What Goes On (Beatles song)

• 1. Introduction

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  "What Goes On" carries one of the most unusual writing credits in the Beatles catalogue: Lennon-McCartney-Starkey. It is the only song the band ever attributed to all three of those names, and it is the only track on Rubber Soul where Ringo Starr steps to the microphone as lead vocalist. When asked about his contribution, Starr answered in his own deadpan fashion: "I wrote about five words to 'What Goes On' and I haven't done a thing since." Those five words quietly earned him his first-ever composing credit on a Beatles recording. The story of how this country-flavoured curio reached Rubber Soul at all reaches back to a house on Menlove Avenue in early 1959, and winds through a near-recording that never happened, a demo Paul McCartney built entirely by himself, and a one-take session late on the 4th of November 1965. Critics have rarely been kind to the result. What keeps it worth examining is the web of decisions, accidents, and personalities that gave it its peculiar shape.

• 2. A Song Waiting Six Years

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  John Lennon wrote the first draft of "What Goes On" in early 1959, most likely at 251 Menlove Avenue. That early version borrowed heavily from the sound of Buddy Holly, and it bore little resemblance to the track that eventually appeared on Rubber Soul; only the chorus survived intact from one version to the other. The Beatles came close to recording the song on the 5th of March 1963, during a session that was primarily booked for "From Me to You" and "Thank You Girl". With time running short, the band faced a choice between "What Goes On" and a song then called "The One After 909". They chose the latter. Lennon and McCartney did make a demo of the 1963 version that day, but the track was shelved. It sat unused for more than two years before anyone returned to it.

• 3. Building the Rubber Soul Version

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  Lennon later described how the song was revived: "it was resurrected with a middle eight thrown in, probably with Paul McCartney's help." Barry Miles also attributed that section to McCartney and Starr working together. Musicologist Ian MacDonald noted that no formal middle eight actually exists in the finished song; instead, one chorus and one verse are simply extended, and he believed those longer passages were McCartney's work. Before any studio time was booked, McCartney built a multitrack home demo to show Starr how the arrangement should feel. Neil Aspinall recalled it clearly: "Onto this went Paul singing, Paul playing lead guitar, Paul playing bass and Paul playing drums. Then Ringo listened to the finished tape and added his own ideas before the recording session." Starr's lyrical addition was, according to both MacDonald and musicologist Walter Everett, the line "Waiting for the tides of time." MacDonald labelled that phrase "pseudo-Dylanesque."

• 4. One Take, One Night

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  The Rubber Soul recording happened in a single take, with overdubs added, during a late-night session on the 4th of November 1965. George Martin produced, with engineers Norman Smith, Ken Scott, and Graham Platt on hand. Everett described Lennon's rhythm guitar as playing in the style of Steve Cropper, a Memphis "chick" rhythm part. Harrison's contribution included what Everett called "rockabilly string crossings, double-stops, and portamento neighbors," played on his Gretsch Tennessean guitar. Starr appears to have recorded a guide vocal onto the basic track, which was later wiped by his final overdub. That original guide vocal was not entirely erased; it bleeds through the drum microphone during Starr's solo and in the coda. One moment stands out in the tape: just before the lead break, Starr sings "tell me why," and Lennon can be heard responding, "We already told you why!" The quip was a reference to the Beatles' own song "Tell Me Why" from A Hard Day's Night. Martin, assisted by Smith and Jerry Boys, mixed both the mono and stereo versions on the 9th of November 1965. In the mono mix, Harrison's Gretsch Tennessean is muted for the last two bars. Everett suggested this was an accident: the engineer likely intended to mute the vocal track but forgot Harrison's guitar was riding on the same channel.

• 5. Release and Chart Life

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  Rubber Soul arrived in the United Kingdom on the 3rd of December 1965, with "What Goes On" sitting as the eighth track. In the United States, Capitol took a different path. On the 21st of February 1966, the label issued "Nowhere Man" as a US-only single and placed "What Goes On" on the B-side. Despite that secondary position, the track entered the Billboard Hot 100 for two weeks, reaching number 81 in 1966. Capitol then stripped it from the North American pressing of Rubber Soul entirely and moved it to Yesterday and Today, a compilation released only in North America on the 20th of June 1966. The first pressing of the US single introduced its own small error: the word "Starkey" was accidentally dropped from the songwriting credit, leaving the three-way collaboration unacknowledged on the label.

• 6. Critical Standing

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  Critics placed "What Goes On" near the bottom of Rubber Soul's pecking order consistently and without much ceremony. Beatles writer Kenneth Womack called it "quite arguably the weakest and most incongruous track on the album." James M. Decker, a professor of English, described it as "a retrograde achievement lyrically" and argued it was "lyrically formulaic and musically plain," though he allowed that the country feel might be read as deliberate parody of its own lyrics. Ian MacDonald compared its atmosphere to "Act Naturally," another country-flavoured Beatles track. Richie Unterberger of AllMusic offered a gentler verdict, calling it an "enjoyable if lightweight" country and western entry, and singled out Harrison's guitar as marking him as "the finest disciple of Carl Perkins." Everett praised McCartney's bass playing as "soulful." His broader conclusion was that after "What Goes On", the Beatles' rockabilly style went "into dormancy."

• 7. Sufjan Stevens Rewrites the Song

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  In 2005, Sufjan Stevens recorded a cover of "What Goes On" for the compilation This Bird Has Flown: A 40th Anniversary Tribute to the Beatles' Rubber Soul. Writing in Pitchfork, Rob Mitchum noted that Stevens took what he called Starr's "abysmal country tune" and transformed it into "a really good Sufjan Stevens song, arranged for the full Illinoisemaker band with choral interludes, diving strings, and a surprisingly gritty jam." Barry Walters of Rolling Stone went further, describing how Stevens changed chords, rewrote the melody, overhauled rhythms, and resequenced large chunks of the lyrics, calling it an arrangement that "turns 'What Goes On' inside out" and "affirms Rubber Soul's elastic strength." Not everyone agreed. Stephen Thomas Erlewine of AllMusic called the Stevens track "the only severe misstep in an album filled with good, generally pleasant covers." The cover demonstrated, in its divisiveness, just how strange the source material really is: a song critics find weak enough to transform freely, yet sturdy enough to provoke genuine argument about whether the transformation improved it.