‘Boris the Spider’: The Who song John Entwistle called “a joke”
For all the seriousness in a band like The Who, you needed some levity to balance things out. Sure, Pete Townshend had written some fantastic material that got down to the essence of what rock and roll was about, but you didn’t need to take more than one look at Keith Moon onstage to know that there was still some tongue-in-cheek humour throughout their songs. When sculpting their first conceptual piece, though, John Entwistle made his heavy offering ‘Boris the Spider’ as a joke.
But, really, is A Quick One really a conceptual piece at heart? The album’s ending is certainly thematic, with the title track’s nine-minute runtime featuring different song fragments sandwiched together, but the rest of the album feels like any standard power-pop fare happening around the same time.
Although Townshend was clearly the band’s star songwriter, there were probably also some debates about royalties, leading to everyone contributing songs for the album. It may have made for a more balanced record royalty-wise, but the uneven songs show themselves right off the bat, like Roger Daltrey’s faceless ‘See My Way’ and Keith Moon’s madcap freakouts like ‘Cobwebs and Strange’.
Entwistle already had a fine grip on songwriting with the song ‘Whiskey Man’, but ‘Boris the Spider’ came out of a completely different scenario. Since he had been told to come up with material, Entwistle came up with the whole song after a night of drinking with The Rolling Stones’ Bill Wyman.
According to Entwistle, the only reason it made it on the album was because he couldn’t think of anything else, telling Classic Rock Stories, “I was sitting next to Bill Wyman at a club one night and we were talking about spiders…I’d already written ‘Whiskey Man’, and I had to write another one for the album, so I thought I might as well settle that and write another one about a spider called Boris”.
The song definitely brought a different edge to the rest of the album, but the spooky atmosphere was meant to be tongue-in-cheek. Entwistle recalled, “I mean, I just sort of wrote the words and the next morning, I got up at ten and did the demo tape of it. That was just the amount of thought that went into it. We just did it as a joke”.
Even if he was joking, this kind of song was wildly ahead of the curve. If Townshend had started making songs that predicted the world of punk on ‘My Generation’, this was a precursor to heavy metal, down to Entwistle’s comedically low voice on the song. It sounds closer to a monster from some B-movie, but there’s a good chance that everyone trying to put menace into their voice later appreciated what Entwistle did.
That slightly off-kilter vibe would creep up in most of Entwistle’s contributions for The Who going forward. From ‘Whiskey Man’ to ‘My Wife’ off Who’s Next, Entwistle kept listeners on their toes half the time by taking his music in a different direction with the odd chord progression here and there. Townshend had a clear vision of what the group stood for, but Entwistle would always play by his own rules.