The Tapes Archive

Hotel Operator: Good afternoon, Mayflower Hotel.

Marc Allan: John Entwistle, please?

Hotel Operator: What is the last name, please?

Marc Allan: Entwistle, E-N-T-W-I-S-T-L-E.

Hotel Operator: Not registered.

Marc Allan: Do you have a Ken Jones there, because.

Hotel Operator: Yeah, I think it is the Mr. Otherthing?

Marc Allan: He should be with Ken Jones, his partner.

Hotel Operator: No, I think Otherthing is Entwistle.

Marc Allan: I’m sorry?

Hotel Operator: He’s registered as Mr. Otherthing?

Marc Allan: Oh, okay. Hold on.

John Entwistle: Hello?

Marc Allan: Hi, is this John?

John Entwistle: Yeah, speaking.

Marc Allan: Marc Allan.

John Entwistle: Hi.

Marc Allan: Hi, we okay to talk now?

John Entwistle: Yeah fine.

Marc Allan: Great. How are you?

John Entwistle: Okay.

Marc Allan: I remember you being on the road years ago, as a solo artist in, I want to say mid-70s or so. And I don’t think a tour that you’ve done as a solo act has passed my way since, so kind of…

John Entwistle: Well I did a tour with Rat Race Choir, and then one with a band called The Rock. That was definitely about ’87, ’88. This is my fourth actually, fourth.

Marc Allan: Is that right? Anyway will you tell me some about this tour? I mean, I’ve gotten really no background information. So what are you, I take it you’re playing a mix of things you wrote for the Who and your own solo stuff and like that, can you just tell me what you’re up to on this tour?

John Entwistle: Yeah, I’m actually selling an album that never got released about eight years ago called The Rock, we’re selling that on the tour. Three or four songs from that.

Marc Allan: What kind of a band do you have?

John Entwistle: A good one.

Marc Allan: I hope so. But, how big a band?

John Entwistle: It’s just four. Myself, Steve Luongo, that’s L-U-O-N-G-O, on drums. And Godfrey Townsend on guitar, and Alan St. Jon, S-T-J-O-N on keyboards. So we got a small band. But the smaller the band, the more freedom you get, really.

Marc Allan: Are you doing all the vocals?

John Entwistle: No, we’re splitting it between us, we all do vocals.

Marc Allan: As far as The Who tunes you’re doing, are they strictly the ones that you wrote?

John Entwistle: I think there are only two that are, I think we’d be using some of ‘I Can See For Miles‘ as part of a medley and ‘The Real Me’ which is a bass solo.

Marc Allan: Yeah, and since you brought that up, I think that that’s like the perfect song that shows what you did with the Who that people never, either never fully realized or never fully appreciated. I mean, that is a bass song more than anything else. And I think everybody has this idea that it was guitar band. But it really was a bass band, wasn’t it?

John Entwistle: The bass, for some reason, is mostly me.

Marc Allan: Right.

John Entwistle: I mean, I played all the brass on that, as well.

Marc Allan: Oh is that right, I didn’t know that. Can you talk about your role, and do you feel like you were underappreciated, and that you’re underrated as far as what you’ve contributed?

John Entwistle: Well yeah, I guess I was, always have. I was appreciated by my fellow musicians, who knew what I was doing. But the general public didn’t really know what I was actually sort of attributing there.

Marc Allan: Were you appreciated by the band?

John Entwistle: Yeah, but they didn’t particularly care for the way I tell people about it.

Marc Allan: No. I was thinking about that and it seems to me that on Odds & Sods there’s kind of an oblique reference on ‘Postcard‘, where Pete says, “Oh, he’s mixing it, “and that’s the reason he’s only playing one chord” “in the whole song.” But it sort of like, it doesn’t say, well, really this song is John and this is…

John Entwistle: Yeah.

Marc Allan: If you look throughout our songs you will find that a lot of our songs are held together by the bass.

John Entwistle: I hate to sound sour grapes about it, I don’t go around telling everybody, “No, it was me. It was me. It was me.” I think that would be a bit…

Marc Allan: Yeah, but it is true. How did you come to pick up a bass, because when you started out you were playing trumpet, right?

John Entwistle: Well, I started on piano.

Marc Allan: Piano?

John Entwistle: I was actually convinced by my father when I was 11, that I should actually carry on teaching myself to play the piano, but I’d really like to play the trumpet. Basically, there were too many trumpet players around then, ’cause it was jazz players.

Marc Allan: Right.

