No Subject

John Entwistle interview, late January 1971 in his house in West London 
which *contains the beginnings of a collection of small-arms replicas and 
suits of armour and a small studio* [note: 'small arms' are guns, not 
literally *arms*, in case you were wondering, because you do wonder, with 
John… ;)
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The first two songs I wrote were Boris the Spider and Whiskey Man and they 
had this sort of child-like quality, even the tunes were simple and easy to 
remember, and our manager said to me, 'Why don't we record an LP for 
children?' because it seemed that my songs really appealed to kids. So I 
wrote about fifteen songs for this album and they all ended up as b-sides.

*But they're not simply childish, they're also very perceptive, as in the 
way that Silas Stingy displays a very clear understanding of the
implications of Silas' greed, and as a result they can also be very cruel 
and morbid in the way that only such perception allows.*

I don't think I'm morbid or cruel, it's just that when I write songs I can't 
help using those kind of ideas. My solo album, well, part of it, deals with 
someone dying, well, it's about death and what happens afterwards. But the 
end is really piss-take. I write about death and cruelty but I don't think 
I'm morbid or cruel, and I put this joke ending on to blow all the ideas 
about how my mind works. 'Cause they love doing that in the States, working 
out how your mind works.

*Did you find it was necessary to write your own album because The Who
weren't really into your music?*

It was too overcrowded. The Who play in the Townshend style, we've developed 
a style in albums and on stage that really stems from Pete's writing and 
playing. Up till now I've never written numbers that could be performed on a 
stage because they didn't have any steady beat at all, a lot of it stemmed 
from the classical music, you know, and The Who usually speed my numbers up 
so you can't hear the chord changes. My influences are mostly classical, 
Wagner and Mussogorsky, I don't listen to much pop or rock. Silas Stingy 
wouldn't have come off on stage at all. It was supposed to be a round, you 
know 'Money, money, money bags' and somebody starting in later. We couldn't  
even record it properly like that.

*There's some incredible organ in that. Who played it?*

Pete, but I was a bit worried about that because he kept sticking in minors 
where there should have been majors, you know. Immediately The Who are 
presented with one of my numbers they expect it to be something morbid. I 
got off the morbid bit for about six months and Kit Lambert was really 
worried, he said 'write some more horror numbers, write some more horror 
numbers'

*How did you come to write your first song?*

We were a bit short of money and our manager got this publishing thing
together with Essex Music where we were assigned to write two numbers for an 
advance of about five hundred nicker, and everybody was supposed to write 
two numbers for AQO. Keith managed his two and Roger managed one, and I 
composed Whiskey Man, which was all the ideas for tunes in my head all 
rolled into one, on a stereo tape-recorder, a Vortexion, that I'd bought, 
but we all more or less left it to Pete. I still had one more number to 
write, so I went out and got drunk down the Scotch Club with Bill Wyman and 
we started talking about spiders and why they frighten people and that gave 
me an idea for a song. Once I had the idea, it only took me about ten 
minutes. But there really isn't room for two composers in The Who, I could 
just about squeeze two on to an album, I wrote the two 'sick' numbers on the 
opera, but I was asked to write those. Pete told me that there were two, as
he said, 'traumatic experiences' that the child had other than acid, and one 
was being raped by his homosexual uncle and the other was being bullied by 
his little cousin. So I put all the information I had in my head about 
children's cruelty and the experiences I'd suffered meself as a kid and 
stuck it in the song. People thought 'that's really sick' but it isn't, it's 
how children are. Pete came to us with the idea, that was about three years 
ago, and gave us all bits to do. I could have done more but it was going to 
be a single album, but the story just didn't work out. I was getting very 
depressed because I'd started writing a lot more than usual and I knew there 
wouldn't be channels for them to go out in The Who. I knew The Who would 
most likely do them different from how I had them in my head, for a start,
so I went out and booked the studio time and got down to it. If I hadn't 
done it I'd most likely be thinking quite seriously of leaving the group; as 
it is I've started writing a second album, and I want to write a symphony.

