The bass John Entwistle wanted to be buried with: “Wonderful piece of Who history”
There was a deeply uncomfortable air around the death of John Entwistle. A nagging sense that no one quite knew what to feel beyond the obvious: it was a tragedy. He was just 57, which is no age at all, playing the best bass of his life, and still seemingly the glue holding The Who together long after Keith Moon’s death. Then, on the night before a major US tour in June 2002, he went to bed and never woke up.
To me, the most uncomfortable feeling was the forced sense of laddish pride everyone was trying to hide their grief with. Entwistle died in a Vegas hotel room, filled with enough cocaine to kill an actual Ox, while in bed with a stripper and notorious groupie Alycen Rowse, a woman who was not Entwistle’s long-term partner Lisa Pritchett-Johnson. It’s such a prototypical rock star death that people tried to pass it off as exactly the way he ought to have gone.
Yet John Entwistle had been the complete opposite of all that for basically his entire life. Sure, he’d lived just as hard as any member of The Who. There were Ox stories a-plenty as there should be, but Entwistle was also the adult in the room for most of The Who’s career. There was a reason that he was the one member of the band who was not going crazy on stage, jumping around and destroying his guitars like the rest of them.
It’s not that he was a calming presence, in fact quite the opposite. If the likes of Pete Townshend, Roger Daltrey and especially Moon had a reliable support to bounce back from, they could go as mental as they wanted without it spinning out of control. On a musical level, this meant they could do as they pleased while always having Thunderfingers’ steady, rhythmic bass playing to find their way back to the song with.
What was John Entwistle to the rest of The Who?
On a personal level, it meant that they could do the same, but Entwistle would always be the sensible one to get them out of any mishaps they might encounter. This showed the great legend of the bass to be something he’d always carried himself as better than, just an average rock star with an average rock star demise. That said, it wasn’t the only part of his death that illuminated some hitherto unknown sides of him.
In an interview promoting a re-release of Quadrophenia in 2011, Townshend made a surprisingly off-the-cuff admission about Entwistle that showed there were several hidden depths to the man. He said, “It wasn’t until the day of his funeral that I discovered that he’d spent most of his life as a freemason.”
However, at least one aspect of John Entwistle’s death chimes with the bass hero we all knew. The man wasn’t just a player of the bass guitar, he loved and respected the art form, as shown by the extensive bass guitar collection he kept at his palatial stately home Quarwood in Gloucestershire. When giving the host of a documentary being made about him a tour of his collection, the host stops by a tell-tale red Fender Precision bass.
The host immediately calls it a “wonderful piece of Who history” and Entwistle concurs, saying “that is the bass I’m gonna be buried with.” The Ox was nothing if not an old troll, though, because he immediately follows that statement up with, “which is a shame because I’m getting cremated, I think!”
As a man with a famously skewed sense of humour, perhaps the death of John Entwistle was precisely the way he wanted to go after all. Leave everyone guessing and perplexed, and pass into the next life with a small, knowing smile on your face.
