The one Who single to feature a guitar solo by John Entwistle
John Entwistle was the quiet secret weapon of The Who. While his bandmates Pete Townshend, Roger Daltrey, and especially Keith Moon were known for their explosiveness, hotheadedness, and unpredictability, Entwistle was always the enigma of the group.
The Who were a band which excelled in all aspects of their instrumentation. Their singer, Daltrey had untold charisma and a big set of lungs. Their guitarist and principal songwriter, Townshend, is more than capable of thrashing a riff out with the best of them and their drummer, well, their drummer was Keith Moon. But one of the most overlooked members of the band is arguably the most talented in their field, the late, great, John Entwistle.
Nicknamed The Ox, Entwistle is your archetypal bassist. The strong silent type, his imposing figure stood 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.
Towering over his bandmates in terms of size, Entwistle’s disposition was often quiet and unobtrusive. However, his bass playing was anything but: he was loud, forceful, fleet-fingered, and completely unique. Along with Moon, he formed one of the most exciting rhythm sections in all of rock music.
Entwistle was also something of a polymath within the group. Although he usually stayed in the background, Entwistle composed a number of bass solos that filled out some of The Who’s biggest songs, including ‘My Generation’ and ‘Who Are You’. On occasion, Entwistle also acted as the band’s alternative singer-songwriter, producing beloved classics like ‘Boris the Spider’, ‘Heaven and Hell’, and ‘My Wife’. There are even songs where Entwistle tapped into his experience playing the French Horn, adding dynamic arrangements to songs like ‘The Real Me’ and ‘Sparks’.
Entwistle didn’t assert himself very much, but when he did, it was impossible for his bandmates to stop him. Such was the case on one of the band’s earliest hit singles, ‘Substitute’. The track was arranged for a traditional guitar solo to crop up about halfway through the track, but when the band made the final recording, Entwistle stepped up instead.
“I played a Gibson SG medium-scale bass with wire-wound strings,” Entwistle would recall later. “When it got to the solo, because we were recording and mixing it virtually live, I thought, ‘Yeah, this should be a bass solo’, so I turned my volume up and they couldn’t mix me out, so it ended up as a bass solo.”
When the bass was only coming into its own in the world of rock and roll, John Entwistle was perhaps the first major player to approach the bass as a lead instrument. The traditional mixing method in the 1960s put the bass low, but it was impossible to do so with Entwistle – he was just too loud, too prominent, and too talented to bury beneath other instruments.
Check out the bass solo that colours ‘Substitute’ down below.
