(Personal reflections inspired by Who songs)
Song: “Boris the
Spider”
Album: A Quick One
Release Date: December,
1966
There was a short period in my early to mid-20s when I shared with
my brother Joe (and separately, college friend Bouv) a rather morbid sense of
humor (also referred to as gallows humor).
Occasionally Joe and I dip our feet back into that bizarre, twisted
world, which never fails to give us one or two belly laughs, but these days
it’s for the most part a rehashing of old material. Back in the 80s however, we were in major fresh-idea
mode (a good window-sample of where our heads were at: We concocted an alternate-world scenario
where the psychotic killer in the first Dirty
Harry movie, along with Jason from Friday
the 13th, and our own creation “Laughing Boy”, hijack the Los
Angeles Lakers charter plane on its way back from Boston after their
devastating 1984 World Championship loss to the Celtics, and force Kareem, Magic
and friends to sing the Boston Celtics Theme Song over and over again). In our musings we would include dialog and sound
effects, such as chain saws, swinging hatchets, poison darts, blow torches,
pipe bombs, rolling heads and flying body parts. Not much was too demented for our imaginations
(I suppose you could say we predated South
Park in this regard).
This humor was pretty unique to Joe and me in our circles. Few could relate to us for very long when we
morphed into this mode, including our very own siblings. Quite often we would find the crowd around us
thinning out, our friends and family off to other conversations, leaving the
two of us (and sometimes brother-in-law Dale when he was feeling it) to our own
devices. It was not so much that they
were repulsed; they just didn’t get it. This
had no effect on us. We knew we had a
good thing going and so we would continue to run with it, coming up with one
outrageous thought after another (I recall on one occasion carrying on our
crazed humor into the wee hours outside on my parent’s front steps).
John Entwistle had the same macabre sense of humor, which he
expressed in his songs. From “My Wife”,
about a very angry spouse out for revenge (“Gonna
buy a tank and an aeroplane, when she catches up with me won’t be no time to
explain”) to “Ted End” about a poor sod who’s funeral goes unattended, to
“You’re Mine” about the devilish fate of someone who drowns cats, whips horses,
and robs old woman, to “905” about the emotionless state of a humanoid, to
“Cousin Kevin” about a masochistic relative, to “Uncle Ernie” about a dirty-minded
one, and finally to this week’s Big Top entry “Boris the Spider” about the
abject fear of an arachnophobe and how he takes it out on a poor defenseless 8-legged creepy-crawler (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o8dSBWysmnM). Many of Entwistle’s
solo-album titles and covers reflected this warped imagination too; from1971’s Smash Your Head Against the Wall, (the
first solo effort by a member of the Who) to Whistle Rhymes, to Rigor
Mortis Sets In (one of my all-time
favorite album titles).
What explains this dark fixation that John Entwistle, Joe, Bouv
and I have connected with at various times in our lives (you can add Alice
Cooper, Vincent Price, Alfred Hitchcock, Stephen King, Elvira and many others to
this list as well)? In terms of
Entwistle, from all I’ve read, it had nothing to do with his personality, which
was the type that Pete Townshend looked up to: The Ox being in many ways the
big brother Pete never had. This was
simply his sense of humor. As for the
rest of us, I don’t believe this humor reflects on our core values either,
which had me scratching my head a bit as I took on these thoughts earlier this
week. And so I ended up doing something
atypical of these entries: A little research on the matter. It turns out that laughing at the macabre and
absurd is for most of those of us who do it, a coping mechanism: A way to deal with the sad reality of the darkest
and most hapless extremes in human nature, and a way to get a grip on some of our
deepest fears. With this new
perspective, I now believe Joe and I just had to get this morbid humor out of
our system as we transitioned into the working adult world (that period being
one of the toughest and stressful transitions any of us make in our lives).
I find John Entwistle’s sense of humor and his personality in general
very interesting in relation to how he fit into the Who as a bandmate. In his insightful review of Smash Your Head Against the Wall, John
Swenson, writing for Crawdaddy
observed “In the complex character
interplay that makes up the Who dialect, Entwistle was always the dark horse
who worked in a strange way opposite to the direction of the other members of
the group”. I read this for the
first time last week (in the liner notes to my brand new purchase of Smash Your Head) and said to myself “right
on!” Roger Daltrey and even Keith Moon
would occasionally genuflect to the genius of Pete Townshend, but not
Entwistle. John admired Pete, but as far as I can tell he did not once ever put
him on a pedestal.
This fascinating relationship I always sensed and I could too
envision how important it was toward what made the Who unique, and toward what
it was that made them tick. John
Entwistle helped to keep things balanced in the band through his equal-footing approach
to Pete Townshend. Without his attitude,
the group would have been top heavy like so many others. Unlike Townshend, Entwistle rarely tried to
tackle big-world problems or spiritual soul searching, or deep concepts or
personal crisis in his songs. He did not
try to emulate his prolific bandmate in any way really. The Ox beat to his own drum, and in doing so
contributed profoundly to the extremely unique dynamics of the Who.
At some
point in their career - probably around the production of Tommy in 1969 - John Entwistle came to the realization that the Who
was Pete Townshend’s band in terms of songwriting. Townshend’s composition style fit the Who
much better than Entwistle’s, the number two songwriter in the band, which must
have been very difficult for him to accept at first (although, the Ox once
admitted that he wrote in a style for himself where Townshend wrote in a style for
the band). But the really cool (and
historically significant) end game in this saga was that Enty never left the group,
despite his abundance of God-given musical talents and a desire to write music primarily
for himself. Yes, the money and fame had
much to do with this I am certain, but there was much more to it. John Entwistle knew that the Who had captured
lightning in a bottle after years of working hard together and he was not about
to disrupt that. Indeed, the truth of
the matter with the Who was, if any member had broken away, the whole structure
would collapse. But keep with it like each
of them did (right up until Keith Moon’s death), and the sky was the
limit. All four band members sacrificed
something of themselves in the process, with Entwistle’s sacrifices being the
clearest of them all to Who fans.
The complexities of the relationships in the Who remind me of my
own complex relationships; the interplay between friends in my handful of
friendships (home, college, Canada) are replete with dynamism, as too with my
family. My hometown neighborhood crew of
eight for example is made up of personality traits that include intellectual
curiosity, bravado, quiet fortitude, slapstick, book smarts, street smarts,
stamina, generosity, extroversion and introversion. How much of this that gets tossed into the
soup kettle on any given gathering can tilt the scales in any number of
directions related to our unique cocktail-blend of personas.
My sibling dynamic is even more interesting. As the oldest of six, I do not always play
the part. Everyone has a strong lead role
in the family. There’s not a weak link
in the bunch. Despite the fact that I
don’t always aspire to the more traditional roles of ‘big brother’, I still find
a responsibility to my standing as the first born. Many oldest siblings set the stage for their
younger brothers and sisters in the standard-bearer ways of what it means to be
successful: Big house, big car, big income, doctor, lawyer, architect, etc. Not me (and I’m proud to never have put that kind
of pressure on my siblings to follow suit, seeing as those types of ambitions for
me would have been misguided because they do not reflect who I am). But I do like to think that when I am at my
best, I can be a role model in many other more important ways; through patience,
kindness, understanding, faith, listening more than talking, minimalism, interest
in the outdoors, dependability, humbleness, concern for the environment, modesty (in my mind a requirement for a civil servant), and
yes, bizarre humor (which I find myself adjusting happily to each sibling’s
comedic tastes in ways that reflect mine) are but some of my priorities. I do not always get it right, but these are the
kinds of ideals I try to portray and convey in my role as big brother.
This is a key reason why I can relate to John Entwistle,
particularly in regards to how he interacted with Pete Townshend. As a big
bother figure to Townshend, Enty let him do his thing. The Ox played by the rules and contributed
his enormous talents to something which he knew he had to take a second fiddle
to. The only other examples I can think
of in Rock and Roll bands is how older brother Tom Fogerty relented to the
songwriting skills of his younger brother John in Creedence Clearwater Revival and
how Band founder Levon Helm eventually bowed to the talents of Robbie Robertson
(although in both of these case the long-term reaction was a quite a bit more
acerbic than it was with John Entwistle).
Of all the great songs the Who have performed live over their many
years of touring, “Boris the Spider”, with that heavy bass sound and John
Entwistle’s exaggerated, eerie baritone vocals, was astoundingly the most
requested of the bunch. This must have
made ‘big brother’ John Entwistle proud.
He stuck to who he was, and in the process helped make the Who who they
were. This all had an eye-opening effect
on my younger 20-something self; seeing a stoic, solid, quiet, rock-of-a-man,
and knowing that it was ok to sprinkle that trait with a little morbid pixie dust
every once in a while for a well needed bit of stress release.
- Pete
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