page_title: John Entwistle
section_title: The Who
hierarchical_section_title: John Entwistle / Career / The Who
caption_attribution_description: MLG Toronto 1980
context_page_description: John Alec Entwistle was an English bass guitarist, singer, songwriter, film and music producer. In a music career that spanned more than 40 years, Entwistle was best known as the original bass guitarist for the English rock band the Who. He was the only member of the band to have formal musical training. He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as a member of the Who in 1990.
  Entwistle's instrumental approach used pentatonic lead lines, and a then-unusual treble-rich sound. He was nicknamed "The Ox" and "Thunderfingers". In 2011, he was voted as the greatest bass guitarist of all time in a Rolling Stone magazine readers' poll, and in its special "100 Greatest Bass Players" issue in 2017, Bass Player magazine named Entwistle at number seven.
context_section_description: After joining the Detours, Entwistle played a major role in encouraging Pete Townshend's budding talent on the guitar, and insisting that Townshend be admitted into the band as well. Eventually, Roger Daltrey fired all the members of his band with the exception of Entwistle, Townshend and the drummer, Doug Sandom, a semi-pro player who was several years older than the others. Daltrey relinquished the role of guitarist to Townshend in 1963, instead becoming frontman and lead singer. The band considered several changes of name, finally settling on the name The Who while Entwistle was still working as a tax clerk (temporarily performing as the High Numbers for four months in 1964). When the band decided that the blond Daltrey needed to stand out more from the others, Entwistle dyed his naturally light brown hair black, and it remained so until the early 1980s.
  Around 1963, Entwistle played in a London band called the Initials for a short while; the band broke up when a planned resident engagement in Spain fell through.
  In 1967, Entwistle married his childhood sweetheart Alison Wise and bought a large semi-detached home in Stanmore Middlesex filling it with all sorts of extraordinary artefacts, ranging from suits of armour to a tarantula spider. His eccentricity and taste for the bizarre was to remain with him throughout his life, and when he finally moved out of the city in 1978, to Stow-on-the-Wold in Gloucestershire, his 17-bedroom mansion, Quarwood, resembled a museum. It also housed one of the largest guitar collections belonging to any rock musician.
  Entwistle picked up two nicknames during his career as a musician. He was nicknamed "The Ox" because of his strong constitution and seeming ability to "eat, drink or do more than the rest of them". He was also later nicknamed "Thunderfingers". Bill Wyman, bass guitarist for the Rolling Stones, described him as "the quietest man in private but the loudest man on stage". Entwistle was one of the first to make use of Marshall stacks in an attempt to hear himself over the noise of his band members, who famously leapt and moved about on the stage, with Townshend and Keith Moon smashing their instruments on numerous occasions (Moon even used explosives in his drum kit during one television performance on the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour). Townshend later remarked that Entwistle started using Marshall amplification to hear himself over Moon's rapid-fire drumming style, and Townshend himself also had to use them just to be heard over Entwistle. They both continued expanding and experimenting with their rigs, until they were both using twin stacks with new experimental prototype 200 watt amps, at a time when most bands used 50–100 watt amplifiers with single cabinets. All of this quickly gained the Who a reputation for being "the loudest band on the planet"; they reached 126 decibels at a 1976 concert in London, listed in the Guinness Book of World Records as the loudest rock concert in history. The band had a strong influence at the time on their contemporaries' choice of equipment, with Cream and the Jimi Hendrix Experience both following suit. Although they pioneered and directly contributed to the development of the "classic" Marshall sound (at this point their equipment was being built or tweaked to their personal specifications), they only used Marshall equipment for a few years. Entwistle eventually switched to using a Sound City rig, with Townshend following suit later as well. Townshend points out that Jimi Hendrix, their new label mate, was influenced beyond just the band's volume. Both Entwistle and Townshend had begun experimenting with feedback from the amplifiers in the mid-1960s, and Hendrix did not begin destroying his instruments until after he had witnessed the Who's "auto-destructive art".
  Entwistle's wry and sometimes dark sense of humour clashed at times with Townshend's more introspective, intellectual work. Although he wrote songs on every Who album except for Quadrophenia, he was frustrated at Townshend not allowing him to sing them himself. As he said, "I 
caption: Entwistle playing at Maple Leaf Gardens, Toronto 1976
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