John Entwistle: The school orchestra gave me a French horn instead, so I took up classical horn. And I was never really happy with jazz, you know? But rock and roll… I starting discovering rock and roll. I was just starting out, yeah. I really wanted a change of instrument. No one wanted a trumpet player in their band. If I’d been a sax player, okay, but I was a trumpet player, and that didn’t fit. So I made myself a bass guitar.

Marc Allan: You made yourself a bass guitar?

John Entwistle: Yeah, yeah, I couldn’t afford to buy one, so I made it. It didn’t live very long. I might as well have just bought one. But then I managed to buy a stolen body, and some stolen parts. I made myself one for about 8 pounds. We had a local factory Fenton Wire, used to be Burns Wire. It was just around the corner from where I lived, so I managed to procure the parts. Ended up with, well I suppose you could call it a real bass. It wasn’t exactly wonderful, but it was…

Marc Allan: And what made you want to play the bass?

John Entwistle: Basically, the sound of it. Yeah.

Marc Allan: Really? I was a really bad bass player in a lot of bad bands when I was a kid.

 John Entwistle: I always thought that Duane Eddy played bass.

Marc Allan: Uh-huh.

John Entwistle: I know he played a lot of low parts, and I liked Duane Eddy, and the first couple of albums that he did. I always felt the bass was kind of like, more sinister, more phallic.

Marc Allan: Yeah, but usually the people who pick up the bass are kind of like the last guy to get into the band. You know? It’s like, we need a bass player, you play bass.

John Entwistle: That was kind of the opposite for me.

Marc Allan: Yeah, yeah, which is really interesting. Were you immediately good at it? I mean, was it a hard instrument for you to master?

John Entwistle: I picked it up pretty quickly, because I had a music background, I’d been reading music since I was six. I just fell right into it. It took me a little while to build up my own playing style. But, that came by mistake. I saw this bass player playing with his first two fingers, I figured, well, I should be able to do that better, you see, because I played Chopin with my right hand, Fletcher with my left, when I played piano. So I started playing with two fingers. I met the guy a couple of years later. I was using all four fingers by then, or five fingers. He was amazed at my fingerstyle, and I said, “Well, I got it from you anyway. You know, when I saw you.” And he said, “Oh, no, I always play with my thumb.” He said, “I had a big blister on my thumb,” “so I played with my first finger.” “When that got blistered, I played with my second.” It was all a fallacy.

Marc Allan: Oh, that’s a pretty funny story. I like that. When you write songs, do you write on the bass?

John Entwistle: Sometimes. Usually I write on keyboards, or eight-string bass if it’s that style of song.

Marc Allan: Wow, so let me throw out a couple of song titles of yours, and tell me… I mean, like, ‘My Wife.‘ How did you write that one?

John Entwistle: That was a weird one. I actually wrote that with no instrument at all. I’d had an argument with my wife, and I took my two Scottish deerhounds for a walk, and I made up some imaginary wife that was chasing me, and it kind of came from that. I had the tune and the words in my head at the same time.

Marc Allan: ‘Boris the Spider‘, that must have been written on bass, right?

John Entwistle: That was on bass, but that was kind of an instrument song. I was embarrassed that I hadn’t written another song, so I made it up as I went along.

Marc Allan: Uh-huh. And now, tell us one more. ‘Heaven and Hell.’

John Entwistle: “Heaven and Hell’, that was written on bass. I wrote ‘Cousin Kevin‘, from Tommy, on piano. Acoustic piano. And a lot of the others, obviously the ones where the eight-string figures, like ‘Success Story‘, that was written on eight-string. But most of them are the piano or some kind of synthesizer.

Marc Allan: How long, with people not really recognizing your contributions to The Who music, do you think people are aware, I mean, especially toward the later days of The Who, I think you wrote probably the best songs that ended up on the albums. Do you think people are aware that you are a songwriter and a contributor in that way?

John Entwistle: Well, I think so, yeah. I mean, it gets a little difficult now, because everything comes out on CD, and the writing’s much smaller. You can’t get as much info on there.

Marc Allan: Yeah.

John Entwistle: Yeah, I’d say a lot of people have forgotten that I actually played all the horns and brass on Tommy, and Quadrophenia. I have a soundtrack out with films. That kind of upsets me a little bit, but I mean, you can’t fit everything on a CD.

Marc Allan: So do you feel like, when you’re on this tour, that maybe people are getting a rediscovery of John Entwistle, that maybe they were–

John Entwistle: I think they are, yeah, for what I’ve done, there’s a couple of classics so far. Because I get a lot more room, on this tour, to stretch out and play some bass solos. Well, they’re not really bass solos, they’re bass guitar solos. I think a bass solo is pretty boring. But bass guitar solos aren’t.

Marc Allan: How do you differentiate that?

