The Who song that John Entwistle wrote as a joke: “I’m not really quiet”
John Entwistle had a distinctively comedic streak running through him. The legendary bass player of The Who was certainly a prankster, teaming up with drummer Keith Moon for some iconic acts of hotel room destruction.
He was in a unique position within the band. The Ox, as he was belovedly known, was a monster on the bass, a truly different species who would break the fretboard with his powerhouse precision. The strong, silent type, his imposing figure standing still was enough to cause some worries, but by the time his fingers got working up and down the fretboard of his bass, you were always ready to pick your jaw up off the floor. In his rare outings as a songwriter, Entwistle kept up the fun with some not-so-serious compositions.
‘Boris the Spider’ was a purposeful novelty track that chronicled the life of the titular creepy-crawler. Besides possibly inventing the death growl, Entwistle gave the song some wacky descending chords and some old-school horror movie twists and turns. When it came time to get a new song in his repertoire, Entwistle kept up the seriocomic energy by composing ‘My Wife’, a turbulent ode to staying out drinking for too long and incurring the wrath of a woman scorned.
By the mid-1970s, ‘My Wife’ was Entwistle’s main lead vocal vehicle during The Who’s live performances. But Entwistle grew tired of performing the track, and instead of replacing it with an older song like ‘Boris the Spider’ or ‘Heaven and Hell’, Entwistle decided to write a brand new tune. This time, he turned the comedic lens on himself and his own reputation among fans: ‘The Quiet One’.
Every band needs a quiet member, and Entwistle was more than happy to be that for The Who for the most part. Like George Harrison in The Beatles, Entwistle neglected the fast and furious limelight and instead focused on his playing. It allowed the bassist to become one of the best in the business and has seen him be rightly lauded as one of the finest players around before he sadly passed away in 2002. But before he passed, he wanted to break out of the mould that had been cast for him.
“It’s me trying to explain that I’m not really quiet,” Entwistle said about the song. Being labelled as the strong and silent type certainly has its potentially profitable notions, but the bassist seemingly wanted to explore a different angle, and used music to try and allow his inner songwriter to explode on to the airwaves.
“I started off being quiet, and that’s the pigeonhole I’ve been stuck in all these years. It started when I heard Kenney playing a drum riff, and I thought, ‘that would be really great for a song and give Kenney a chance to play that on stage.’”
“So I got Kenney to put down about three minutes of that, and I worked along with it and came up with the chorus of ‘The Quiet One’,” Entwistle adds. “I wrote ‘Quiet One’ especially to replace ‘My Wife’ onstage. I had gotten tired of singing that and ‘Boris the Spider.'”
Of course, Entwistle was anything but quiet on stage. Bolstered by a mammoth stack of speakers, Entwistle’s bass was deafening in the literal sense: his hearing loss began to drastically affect his playing during his later years. But since Entwistle was seen as more low-key than his bandmates on and offstage, Entwistle came up with ‘The Quiet One’ to set the record straight.
Check out a live performance of ‘The Quiet One’ from 1981 down below.
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