Saturday, July 6th, 1968

Disc and Music Echo interviews John in an article called, "So I said to John Entwistle's dog..." John discusses his performances, his songwriting and his dog Jason. He admits he "wasn't all that keen on 'I Can See For Miles.'"

The same day, Fabulous magazine has a short mention of Jason.

 

Transcript:

So I said to John Entwistle’s dog…

DISC’S Hugh Nolan has an interview with Jason (his pet man is Who John Entwistle) large Scottish deerhound. Mr. Entwistle has a few words to say as well.

JASON, latest addition to John and Alison Entwistle’s family, is only eight bouncing months old—but already stands at over six feet tall!

No, there hasn’t been another unheralded happy event among members of the Who. In fact Jason is a very, very large dog, of the Scottish deer hound family, whose chief pleasure in life is jumping gleefully into the middle of picnic parties and scattering them in utter confusion.

John is the bass-player and traditionally the quiet one of the Who—the Pete Townshend smashes his guitar and amplifier into several hundred pieces, while Keith Moon pounds his drum kit into the stage and Roger Daltrey crunches up mike-stands and anything else left intact.

But compare John’s enormous pet (every small boy who sees John and Jason in the street invariably asks for “a ride on your horse please mister”) with Pete’s modest Spaniel and Keith’s and Roger’s former pets, a Labrador and a Saluki respectively.

Jason strides among them all like a colossus. So, I asked John and Jason, is the truth of the matter that John is not by nature as quiet, modest and unassuming as he appears on-stage, compared to the other three members of the Who?

Jason, overjoyed at being spoken to by a complete stranger, wagged an enormous tail, leapt on my shoulders and pinned me to the floor while he licked my face with a tongue the size of a dinner-plate (the trouble is, you see, that while he LOOKS fearsome Jason is in fact completely soppy and friendly to everyone. Nice, but no good as an anti-burglar device).

Wrestled

John wrestled him off and (several minutes of chaos afterwards) replied: “I don’t usually start smashing up my equipment because we have to keep some sound going while all this destruction is going on.

“I tried it once in Los Angeles. I started to smash up my bass after all the rest of the group had finished smashing up their equipment. But it took about ten minutes to smash the thing, and all in complete silence, with just the rest of the group shouting encouragement! And the damn thing just wouldn’t break.

“Then once when we were in Sweden I was in a temper for some reason and I smashed my guitar through a speaker. It came out the other side and just stuck there—I couldn’t get it out again. Eventually it took two people to pull it out.”

Cake

By this point Alison, John’s pretty, dark-haired wife (who is most emphatically NOT a Who fan) wheeled in a large tea-trolly bearing biscuits and cherry-cake.

Jason accordingly freaked out, leaping all over the room. Eventually quietened, he subsided gratefully on the floor with a large, delicious hunk of cake—which disappeared down his vast throat in about two seconds flat.

His food consumption, said John, is about two pounds of meat and four pints of milk a day—but then he is only a puppy.

“I wanted to get a Great Dane but I’d heard they don’t get very well with other dogs. So we looked for the next biggest, which was a Scottish deer hound, and there he was.

“He’s got a first-class pedigree. Comes from excellent stock—in fact his father brought down a stag last year.

“The trouble was when we first got him I had to keep going away on tours, and every time I came back he’d doubled in size. And changed colour!”

Talking of dogs, John likes the new Who single “Dogs”—more than any of their singles for some time. “I wasn’t all that keen on ‘Call See For Miles.’ The trouble is our last few singles have taken us so long to make. We finish them and then we add little fiddley bits which take days. ‘Happy Jack,’ on the other hand, took us just half a day in the studio.”

Romps

The Entwistles have been living for almost a year in a neat little house in Ealing, just in front of a large and beautiful park where Jason goes for twice-daily romps and indulges in his favourite practice of breaking up happy family picnic parties.

“We start shouting at him when he gets near a picnic, but he usually leaps up with hands right on the tablecloth and a mighty leap,” said Alison.

Then he turns round and runs right up to us, so there can be no doubt whom he belongs to!

“But if there’s a bloke and a bird lying on the grass he won’t go near them.”

Both John and Alison have lived in the area all their lives. In fact it was at Acton County Grammar School, just up the road, that the Who first started.

“I used to play in the school orchestra—but only to get off lessons!” says John. “My father taught me to play trumpet but there were already too many trumpets in the orchestra so I took up the French horn, a very unglamorous instrument.

“Then the rock-n-roll boom started so I took up bass and formed a group with Pete Townshend and a couple of other guys. When we left school we teamed up with Roger Daltrey—he played lead and Pete played rhythm guitar.

“We were a five-piece until the Beatles came along, so we sacked our singer and became a four-piece. Roger was doing sheet metal work and had a lot of split fingers, so Pete took over on lead and Roger started singing.”

Now, five years later, John has his own private recording studio upstairs at home, where he does all his songwriting. “It’s the only way we can write—we make demos of our songs and then play them to the rest of the group.”

Writing

“I’m only just getting into writing properly—it takes a while to get into the stride. I wrote a song called ‘Mr Hyde’ which was the B-side of ‘Call Me Lightning’ in the States and should go on our next LP here, with another one of mine.

“There’ll probably be a number by Keith on the LP too. But he hasn’t done a demo yet—after all, there’s not much you can do with just drums!”

The group hopes to finish off the album in L.A. and at the same session should complete their next single, probably a track called “Magic Bus.” “We’ve got enough material but we just haven’t had time to finish it yet.”

John left for yet another tour, a large one of the States—last week, leaving Alison and Jason at home. Actually he asked Alison if she’d like to go with the group this time, but she replied:

“What—and watch you play every evening? I’d be bored to tears!”

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John with Jason, who gets mistaken for a horse.
Pictures by PETER STUART