John Entwistle stood still while the Who smashed things around him
Bill Wyman called him the quietest man in private and the loudest on stage. While Pete Townshend and Keith Moon destroyed instruments, John Entwistle barely moved, yet he was the only trained musician in the Who, and he helped push the band toward towering Marshall stacks just so he could hear his bass.
Entwistle was born in Hammersmith on 9 October 1944, an only child whose trumpet-playing father and piano-playing mother split up soon afterwards. Divorce was rare in the 1940s, and he grew up reserved at his grandparents' house in South Acton. Piano lessons from age 7 bored him; at grammar school he moved to trumpet and then French horn in the Middlesex Schools Orchestra. There he met Townshend, and the pair formed a trad jazz band that managed a single gig.
Rock and roll drowned out his trumpet, so he tried guitar. Large fingers and a love of Duane Eddy's low twang sent him to bass instead, and he built his first instrument at home. In the Detours he lobbied for Townshend to join. While still working as a tax clerk he saw the group become the Who, and when the band wanted the blond Roger Daltrey to stand out, Entwistle dyed his light brown hair black and kept it that way until the early 1980s.
His nickname the Ox came from his apparent ability to outlast everyone at eating and drinking; Thunderfingers came later. He played French horn on Pictures of Lily and across Tommy, and layered horns for tracks like 5:15. Townshend asked him to write the nasty songs for Tommy that he himself found uncomfortable, and Entwistle's darker humour produced Boris the Spider and My Wife. Frustrated that Daltrey sang his songs, he released Smash Your Head Against the Wall in 1971, the first solo album by any member; a young Roy Thomas Baker engineered it on a piano Freddie Mercury later used for Bohemian Rhapsody.
He drew the cover of The Who by Numbers for £30, compared with £16,000 for Quadrophenia. Rolling Stone readers voted him the greatest bassist ever in 2011. He died on 27 June 2002.
Source: John Entwistle
