Listen to the John Entwistle interview

Rock ‘n’ roll may have produced a greater bass guitarist than John Entwistle, though no one comes immediately to mind.

There are bassists in his league: Chris Squire of Yes; Les Claypool of Primus; Billy Sheehan (most recently of Mr. Big); and funk players Bootsy Collins, Larry Graham and Louis Johnson. Like Entwistle, all of them elevated their rhythm instrument to lead status.

But Entwistle gets my MVP vote for holding The Who together. Surrounded by three creative but volatile rock stars hell-bent on grabbing attention, Entwistle quietly made himself indispensable. Careful listeners knew that while guitarist Pete Townshend windmilled his arm, Roger Daltrey twirled his microphone and Keith Moon bashed his drum kit, Entwistle merely kept the band going – all the way to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. The Who was inducted in 1990.

Entwistle contributed a number of excellent songs to The Who’s repertoire, including Heaven and Hell, My Wife, Cousin Kevin, Fiddle About and Boris the Spider. In the band’s final years, his songs – You, Had Enough, Trick of the Light – rivaled Townshend’s for quality. Beyond that, he also played all the brass instruments on The Who’s records, drew the connect-the-dots cover for the 1975 album The Who By Numbers and found the time to make five solo albums.

Entwistle rarely received the recognition he deserved – in part, he says, because bass players “can’t overindulge on a record” the way they might in concert.

“I do a lot better stuff on stage than I’ve done on record,” he says by phone from New York in an obvious but truthful plug for his show Wednesday at Circle Centre’s World Mardi Gras. “But really, if you want to hear me play some silly bass, come and watch me in concert.” It’s a chance for a second look at Entwistle on this, his fourth solo tour. (Tickets are $12; call (317) 630-5483 for more information.)

“I was appreciated by my fellow musicians, who knew what I was doing,” he says. “But the general public didn’t really know.” Did the band appreciate him? “Yeah, but they didn’t particularly go out of their way to tell people about it,” he says, laughing. “I hate to sound sour grapes. I don’t go around telling everybody, `It was me, it was me, it was me.’ “

But surprisingly often, it was. Listen to The Real Me on the Quadrophenia album. The music is almost entirely bass and brass.

All Entwistle.

He’s 51 now, a little hard of hearing (he blames this on wearing headphones in the recording studio, not on performing loud concerts) but still enjoying music, as he has for the past 45 years.

Starting with piano at 6, Entwistle could read music and play the piano. “I managed to convince my mother when I was 11 that I could actually carry on teaching myself to play piano,” he says. “I thought I might like to play the trumpet. Basically, there were too many trumpet players around then, because it was jazz days. The school orchestra gave me a French horn instead, so I took up classical horn.”But I was never really happy with jazz. I started discovering rock and roll. I made myself a bass guitar.”

Made a bass guitar? “I couldn’t afford to buy one, so I made it. It didn’t live very long. I managed to buy a stolen body and some stolen parts and made myself one for about 8 pounds. We had a local factory . . .just around the corner from where I lived. So I managed to procure the parts.”

He liked the bass for its sound. “I always thought Duane Eddy played bass,” he says, recalling the legendary inventor of the twangy guitar sound. “He played a lot of low parts. I liked Duane Eddy, the first couple of albums that he did. I always felt the bass was more sinister, more phallic.”

Entwistle developed his style – an agile, involved, lead guitar-like sound – quite by mistake. “I saw this bass player playing” – plucking the strings – “with his first two fingers,” he says. “I figured, well, I should be able to do that dead easy. I played trumpet with my right hand, French horn with my left and I played piano. So I started playing with two fingers.

“I met the guy a couple of years later – I was using all five fingers by then – and he was amazed at my finger style. I said, `I got it from you, anyway.’ And he said, `Oh, no, I always played with my thumb. When I had a big blister on my thumb, I played with my first finger. When that got a blister, I played with my second finger.’ It was all a fallacy.”

Fallacy or not, it worked for Entwistle. In clubs on this tour, audiences get a close-up look at his technique. They’ll also get to hear some Who classics (I Can See for Miles and The Real Me are the only Townshend compositions he performs with his four-piece band) and songs from his solo albums.

Projects aplenty

Meanwhile, Entwistle is keeping busy with several side projects. Walnut Street Gallery of Fort Collins, Colo., has a traveling exhibit of his rock and roll caricatures on the road now (it’s expected in Indianapolis by early summer). And he’s writing the first of three books on The Who “from my point of view.”

When Entwistle talks about The Who, it’s with fondness and some irritation. Asked about the Broadway musical version of The Who’s Tommy, he says he’s seen the show several times.

“It’s about as rock and roll as you’ll get for Broadway, I guess,” he says. The overall production is “Tommy with a suit on.” And as for Townshend’s adaptation, which turns the messiah-like Tommy of 1969 into a comparatively mainstream, normal character, he hesitates to criticize.

“I dunno, I guess it was a bad week,” Entwistle quips. Or maybe he’s just saving his best comments for the books, the first of which he hopes to finish by year’s end. “It’s a funny book,” he says. “It’s not a serious, tear-The-Who-apart book.”

But it will clear up misconceptions about the band, one of rock’s best and also one of its most combustible. Would Entwistle like to clear up anything during this interview? “No,” he says with a laugh. “It sounds much better when it’s written in a funny way. I tend to rant and rave when I talk about The Who now.”