*Wouldn't you want to start doing live performances of your songs or are you 
happy just to record them?*

If any of these numbers work out on stage, we'd most probably do them on 
stage, and that'll be the outlet. To do most of them you'd have to form a 
nine-piece group anyway; on the album I play everything except guitar.

*Because there's this great emphasis in The Who on live performance and 
touring, when we spoke to Roger he said, 'we're never going to stop 
touring'. But that only concerns you as a member of The Who and not as a 
separate composer.*

Yeah. I mean, we haven't been back to the states now for six months and it's 
really showing in the group. You run out of ideas when you're not working; 
well, I do, and Pete does too. No, we can't stop touring.

*A lot of groups today find it a drag to play live or to tour. Roger had no 
sympathy for groups like that; how do you feel?*

We find that it cuts our time down a lot. If you've got to play and record 
and compose, you know, it's pretty hard. But I find it pretty easy to 
compose in the States and Pete does quite a lot of composing in the States. 
I find that I haven't got the responsibilities of having the house and being 
married, taking the dogs out and little things like that. Pete spends a lot 
of time in his hotel room just sort of strumming on his acoustics and 
working things out, you know. I do the same. Take a little cassette 
tape-recorder around with you and sing your ideas into it. We usually take a 
party of four road managers,  a production manager, a booking man, there's 
usually ten Englishmen going round in the States. Americans have a different
sense of humour, their whole way of life is different. They're aliens and 
you're aliens to them and you can't mix with that sort of person, so you're 
thrown together and you spend a lot of time in hotel rooms and so on. You 
can do a lot of work in that atmosphere.

*It's strange that your songs go down so well in the States, because their 
humour seems very English.*

Perhaps that's why they like them, and then it's only among a small number 
of people, it's more or less a cult following.

*Things like Silas Stingy portray very English scenes*

I wrote that about meself. The rest of the group used to take the mickey 
because I was the first one to buy a house, and I found it very hard going 
'cause we had ridiculous expenses and our money wasn't that big, so I saved 
every penny to put a deposit on the house and buy furniture. That was in 
'67. It was this house, actually, but it's getting too small. So Silas 
Stingy buying a house and a watchdog and a safe is exactly what happened to 
me.

*Are a lot of your songs autobiographical? You mentioned Cousin Kevin*

Whiskey Man, I got the idea from a film, I think it was called Night of the 
Tiger, about this town drunk who was also the villain and when he got shot, 
at the end, he said 'Whiskey man, they got us both.' I've been away has 
nothing to do with me, it's about someone coming back from prison, we did 
that in thirty minutes, it was just me and Keith. The others had gone to a 
pub and we did the B-side. Jekyll and Hyde was written about Keith Moon. The 
potion was vodka. I drew a comic strip about it, you know, kindly Dr Moon 
changes to Mr Hyde, and wrote the song afterwards. Someone's Coming was 
written about when I started going out with my wife, she was fourteen and I 
was still at school and we had those sort of problems. Postcard's written 
about touring in various countries. The stuff on my LP really isn't written 
from personal experience at all. The important thing on that is the chord
changes. I've bought myself an electric piano and a drum kit, so I can write 
a more rhythmic music than I could when I composed on bass. I work out chord 
modulations that I find pleasing and build the songs around them. The LP is 
just chord changes that I like. I try not to steal but I know that some of 
what I write is very influenced by what I listen to. The beginning of Heaven 
and Hell, the brass introduction, I discovered is very similar to the theme 
of Tubby the Tuba, which is like an introduction to classical music for 
children, and I know people will say that a lot of the LP is influenced by 
Chicago, but it was just that they were doing what I wanted to do with the 
brass and block chords, though I'd written most of the songs before I came
across Chicago.

