doing such an exception. Because this is clearly an example of an attempt to play in a style which just doesn’t quite work. From the Be My Baby beat at the start and right on through to the chorus, this is meant to imitate the Phil Spector production style. And all the bones of that are here. By all rights, you’d expect them to have succeeded. But they just…didn’t.
And so we have here a song that’s still wonderful and pleasant to listen to, but which they correctly judged in later years to have essentially been a throwaway.1 I’d certainly be surprised if there are many people out there who revere it, or consider it an inner-circle Beatles track.
Even so, I do think this song could have been a gargantuan hit, if they’d just felt the magic in it, and been inspired to bring it to life. Because like I say, the bones are there. It’s just one of the few Beatles tracks that simply doesn’t live up to its full potential
For many years, I’ve been a little judgmental about it for that reason. I saw it as a failure. But like many things in life, it’s usually better to respond to the thing (or person) as it really is, not to impose your own sense of what it ‘ought’ to be. So I now just appreciate a beautiful little song with a beautiful vocal performance and some clever internal rhyming, rather than wishing it was something more.
And in a way, it’s actually rather heartening to have songs like this in the Beatles catalog. They help us to remember that everyone has down moments, days that we clock in and clock out but don’t really want to put in the effort. Even the Beatles.
A couple codas:
First, for a throwaway song, this one casts a surprisingly long shadow. Because this track is basically the prototype for The Byrds, a very important band in their own right, who then launched a bunch of other careers up to and including Tom Petty.
It’s often said that some bands make an entire career out of recording and re-recording one single Beatles song. It’s obviously hyperbole. But also kind of true.
Second, I like the interpellation of What You’re Doing with Drive My Car from the Love album and Cirque du Soleil show.
As a music appreciator more than a music-knower, I don’t really understand keys and chord progressions and thinks but I remember people saying that these two songs were basically built in the same way (alternating between b-minor and G-Major), so it’s fun to hear that literally mashed together here.
Third, this feels like a song that deserves a great cover. Doesn’t seem like anyone’s ever really attempted it.
According to Paul, in Many Years From Now: “You sometimes start a song and hope the best bit will arrive by the time you get to the chorus, but sometimes that’s all you get, and I suspect this was one of them” (p. 176).
And as far as I can tell, Paul has never played it live. Not once in the 61 years since it was written.