The sense of humor that John Entwistle possessed was exquisite. The Who’s iconic bassist and drummer, Keith Moon, is known for some notoriety for his work in hotel rooms. Entwistle was able to keep the party going with a few entertaining tunes because to his sporadic songwriting performances.
The novelty song “Boris the Spider” was written with the intention of chronicling the life of the scary crawler in question. Entwistle may have invented the death growl and added some bizarre descending chords and classic horror movie twists and turns to the tune. Entwistle wrote “My Wife,” a stormy homage to staying out drinking too much and earning the fury of a lady scorned, to add a new song to his catalog while maintaining the seriocomic intensity.
By the middle of the 1970s, Entwistle’s primary lead vocal vehicle for The Who live concerts was “My Wife.” However, Entwistle became weary of playing the song, and instead of switching it out for an older song like “Boris the Spider” or “Heaven and Hell,” Entwistle chose to compose a completely original song. This time, he used humor to examine himself and his status as “The Quiet One” among his followers.
“It’s me trying to explain that I’m not really quiet,” regarding the song, Entwistle said. “I started off being quiet, and that’s the pigeonhole I’ve been stuck in all these years. It started when I heard Kenney playing a drum riff, and I thought, ‘that would be really great for a song and give Kenney a chance to play that on stage.’”
“So I got Kenney to put down about three minutes of that, and I worked along with it and came up with the chorus of ‘The Quiet One’,” Entwistle continues. “I wrote ‘Quiet One’ especially to replace ‘My Wife’ onstage. I had gotten tired of singing that and ‘Boris the Spider.’”
Entwistle was obviously anything from silent on stage. Entwistle’s bass was ear-splitting literally thanks to a massive stack of speakers since his hearing loss started to significantly impede his playing in his latter years. However, Entwistle created “The Quiet One” to correct the record since he was perceived as being less outgoing than his comrades both on and offstage.