John Entwistle: Bass guitar sounds like a guitar, it’s just an octave lower. As far as bass is concerned, it’s a bass-y sound, you know, a boom-y sound.

Marc Allan: Are there other bass players that you admire?

John Entwistle: Not really. I mean, there are a lot of bass players that are well along the same lines as me, but a little later then I did. Chris Squire, Billy Sheehan they all play kind of a lead bass sound. It’s not really the same sound as myself. I use mostly guitar amps on the top amp. I have my clean bass amp down at the bottom, but it’s more the guitar amplifier. So when the guitar is plugged into it, I get an amazing sound.

Marc Allan: You mentioned Tommy, have you seen the Broadway show?

John Entwistle: Several times, yeah.

Marc Allan: And your impression?

John Entwistle: It’s pretty good for Broadway, it’s about as rock and roll as you’ll get for Broadway, I guess. The extra song, uh, I don’t know.

Marc Allan: Yeah. And how about the changes of the lyrics?

John Entwistle: Sorry?

Marc Allan: I mean, you know, Tommy is now kind of a normal guy, instead of the messiah.

John Entwistle: I don’t know, I guess it was a bad week. It’s, I don’t know…

Marc Allan: I don’t know, I listened to it when they sing, ‘Freedom lies here in normality, and I’m free’, and I think, I don’t know, I can’t really listen to this, you know? To me it kind of ruins what you guys had created, and I wonder how you felt about it.

John Entwistle: I don’t know it’s… Tommy put a suit on.

Marc Allan: Tommy’s grown up and gotten a job, I guess. You’ve seen it several times, though, so obviously you must like it.

John Entwistle: I saw the touring version in L.A., I almost got to see the German version, but I had a severe reaction to the program.

Marc Allan: Okay. I read something, that you’re working on some books about the history of The Who.

John Entwistle: It’s not a history, it’s more like our story from my point of view. It’s a funny book, it’s not a serious, like, tear The Who apart. They’re gone.

Marc Allan: Are there misconceptions that you think should be cleared up about The Who.

John Entwistle: There are thousands, yeah. Because most of the people who’ve wrote books about The Who, I’ve never even met before.

Marc Allan: Would you like to clear up one or two now?

John Entwistle: No.

Marc Allan: No? Okay. All right.

John Entwistle: It sounds much better when it’s written in a funny way, rather than… I tend to rant and rave when I talk about The Who, now.

Marc Allan: All right. Is it three books? Did I read that right?

John Entwistle: Yeah, I’m trying to get the first one finished by the end of this year, but hopefully nothing will crop up to make me put it back on the shelf again.

Marc Allan: And do you have a publisher?

John Entwistle: There are several interested, but I haven’t actually started passing it around yet.

Marc Allan: You’ve got some reissues, or new discs in the works?

John Entwistle: There’s a remix. It’s just called Entwistle, which is a selection of songs from the solo albums. And then, a few months after that, I believe they’re gonna release the solo albums in the right order.

Marc Allan: Is that right? Okay. Is that all on Rhino?

John Entwistle: Yeah.

Marc Allan: Oh, okay.

John Entwistle: It’s on Repertoire in Europe.

Marc Allan: What will people learn about you from the solo albums, do you think? I mean, it’s been a long time since I’ve listened to a couple of them, so I’m wondering–

John Entwistle: You probably thought I’m a little strange. No, it’s strange because I get a lot of young bands in my studio. I listen to their stuff because they’re obviously recording there. And I have a large 20-foot long bar that the bands come into, so I subject them to some of my stuff, and they can’t actually believe that it’s 20 years old, because it sounds… A lot of new bands are playing with the same chords that I did.

Marc Allan: And just a couple other things, and I’ll let you go. You’re in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and I wonder what you think of the idea of a Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and what you think the criteria should be for people to get in.

John Entwistle: I didn’t catch the last part.

Marc Allan: Oh, what should be the criteria for people to get into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame?

John Entwistle: I don’t know. I guess they probably got it right. Most of the people there, they’ve been going for, like, 25 years, I think the limit is.

Marc Allan: Mm-hmm, right.

John Entwistle: If you’re still around after that amount of time, I think that should get you in.

Marc Allan: Should that be the only criteria, or should there be more than that?

John Entwistle: No, I think they should have made some very, very strong contribution to rock and roll.

Marc Allan: And what do you think of the hall, in general? Have you been there?

John Entwistle: I’d seen it when it was partly finished, I had a private tour around there. So I haven’t seen it in its full glory, but I’m supposed to be doing an album signing, the album that we’re selling on the tour, The Rock, I’m supposed to be doing that at the Hall of Fame, so I guess I’ll see it then.

