The Who on the Who by Sean Egan

Author:Sean Egan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
Published: 2017-11-10T05:00:00+00:00

What was the scene like when you first started playing?

I sang before I was seven; my grandfather used to stand me on a chair in the local workingman’s club, and while I sang, he went around with the hat. My mother forced me to play the piano when I was seven, but I convinced her that I could carry on teaching myself the piano and learn trumpet at school. But there were too many trumpet players, so they made me play French horn instead. Then, when I was about fourteen, I made my own bass. I never played guitar.

Why did you fashion a bass and not a guitar?

Everybody I knew played guitar, and everybody needed bass players, and they just weren’t about. When I first started playing in England there were only about four bass guitars on the market, and they were all very cheap. You couldn’t buy a Fender bass or a Gibson. They were all like these very cheap tuxedo basses; I think the most expensive one you could get was a Framus-style bass—a big sort of acoustic thing—and a few Hofners. I had some photographs of Fender basses, and I just looked very closely at the pictures and tried to make one. I wanted a nice long bass, and so I made the neck really long—it ended up about 5’6” long. When I took it in to be fretted they took the fret measurements off a Hofner violin bass, and it ended up with about 9” of fingerboard with absolutely no frets on it. It had drum material for the scratch plate, the control knobs were stuck on with glue, the wire came straight out of the pickup, and it had a square neck as well. It was terrible.

What type of amplifier and guitar were you using when the Who first formed?

When we first started calling ourselves the Who I used a Marshall 50-watt amp with a 4-12 cabinet. I had the first 4-12 cabinet that Marshall made. We more or less forced them to make 100-watt amps by changing to Vox, who had already made one. Marshall decided that if they were going to keep us, they’d have to make a 100-watt amp. They used to make their amps with speaker material on the front, and they looked completely different. I said, “I don’t like that; I want it all black,” so they changed them. I bought another 4-12 cabinet, and then Pete bought another 4-12 cabinet, and it went on and on and on. We had more equipment than any other band in the country—it was ridiculous. I was using a Fender Precision on the first albums, and then I had an Epiphone and a Rickenbacker. Then I got rid of the Precision and got a Gretsch bass, which I could hardly play. I played it for ten minutes, and my hand got worn out. Then I had three Dan Electros in a row because you couldn’t buy the strings small enough to vibrate properly. I only used the guitar until one of the original strings busted, and then I bought another one.

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