Local Telephone Gossip
Ted End - John Entwistle (Blast from The Past Sunday)
This past Friday saw the release of “Now and Then”, the last Beatles song. While I felt like I had won the lottery with that alone, the surprise release of all of John Entwistle’s solo albums on streaming services had me feeling like I’d won the jackpot all over again!
I guess I should explain why this was such an earth-shatteringly amazing development in the world of music. Entwistle’s solo albums have never been on streaming, despite being out there in physical copies for years. I only discovered Entwistle’s solo career through Youtube a few years ago, when I clicked on a video called “Ted End - John Entwistle”.
I had a phase in middle school where I essentially stole my parent’s cassette player, and despite taking several tapes to my room to listen to, I really only listened to Tommy and Changes2Bowie. Tommy became a slight obsession for me. I listened to it multiple times a day, charting the story and playing along to Keith Moon’s impeccable drumming. It’s well-known that John Entwistle wrote two of the most grotesque songs on the album, “Cousin Kevin” and “Fiddle About”. Despite their awful subject matter, those two songs were ones that I was fascinated with, due to their dangerous chord progressions and absolutely stacked harmonies.
I’m happy to report “Ted End” is not filled with violence, but instead details how nobody showed up to Teddy Greenstreet’s funeral. Okay, maybe that’s not quite a happy report, but I do think it perfectly displays Entwistle’s brand of humor. The delivery is that of a local telephone gossip, someone relaying Greenstreet’s tragic end to their friend with little emotion towards him.
Like a million other songs, what drew me to “Ted End” was the harmonies. The chorus is like a gold mine for me, because it’s a three-part harmony that sounds like it’s only two. The lowest voice is so hidden in the mix that you could just listen right over it, yet it adds so much weight to the chorus, fills it up and makes it feel whole.
What makes “Ted End” such an irresistible song is that is never gets boring. I’m speaking from experience here, as I think I may have listened to this song for five hours straight at some point. This is a song with three verses, two of which are the same, and two repeats of a chorus, a song that, in any other context, could be totally lame after three plays. “Ted End” keeps it fresh, but I can’t really pinpoint how. Maybe it’s the total shredding of the piano at the end, tucked away behind the mix. Maybe it’s the perfection created by the deeply blended harmonies. Perhaps it’s the mental exercise of trying to figure out just how many guitars are featured in the song. Heck, maybe it’s just the morbid yet humorous picture that the lyrics paint of a family with total disregard for their patriarch upon his time of death! (Let’s be honest, it’s probably the fact that Smash Your Head Against The Wall is one of the best album names ever.) Any way you spin it, it’s clear that “Ted End” is a special song, one that is weird and silly and strange and beautiful and more than deserving of a place in history and in your headphones.
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