*When did you start playing in a group?*

I was at school, I was about thirteen, and Pete and I were playing in a 
Dixieland band., He played banjo and I played the trumpet. When Pete took up 
guitar, about two years later, we formed another band. I'd built myself a 
bass guitar, Pete had an acoustic with a little pick-up on it and we had a 
drummer and vocalist who were in my form at school, and we did all the old 
shadows stuff. We were getting nowhere fast so I left and joined Roger's 
group. He was getting thirty bob a night playing firms' outings. He'd been 
expelled from our school, and I met him walking down the street one day and 
he said 'Here, you can play the bass guitar', which was pretty obvious 
'cause I was carrying one under me arm. He said 'Our group needs a bass 
guitarist, do you want to audition?' Roger was on lead, and we got rid of 
the rhythm  uitarist 'cause he only knew three chords. I got Pete to come
over and play with our group and he was impressed with our amplifiers, two 
Vox 15s and joined. Doug Sanden [sic] joined us as a drummer, he was ten 
times better than we were but he didn't get any better and eventually we 
overtook him. We used to play down the White Hart Acton, fighting to be top 
of the circuit at ten quid a night. Managed by the bloke who put on the 
promotion, who took ten percent of what he was paying us. We played five 
nights a week after work. We'd play everything, we'd open with a few guitar 
numbers, then Pete would play the one-finger organ and we'd do a few 
Tornados numbers, and then we'd got a singer who'd do country and western, 
then we'd do some John Barry Seven numbers and I'd change to trumpet, and 
then the couple of Dixieland numbers with Roger on trombone. Then when the 
Beatles came along Roger switched to singer, because our other singer had 
left, 'cause he and Roger were always fighting, and Pete, who had been on
rhythm, switched to lead - but he was still basically a rhythm  guitarist, 
always has been. We played Beatles stuff and so on until eventually we 
discovered rhythm and blues. Pete was going to art school and got to know 
about John Lee Hooker and so on. We knew we wouldn't get anywhere playing 
the other stuff so we switched to this, until all the other groups, the 
Yardbirds, the Downliners Sect got hold of it. Then we changed to Tamla 
Motown. We met Pete Meaden, and this manager, a doorknob manufacturer from 
Shepherd's Bush, and Meaden changed our name to The High Numbers and got us 
our first record. We only stayed with them for a couple of months and then 
we went with Kit Lambert and changed our name back to The Who. We were 
playing not so much Tamla Motown but black stuff like James Brown, and then 
Pete started writing and we made Can't Explain.


*How did Keith join the group*

Well, Meaden and this manager Helmut Gordon, who fancied himself as another 
Brian Epstein, decided that Doug was wrong for the image, 'cause he was 
about thirty-five and we were all kids. We got rid of him and while we were 
playing with a session drummer at the Oldfield Hotel in Greenford, this 
bloke came up and said my mate can play better than that geezer. We said we 
were still auditioning, so Keith staggered up, pissed out of his head, and 
started to play the drums, broke this drummer's bass drum pedal which he'd 
had for twenty years. Keith was playing with a group called the 
Beachcombers, playing Beach Boys stuff, on more or less the same circuit as 
us, but we were the big stars of the circuit, playing rhythm and blues, you 
know. The other groups were petrified of us 'cause Pete was smashing his
guitar and making this feedback noise: the guitar smashing started about 
then when Pete hit his guitar on this very low ceiling in the Railway Tavern 
in Harrow, and the kids loved it. Well, here was Keith dressed all in ginger 
with ginger dyed hair and he was just as mad and loud as the rest of us. Our 
first recording company didn't want him to play with us, they preferred a 
bloke from the Fourmost who was more technical, but Keith stayed and he 
changed the whole style of the group, 'cause we'd more or less been playing 
with no drums till then. In fact, I developed my style largely because I had 
to make the bass sound like a bass drum. But when Keith joined we started 
developing what was really The Who style.
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