Beatles – "What You're Doing" (1964)

Please stop your lying

You’ve got me crying, girl

In response to my recent 28 POSTS IN 28 DAYS! post about the Beatles’ “Not a Second Time,” a friend of mine said that he was amazed by my statement that I had never heard the song before stumbling over it last week.

“How is that possible?” he asked.  “I’ve heard it countless times.”

It’s possible that I heard “Not a Second Time” back in the day, but it’s equally possible that I didn’t.  

The first Beatles album I ever owned was Rubber Soul, which was their sixth studio album.  Before then, the only Beatles records I ever heard were those that were played on AM radio stations.  

Since “Not a Second Time” wasn’t released as a single (or as the B-side of a single), it wasn’t played on the radio. 

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A couple of hours after my friend and I discussed “Not a Second Time,” I was walking my dog while listening to Sirius/XM’s “Underground Garage” channel.

One of the records I heard while on that walk was instantly recognizable as being by the Beatles – but it was a song that I had never heard it before.

I had to go to the “Underground Garage” Facebook page when I returned home to look it up.  It turned out to be “What You’re Doing” – a Lennon-McCartney original that was released late in 1964 on the Fab Four’s fourth UK studio album, Beatles for Sale. (It was released in North America about six months later on the Beatles VI album.)

Jane Asher was dreamy!

Most sources say that Paul was primarily responsible for writing “What You’re Doing.”  The lyrics of the song seem to have been inspired by his problematic relationship with Jane Asher.

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If you want to learn more about any particular Beatles song, The Beatles Bible website – an online repository of information about each and every song they recorded – is a good place to start.  

That’s where I found this Paul McCartney quote about the song:

“What You’re Doing” was a bit of a filler. . . . 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.  

The Beatles for Sale album

You’ve got to give Sir Paul credit for being honest.  The song is “a bit of a filler,” all right – it was the last track recorded for the Beatles for Sale album, and I have a feeling they included it only because no one came up with anything better before they ran out of time.

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The Beatles Bible notes that the verses of this song utilize a somewhat unusual internal rhyming scheme – the last word of the first line of each verse is not rhymed with the last word of the second line, but with the next-to-last word (or words).

From the first verse:

Look what you’re doing

I’m feeling blue and lonely

(“Doing” is rhymed with “blue and.”)

From the second verse:

You got me running

And there’s no fun in it

(“Running” is rhymed with “fun in.”)

The third verse falls back on a perfect rhyme instead of the imperfect rhymes used in the first two verses:

Please stop your lying

You’ve got me crying, girl

It’s like Paul couldn’t think of a more creative imperfect rhyme for the third verse and fell back on the rather obvious “lying”/“crying” perfect rhyme. 

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If there’s anything that 2 or 3 lines is really good at, it’s nitpicking.

The nit I’m going to pick today relates to the song’s refrain, which reads as follows:

Would it be too much to ask of you

What you’re doing to me?

Paul doesn’t really mean “ask of you” here – he means “ask you.”  But “ask you” would have left this line too short by one syllable.

As all you English majors out there know, the line “Would it be too much to ask of you” is trochaic pentameter – it contains five poetic feet, each consisting of one stressed syllable followed by one unstressed syllable (except for the final foot, which has only the stressed syllable):

WOULD it BE too MUCH to ASK of YOU 

Sure, Paul could have rewritten the line so as to obviate the need for the “of” – e.g., “Would it be unfair for me to ask.”  But he was in a hurry!

Now I’m not saying my alternate line is anything special, but it took me less than 60 seconds to come up with it.  Give me five or ten minutes and I’m sure I could have done even better.

(The Beatles worshippers are going to lose their minds when they read this post – not only am I poo-poohing a Lennon-McCartney song, I’m rewriting it!  They’ll want to burn me at the stake for  BLASPHEMY!)

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Click here to listen to “What You’re Doing” (which includes a really bad instrumental break at about 1:18).

Click on the link below to buy the song from Amazon: