The Who talk about JOHN ENTWISTLE

JOHN: I played the trumpet, and I formed like a Dixieland band in which there were three banjo players, so Pete decided that he was going to take up the guitar. Anyway he took up the guitar instead of the banjo and I carried on playing the trumpet for about a year, then I decided that the trumpet wasn’t really loud enough and I wanted to play the guitar y’know. I decided that I was going to play a six string guitar and didn’t really make much head way with that. So I figured oh bass must be a lot easier to play, so I took up the bass and found out it wasn’t easier to play, it’s easier to start with but when you actually get into it it’s just as hard as guitar. I made my own bass guitar and formed a group with Pete and a couple of other fellows at school, actually called The Scorpions. And just before I left school I met Roger walking down the road and I was with my wife - who was my girlfriend then - and I had this home made bass guitar under my arm. I was walking along with this bass guitar and Roger came up and said "I hear you play the bass guitar". So I said yeah so he said "well d’you wanna join my group" y’know. So they arranged an audition and I’ll always remember his words from when we finished playing a couple of numbers, he said ah "d’you think we’re good enough". And you know we played a couple of gigs as the band was, and then the rhythm guitarist left and I got in Pete.

KEITH: I think John’s *the* best bass player in Rock’n’Roll. He’s, I mean really he’s fantastic. He’s the most original, inventive, and probably out of all of us - with the possible exception of Pete - the most sort of musically gifted.

PETE: John and I were very good friends at school you know. But music’s one of those things that kind of brings people together against all possible odds you know. It really is true, it’s a great equaliser, and when you take the music away then you tend to just fly back on the opposite pole again. But when John and I talk about music today and when we talk about the band we come together again, and when we don’t talk about the band we find out that we’re completely different. We have different spiritual attitudes, different ideas about money like I feel very guilty about making a lot of money, John doesn’t. We have different attitudes about our families and things like that. I mean we’re different blokes, but we still have that same thing in common that we had many years ago.

PETE: Despite the fact that he’s the guy in the band that I’ve known the longest he’s probably the guy that I know the least well, have least opinions about. And over above everything else he’s the bloke that I think potentially must be the most, as erm, oh he hates it when I say this, he hates it when I call him an accomplished musician. You tend to get stuck in with the fact that with, you know, John channelled in through The Who. And of course John’s efforts on the side with a band like Rigormortis are really not necessarily efforts to expose himself as a musician but rather as a writer. So I don’t think the world has yet seen the musical sort of capabilities of the man.

JOHN: I think of myself as kind of a mixture of ah, bass guitarist, producer, composer. I play bass fundamentally, ah, and I’ve been recognised as a bass player, but now I want to be recognised to a larger extent as a writer. Production is a thing that comes with making records, you know it’s just the likes of a side line. If you record a thing, if you’ve written it and arranged it and performed on it then you want to be there when it’s being mixed so you produce it as well you know. I think if I hadn’t had a huge amount of ambition that I wouldn’t actually be in The Who now. I think the whole band was so ambitious that they actually made The Who what it is, into a solid thing. We’ve always wanted to out do ourselves all the time, and to reach even like sort of greater sort of like musical heights I suppose you could call it.

KEITH: Pete plays the most agressive chords and the most agressive guitar, with attack, I play the drums agressively and John plays sort of round all the agression.

JOHN: I think the thing that I’m most proud of is my following that I’ve got as a bass player. The amount of respect I’ve got around me as a bass player and the following that I’ve built up for my solo material. The Entwistle freaks are one thing that I’m really really proud of.

ROGER: If John just realised the things that he’s not good at. He’s probably the best bass player in the world, but then again he’s the best bass player in the world with The Who. He’s good at writing those songs, he’s very good in sort of black comedy ideas. The whole trouble is that John isn’t as good a singer. He’s a worse singer than I am.

JOHN: I’ve written a song which is a tongue in cheek falsetto ballad which is on The Ox album. I think it’s something that I’ve always wanted to, I’ve always wanted to sing in that way and I’ve never had the opportunity to.

KEITH: John, you know John appears very quiet and subdued but he’s like a steam roller once he gets going. I mean that’s why we call him The Ox. I can’t keep up with him when he’s clubbing, I mean it’s days.

JOHN: I was incredibly lazy at the beginning of the career, which got me the reputation of being quiet. I suppose in a way I am quiet, I like to have moments where I don’t say anything. When I’m travelling I don’t like to talk, things like that. I’m quiet in a few ways but I’ve got a lot more to say nowadays than I did before. But I still feel that I don’t particularly want the rest of the group to know what I’m thinking. I dunno why it is, but that’s the way I usually feel. So I suppose I’ve got a reputation of being quiet in that way as well. I don’t actually speak up. I speak up if something goes wrong, vitally wrong, but I think being a Libra I just chug along and try and stay well balanced. And try and let as few things as possible interfere with me.

JOHN: I think the different stage presences of the group happened partly by accident and partly by actually trying to create them. I found that I could always play better when I wasn’t actually moving about. I had to spend an awful lot of time standing at the microphone because I was doing some lead vocals and an awful lot of backing vocals in the early days. And I started getting paranoia because people, you know, the kids in the front row weren’t screaming out my name. So I figured, well, I’ll try moving. So I tried moving and they screamed my name out, so I thought to myself, well, now I know I’ll stop moving again. So I stopped moving once I knew that they’d scream at me if I started moving. Then it didn’t matter anymore. I could go back to playing bass and trying to hold the band together, which I could do better from a standing position.

PETE: John Entwistle might be the visual anchor on the stage but Roger is the actual anchor.