Who #8: You mess with the Ox, you get the horns
Or, Big Johnny Twinkle can handcuff me to the bed
Just kidding. Ha ha ha ha. …ha.
My dad says I go for the quiet ones. That’s news to me, because I think the ones I go for don’t always stay quiet, for better or worse. But I do take a shine to that John Alec Entwistle, who famously wrote a song for 1981’s Face Dances called “The Quiet One.”
His birthday happens to be 9 October, the same as John Lennon's (but four years later). Guess I'm consistent if nothing else.
For forty years he stood onstage without breaking a thing, nothing moving but his hands, just playing his bass guitar excellently. (And he was adamant about calling it a bass *guitar*. We stan a persnickety king.) So excellently that it earned him two nicknames, the titular one and ‘Thunderfingers.’ Now that sounds like a Bond film from which I would take some carnal enjoyment.
He was also a consummate brass player like his dad, augmenting tracks with French horn, trumpet, and the like. Possibly my favorite example is “Whiskey Man” from A Quick One. Such a creative song, chordally and instrumentally, with a horn solo to rival Siegfried’s. While I love his enhancements on Townshend compositions, it’s extra special when they appear in his own work because they aren’t mere enhancements: they’re built in. I've talked about “My Wife,” but when I tell you I go around singing it constantly.
His vocal range was the widest of all of theirs. His falsetto is on perfect display at the end of "A Quick One, While He's Away" (wherein I for one am absolutely seduced by his turn as Ivor the Engine Driver) and his guttural low voice on "Boris the Spider," among others. Which is the tune I sing whenever I find a spider in my flat. He was the Walt Whitman of rock & roll.
He didn't have a big personality, but he did have a talent for one-liners, like his description of the sunrise at the end of their Woodstock set: "God was our lighting man." Don't be fooled by the deadpan, either, because he could party with the best of them, and he really loved the people he loved.
His emo-goth-kid vibes were way ahead of their time. I love how into eyeliner he was (bonus points for the coat that makes him look like a feudal conqueror), and how smiling obviously didn't come naturally, and how he made that skeleton suit a mantle that Phoebe Bridgers and Harry Styles feel compelled to carry into the present day. And not to get us ahead of ourselves, but the photo for Who #10 takes me out.
I mean, look at him. I want him to play me like he plays that wack-ass bass guitar. Also I want those shoes.