I wrote this appreciation of John for Bass Guitar magazine
last month and although I posted an extract on my blog on May 1 I was asked by the
its editor not to post the whole thing until late June in case it impacted on
sales of the magazine.
“About time
too.”
John Entwistle could be forgiven for
thinking such thoughts when, in 2000, Musician magazine named
him its “Bassist of the Millennium”. A shame, then, that The Ox wasn’t around
11 years later
when readers of Rolling
Stone overwhelmingly voted him the greatest bass player of all time. Today,
of course, it’s widely acknowledged that John, who died in 2002, was the best rock
bass player ever to plug in and shatter eardrums, but it was his misfortune
that during the time when The Who were performing regularly, from 1964 to 1982,
his skills were largely overlooked.
The golden era for The Who coincided
with the release of their rock opera Tommy,
50 years ago in May 2019. Although they’d already distinguished themselves on
the UK and US concert circuit, this was the group’s breakthrough in terms of album
sales. In many ways it was a showcase for John who not only played bass
throughout but also contributed vocals, including lead on two ‘nasty’ songs
that Pete Townshend requested he write for his rock opera, as well as French
horn, trumpet and flugelhorn.
John soon makes his presence felt.
In the ‘Overture’ to Tommy his French
horn – the first solo instrument to be heard – takes on a melodic role in place
of absent vocals, while in the indistinguishable instrumentals ‘Sparks’ and
‘Underture’ his repeated descending bass figure defines the structure, the rigid staff
around which Townshend and Keith Moon can improvise. On
stage ‘Sparks’ would become a pièce de
résistance of ensemble Who playing, with the band’s three instrumentalists
reaching higher and higher towards block chord climaxes that characterised their style: the
ringing open notes, the octave drops and wave after wave of escalating,
bass-driven crescendos. In ‘Pinball Wizard’, the best known song from Tommy, Townshend’s furiously strummed
intro is punctuated by the thunderous boom of powerful guitar stabs that John
famously reproduced live by hammering down on his bottom string, and the finale
to Tommy, ‘See Me Feel Me’ with its
turbocharged ‘Listening To You’ coda, is driven by rousing major chords while
John’s relentless, twangy bass acts as the foundation on which his three
colleagues could rip yet another stage to pieces.
All of this, coupled with
increasingly earnest accolades from his peers, ought to have raised John’s
profile as a bassist par excellence
but in the period after Tommy’s release,
other players – most notably Jack Bruce, Chris Squire and Greg Lake – received
many more votes in the ‘Top Bassist’ category of readers’ polls conducted by Melody Maker, then the benchmark by
which instrumental prowess was measured. Indeed, in the 1973 MM poll John doesn’t even make the top
ten bass players.
Why was this? Well, despite my
efforts as MM’s unofficial Who
cheerleader, the paper gave far more coverage to Yes and Emerson, Lake &
Palmer than it did to my favourite band, and Jack Bruce’s stint with Cream gave
him an edge that never went away. Furthermore, despite his solo recordings John
had the lowest of profiles within The Who. Overshadowed by the wayward but
fearsome intellect of Townshend, the lunatic exploits of Moon and the craggy good
looks of Roger Daltrey, John early on realised the futility of competing, of doing
anything other than simply stand there and play, a low-key approach unlikely to
earn him votes from magazine readers.
But I think there was more to it
than that. John was a bass guitarist, not a bassist, perhaps even a guitarist
who played bass, and this distinction – which he made himself – is important.
“I found bass very boring,” he once said. “I wanted to turn it into a solo
instrument and the only way to do that was turn up the treble.” In another
interview he even went as far as to say that The Who didn’t have a bass player.
So
it was that audiences never really appreciated what John was playing because
the sounds that came from his speaker stacks appeared as if they were coming
from Townshend’s guitar, or even a pre-recorded low register synthesiser.
Coupled with the guitarist’s attention-grabbing style – the leaping around and
windmilling – not to mention the antics of Daltrey and Moon, no one paid much
attention to the chap on the left in the brightly coloured jackets who simply
stood there and played. What they missed was a display of extraordinary but
largely inconspicuous fluency, a player whose technique involved not just
plucking his strings with his thumb and every finger of his right hand, but
tapping them and switching periodically to a plectrum, bending and hammering on
and off notes, vibrating trills and unexpected bell-like harmonics, glissandos
that occasionally slid up and down his entire fretboard, parts that echoed or
reinforced lead riffs and vocal lines, and even chords strummed across two or
more strings that created an all-enveloping wash of low-frequency resonance.
What’s more, he made it look easy.
“John
got attention simply because he stood so still, his fingers flying like a
stenographer’s, the notes a machine-gun chatter,” wrote Townshend in Who I Am, his 2012 autobiography. “And
through it all, as if to anchor the experience, John stood like an oak tree in
the middle of a tornado.”
When after a break of seven years Townshend
agreed to tour again with The Who in 1989, he stipulated
that because loud noise had damaged his hearing he would do so only if John significantly
reduced his on-stage volume, a condition that required The Who’s stage
personnel to be substantially reinforced. With Simon Phillips now on drums, they were augmented by a
further twelve musicians, all to compensate for John turning down. “The
only way we could add [John’s] harmonic richness,” said Townshend, “was to add
brass, second guitar, acoustic guitar, two keyboards, backing vocals and people
banging gongs, because that’s what John used to replicate.”
“He had a technique that was light
years ahead of everybody else at the time,” said keyboard player Rick Wakeman,
who studied at the Royal College of Music. “Nobody played like John.”
“Best bassist in rock’n’roll,” added
Lemmy. “No contest.”
