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:

Beatles -- "Drive My Car/The Word/What You're Doing" (2006)

Would it be too much

To ask of you

What you're doing to me?

I'm not sure I ever heard "What You're Doing" until I listened to Love, a remix-mashup album of Beatles music by legendary Beatles producer Sir George Martin and his son, Giles.

Love was created to be the soundtrack for a Cirque du Soleil show of the same name, which opened in June 2006 in a specially-built theater at the Mirage Hotel in Las Vegas and has been running there ever since.

Here's a trailer for Cirque du Soleil's Love that should give you an idea of what the show is like:

The Love album is almost 79 minutes long and incorporates elements from 130 Beatles songs.  Some of its tracks consist primarily of a single Beatles song, always remixed and often shortened, but sounding relatively similar to the original.  

But there are several tracks (like this one) that splice together two or three songs, throw in brief snippets from other songs -- perhaps just a single guitar chord -- and are more accurately described as mashups, although they differ in significant respects from the music created by mashup artists like Girl Talk or Super Mash Bros.  (The mashups in Love aren't quite as mashed up as most regular mashups are.)

While this track is titled "Drive My Car/The Word/What You're Doing," the actual order is "Drive My Car/What You're Doing/The Word."

The Mirage Hotel in Las Vegas

Things kick off with a verse and chorus from "Drive My Car."  The verse is relatively unaltered, but the chorus is enhanced with some "Savoy Truffle" horns.

Next comes part of the guitar solo from "Taxman," which segues almost seamlessly into the guitar solo from "Drive My Car."  (One reviewer called it a "sleight-of-hand edit," and that is a very apt description.)  Fifty seconds into the song, you're ready for the second verse of "Drive My Car," but instead you get the first verse of "What You're Doing" -- once again, the transition is almost seamless.

At about 1:23 if the track, there's a brief drums-and-handclaps bridge that drops us into the middle of Rubber Soul's "The Word."  We get another taste of those "Savoy Truffle" horns before the track fades to black less than two minutes after it begins.

Here's a little background on "What You're Doing."  It was released in the United States in 1965.  It led off the second side of Beatles VI, which was actually the Beatles' seventh Capitol Records album.  (The group had previously released two other albums on other labels in the U.S.)

Beatles VI is a real mishmash of an album -- it included covers of songs by Buddy Holly, Larry Williams, and Lieber and Stoller, and several originals that had been released in the UK the previous year.  The only really well-known Lennon-McCartney song on the album is "Eight Days a Week."

Love is an album that any Beatles fan should own.  Unlike covers of Beatles songs recorded by other artists, you're getting the real McCoy here -- but a little different from what you're used to hearing.  The majority of the tracks are more remix than mashup, and much of the remixing is relatively subtle.  

Sir George Martin with his son, Giles

But just about every remixed song sounds better to me than the original.  Perhaps that's because a sophisticated producer like Martin has more electronic tools at his command these days than he did 40-odd years ago.

Or maybe it's because we've heard the originals so many times that even a subtly different mix sounds fresh.

Here's "Drive My Car/The Word/What You're Doing":

Here's a link you can use to buy the Love CD from Amazon: