Licorice Pizza: Happy Birthday to the Ox

10/09/2006

Happy Birthday to the Ox

Had he lived, John Alec Entwistle would have been 62 today. As I promised in an earlier post, I want to share some of the Ox’s old solo material as a small way of marking the birthday of one of rock’s greatest bassists.

In case there’s someone who doesn’t know much about John Entwistle, here’s a couple of biographical paragraphs from Wikipedia:

John Alec Entwistle was born in Chiswick, a London suburb, in 1944. In the early 1960s, he played in several traditional jazz and dixieland outfits with schoolmate Pete Townshend, and later joined Roger Daltrey's band the Detours. This band later became The Who.

He was nicknamed "The Ox" because of his strong constitution -- the ability to "eat, drink or do more than the rest of them" -- not for his size, or his tendency to stand still during shows. Bill Wyman described him as "the quietest man in private but the loudest man on stage." For much the same reason, he was often known by the nickname "Thunderfingers" by his bandmates and Who fans.

John Entwistle died in a hotel room at the Hard Rock Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas on June 27, 2002; one day before the scheduled first show of The Who's 2002 US tour. The number of the actual room in which he died has remained a closely guarded secret, ostensibly to prevent the room becoming a shrine/place of pilgrimage.

The Las Vegas medical examiner determined that death was due to a heart attack induced by an undetermined amount of cocaine. Though the amount in his bloodstream was not great, the drug caused his coronary arteries — already damaged by a pre-existing heart condition — to contract, which led to the fatal heart attack. Entwistle battled cocaine addiction through much of his adult life.