*
* *
In the third week
of December, 1972, I visited John at his semi-detached house in the west London
suburb of Ealing, ostensibly to interview him for Melody Maker about his second solo album Whistle Rhymes. By this time I had edged myself into the role of MM’s unofficial ‘Who correspondent’ and
charmed my way backstage at several concerts, so I knew him reasonably well. He
was a friendly, down-to-earth man, dry of wit yet quite softly-spoken and reserved when he
wasn’t performing, and he took compliments like a pinch of salt, wryly amused
by his reputation as a disciple of the macabre; “big bad black Johnny Twinkle,” as Moon once yelled on
stage, to which Townshend added, “with the flying fingers”.
John and his wife Alison welcomed me
into their home. It was the kind of house you might expect a moderately
successful and well-travelled businessman to occupy with his family,
comfortable but not ostentatious, perfect for the character in The Kinks’ song
‘Well Respected Man’. Some wags within the Who camp were suggesting John should
run for Mayor of Ealing.
The house was full of curios: “part
museum, part instrument store, part studio and part home,” I wrote in MM. He had just bought a table lamp with
those swishy frond-like tentacles that lit up at the ends and I’d never seen
one before. Nowadays they’re a bit kitsch but I was fascinated by it. Even more
impressive was the first video recorder I’d ever seen, a contraption the size
of the average micro-wave with lots of knobs and cassettes like cigar boxes.
John demonstrated it for me, and then took me upstairs to admire his collection
of guitars and basses. Outside of a music shop, I’d never seen so many guitars
in one place. He told me he had 32, which was nothing compared to the number he
would eventually amass.
In 1975, flush with funds accrued
from the Who’s US success, John and Alison moved to a preposterously large
mansion on the southern outskirts of Stow-on-the-Wold in Gloucestershire, about
85 miles west of London. Approached by a winding drive through trees and shrubbery,
Quarwood was a gothic Victorian hunting lodge completed in 1859, with 42 acres
of land, seven cottages and 55 rooms, its
cantilevered staircase leading to a gallery where gold and platinum records
were displayed floor to ceiling. Many of the bedrooms housed John’s instrument
collection which, in the fullness of time, would grow into one of the
largest guitar collections belonging to any rock musician. Another was given over to his electric train set.
Medieval suits of armour stood in the hallway where, dangling from a noose, was
a stuffed effigy of
Quasimodo eyeing the skeleton that reclined in an armchair.
Unlike the semi in Ealing, it was
the epitome of rock star indulgence and although it seemed to me as it if it
was permanently in need of a coat of a paint and a bit of building work, the
master of the house was as proud of his chattels as any 18th Century
Lord of the Manor. “My father loved the house and Stow,” says John’s son
Christopher, who put the house and most of its contents on the market after his
father’s death. “Everyone knew him there but they gave him plenty of privacy
and he was never bothered by anyone.”
About 90 of John’s bass guitars,
among them several instruments that he had played onstage with The Who, were
sold in 2003 at Sotheby’s Auction Room in South Kensington, along with a
similar number of guitars and many brass instruments. The sale, which also
included Who memorabilia, stage clothes, antique chandlery and
casts of game fish, raised about a million quid.
Watching
the auctioneer’s hammer come down alongside me were grieving fans eager to bid
for a little piece of John Entwistle. In the last
decade of his life they had seen him performing not only with The Who but also
with bands of his own, and the lack of renown he’d suffered in the early part
of his career was now a thing on the past. These loyal fans deeply appreciated not
just John’s immense skills as a musician but the touching allegiance he had
always shown towards them. Within
the Who fan community it had become well known that after both his own and Who shows,
John would often remain behind to socialise, happy to answer questions about his
equipment, his playing style and The Who, and sign autographs for one and all.
I cannot think of any other rock star of his stature who was more gracious to
fans, the lifeblood of the music industry after all, than John, nor fans who
appreciated this princely attitude so much.
The
last time I spoke to John was backstage at Wembley Arena after a Who show on
November 15, 2000. The hospitality area was crowded with men and women far
younger than me or the group and there was no sign of Townshend or Daltrey but,
as ever, John was in the midst of the throng. Grey-haired and looking older
than his 56 years, he was slightly tipsy I think, and when he saw me he offered
a warm smile of recognition.
“I
don’t know a soul here apart from you,” I said to him.
“Neither
do I,” he replied, laughing.
*
* *
Thanks to the
miracle of modern technology it is now possible for fans to hear John’s bass lines
isolated from the vocals, guitar and drums, at least on two Who’s Next songs, ‘Won’t Get Fooled
Again’ and ‘Baba O’Riley’, and watch him as he does it. These extraordinary
clips, made available for the first time on a bonus disc with the 2004 reissue
of the Who documentary film The Kids Are
Alright, can now be found on the internet and have, at the time of writing,
attracted 1,890,184 views for ‘WGFA’ and 479,209 for ‘Baba O’. John’s now
famous solos in The Who’s ‘Dreaming From The Waist’ and ‘5.15’ can also be
viewed, as can bassists who demonstrate John’s techniques.
Finally, a full length biography of
John is due to be published by Constable in October. Written by Paul Rees, a
former editor of Q and Kerrang!, The Ox: The Last
of the Great Rock Stars: The Authorised Biography of John Entwistle is sanctioned by John’s estate and
features contributions from Alison and Christopher,
his cousin and stepbrother, and John’s second wife, Maxene, along with many
from the Who camp, including manager Bill Curbishley and Who soundman Bob
Pridden who operated John’s studio at Quarwood. Rees also had full access to
John’s archives, including several chapters of an unpublished autobiography
that John had completed.
About time too.
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