Marc Allan: Do you like the idea of having a hall of fame for rock and roll?

John Entwistle: Well, if baseball’s got one, we should have one.

Marc Allan: Yeah, I guess so, but it’s sort of like Tommy in a suit, maybe, you know? I don’t know. Roger Daltrey, a couple of years ago, he said that you wear two hearing aids, is that correct?

John Entwistle: I tried, but it doesn’t work. No, I mean, but he should. He’s got absolutely no highs left at all. I have a hearing problem, but it didn’t happen. For some reason that says it did. I had absolutely perfect hearing when The Who stopped. I had my hearing tested, and it was above average. I missed out on one frequency, which was a high frequency, but the equipment was humming, but they wouldn’t allow me the frequency. But I lost three or four dB in each ear, and a muscle closing. There’s a muscle that closes when you hear a loud noise, and those muscles are permanently closed now, because I spent a whole day listening to a click track, through headphones, on a recording session. Headphones are the most dangerous thing in the world. I refuse to wear them in the studio, now, I just play in the control room. Plug straight into the booth. My hearing has gone down about three or four dB, but it’s dropped down perfectly flat, so I can still produce records. I listen to music. It’s just basically conversation.

Marc Allan: Well, you’re doing pretty well with me, and I tend to mumble a lot, so that’s not bad at all.

John Entwistle: It’s basically a slight whistle over closed muscles, but I’m not blaming rock and roll for that, I’m blaming the headphones. I’m blaming modern click tracks.

Marc Allan: And finally, I don’t know if you’ll want to do this, if you’ll indulge me, would you tell me, if people wanted to really appreciate what a great bass player you are, what are the five songs that you’ve done, that they should listen to?

John Entwistle: Oh, five songs?

Marc Allan: Well, 10 songs, however many you want to mention, I don’t care. But I usually just like to leave it to five, but whatever you like.

John Entwistle: Some of the things I’m playing live, at least, ‘The Real Me.’ I mean, I do a lot better stuff on stage then I’ve done on record. Parts of Quadrophenia. As far as my solo albums are concerned, I think probably, I was actually pumped to play ‘Tongue and Cheek’. ‘Dancing Master’, ‘Too Late the Hero’. Though, really, if you want to hear me play some silly bass, come and watch me in concert, that’s when I play it.

Marc Allan: Why is that? Are you just more comfortable in a live setting?

John Entwistle: No, it doesn’t fit on the records.

Marc Allan: How?

John Entwistle: When we did live stuff, we had about 30 minutes at the end there, where we just played stuff off the top of our head, and that gave us a chance to show where we could really play. You can’t overindulge on a record.

Marc Allan: Anything else you want me to tell people that we haven’t covered?

John Entwistle: No, did we cover the art show?

Marc Allan: No. Oh, that’s right. That art show was supposed to come here, I thought, to Indianapolis, and I don’t think it did.

John Entwistle: It’s kind of running about a month after The Who, the tour started. It should be starting in Cleveland, now. I’m doing a signing at Hall of Fame, and the art show is opposite the Hall of Fame. This is a lithograph that I’ve… After I did The Who by Numbers cover, it got me interested in art, again.

Marc Allan: Is this gallery out of Colorado?

John Entwistle: Yeah, Walnut Street.

Marc Allan: Right, Walnut Street. Yeah, Lara Everly is a friend of mine, so I got a flyer from her a while back saying that show was going to come here, but it never did, so I guess it got delayed, or something.

John Entwistle: Sorry, where are you based from?

Marc Allan: Indianapolis.

John Entwistle: Indianapolis.

Marc Allan: But at any rate, so these are lithographs of different pictures that you’ve drawn of music?

John Entwistle: Yes, they’re cartoons.

Marc Allan: Oh, cartoons.

John Entwistle: Cartoons of rock stars.

Marc Allan: Is there a Keith Moon cartoon in the collection?

John Entwistle: Yeah, there’s a couple of imaginary ancestors that I threw in there.

Marc Allan: I could call Walnut Street Gallery, and they’ll know when it’s coming to town, right?

John Entwistle: Yeah, yeah.

Marc Allan: Yeah, because it’s not traveling with you, right?

John Entwistle: After the music tour’s finished, I might have to visit a few places that I’ve missed, because we couldn’t really tie them all up at the same time as the concert. We try as close as we can.

Marc Allan: Well, I will definitely mention that, and I appreciate your time. Good luck with the tour, hope everything goes well, and I’ll see you in a week or so.

John Entwistle: Okay.

Marc Allan: Thank you very much.

John Entwistle: Thank you.