I DON’T WANT TO OVERSTATE IT, BUT HE WAS JUST LYRICAL AND POETIC
A CONVERSATION WITH JOHN ENTWISTLE’S PARTNER-IN-CRIME STEVE LUONGO
His name might not be instantly recognizable, but not only is drummer Steve Luongo a fantastic musician with his own music/albums (Steve Luongo Project, Rat Race Choir), but he has also drummed for some of the biggest names in rock. Go and take a look at some of your albums. Luongo has played and recorded with Leslie West (Mountain), Alan Parsons, and Robin Zander and Rick Nielsen of Cheap Trick to name just a few. He was also a very dear friend to John Entwistle of The Who and was an integral part of The John Entwistle Band. He served as music director and provided the drums to Entwistle’s thunder bass. He has also worked closely with the John Entwistle Estate to bring fans two albums of previously unreleased solo John Entwistle music. Rarities Oxhumed – Volume One was released in 2022, while Rarities Oxhumed – Volume Two was released earlier this year. Luongo worked very hard at producing, mixing and preparing the releases and both have been very well received by fans.
Luongo met Entwistle at NAMM (National Association Of Music Merchants) in McCormick Place in Chicago in 1987. “John loved going to the trade shows,” Luongo told me during our recent conversation via ZOOM. And through a mutual friend, “I said to him, ‘do you want to jam’, and he said ‘anytime, mate.’ I went down on the NAMM floor to the Kramer [guitar] booth and said ‘hi, I am putting together a jam with John Entwistle.’ Kramer made arrangements for the jam.”
But this was not going to be a jam on the convention floor. Kramer made other plans for Entwistle and Luongo. Kramer also sent a stretch limousine. “I get in and tell them to take me to The Drake on Lakeshore Drive, the limo driver gets out, pages Entwistle. Entwistle comes down with his roadie carrying his bass and he looks at the stretch and looks at me, because he doesn’t really know who I am.”
JOHN ENTWISTLE
They quickly pulled together jam session turns into a full-fledged rock concert for Entwistle, Luongo and the band. “Entwistle asked, ‘what are we going to play?’. I said, ‘Some Who songs’, and he said, ‘I don’t know any,’” laughed Luongo. “We get to the theatre, and I use my band, Rat Race Choir, and we are running down the songs with him. All Who songs and he said, ‘you guys even learned the mistakes.’ He thought we were playing in a nightclub or something small, but we were at The Vic Theatre in Chicago and there were thousands of people. He walked out on the stage, and thankfully for him and us, we knew the parts. He was so relieved that we didn’t embarrass him on stage, that he and I wound up talking for a couple of hours in the green room. I was about to leave, and he handed me a piece of paper with his telephone number on it, and he said, ‘stay in touch, mate’. Which I did.”
And the first time he played with Entwistle, it seemed to go very well. “The reason it wasn’t difficult is that I just did what I do. I am a lead drummer, an overplayer. It is what attracted me to the great overplayers of the day, Keith Moon, Ginger Baker, Mitch Mitchell, John Bonham. I was not a beat drummer, no disrespect to those guys, but I play like I am getting paid by the note. And it just fit. It just clicked, and that’s what started the working performance relationship, which blossomed into a great friendship. We clicked as a rhythm section. He didn’t have to ask for anything, I didn’t have to do anything.”
Luongo kept in touch with Entwistle, and they became fast and very good friends. “We were telephone friends, telling jokes back and forth and there was no class distinction. Like he was in one of the greatest British Bands in the world, and I was in this tri-state area cult band. We were just two players. There was a lot of trust, both ways,” Luongo told me. “I trusted him to always keep my best interest at heart. There was an integrity we had for the music and for each other. The friendship and working relationship came totally naturally to me, and I think John was so happy for not having to be responsible for everything and he could trust me. It just worked and it never stopped working.”
PURCHASE RARITIES OXHUMED VOLUME TWO
The new album, Rarities Oxhumed Volume Two is an album of previously unreleased songs by The John Entwistle Band. “I’m still very close with John’s son [Chris Entwistle] and I have been since Chris was 16. Everything I do with John’s music, I do with the estate and with John’s Legacy. I called up Chris and told him I had an opportunity to do a rarities album, but I don’t want to call it John Entwistle Rarities. And he said, ‘Rarities Oxhumed’. It was so Entwistle, it must be in their DNA, because John was quick witted like that. It was the perfect title.”
And Luongo will be the first to state that Entwistle was not just a brilliant bassist but a brilliant musician and lyricist. Entwistle could also arrange songs that always improved on the original idea. “There is a song on this album that I initiated called “Sometimes”. The day we were going to record and he came downstairs at noon, I had been in the studio for a couple of hours, and he said ‘I have an introduction to “Sometimes”’. He takes out a small composition book. He had a series of chords that he had written just before he went to sleep. So, he thinks this stuff in his head and writes it down on paper. He taught the guitarist and when he put the bassline under the whole thing, I just thought ’holy crap! And you thought this before you went to sleep and wrote it down in pencil? Staggering. The mind and the musical awareness to do that, I was just stunned. And when you needed lyrics for something, he would just pop up with them. He was brilliant. I don’t want to overstate it, but he was just lyrical and poetic.”
Writing with Entwistle was also an opportunity for Luongo to learn new techniques when it came to writing and song arrangement. “There’s an interesting thing that he used to do that not many people would know about. When he would sit down to write lyrics, he would write the alphabet out across the top of the page because he would look for rhymes. He had this method in his head to look for letters to rhyme words, it was just incredible. I have reams of lyrics he wrote over the years and every one of them has the alphabet at the top. He told me it was a tool that he used to have an idea where to go. Just brilliant. Writing with him made me feel that I was where I was meant to be, and at the same time, it was like ‘How did I get here?’ Honoured doesn’t even scratch it. We learned from each other, and we grew with each other, and I think we wrote some great material together.
STEVE LUONGO
Some of the music had been written for Van-Pires, an animation television based on a video game. “We went to England and wrote four songs together. I came back to the U.S. to shop for a deal. And one of them was “Left For Dead” and “I wouldn’t Want To Sleep With You”. So, I went back to the States, and no one was signing any legacy artists. But my business manager at the time had a cousin who was a producer for a show called Sky Dancers, a very well-known children’s television show. He played the demo for the producer of Van-Pires. But lyrics had to be changed, because it was for a children’s show. You couldn’t have sex or violence. So, “I Wouldn’t Want To Sleep With You” didn’t cut it. But we changed “Left For Dead”, but on this album, Rarities Oxhumed Volume Two, you get the original version with the original lyrics.”
“So, I had all these things left over, alternate mixes of songs, other takes that were just as good and some jamming, like at the end of “Left For Dead”, we were jamming “My Wife” and I just let the tape run out and we did it for much longer than we needed to but I just left it up. I wanted people to hear the raw stuff. With the live stuff, there are no overdubs, no fixes. It is 100% live. If there were mistakes, I left them there.”
With these releases, Luongo has hopes for how people will perceive Entwistle, beyond the fact he was in The Who, a greater awareness of what an immense talent John was and his willingness to open that talent up for other people. “If you leave with nothing else leave with the fact that John loved playing for his fans so much he would have played at the opening of an envelope. But I don’t know if people got to see that part of John, the improvisational part, having fun. I wanted people to know how great he was to be in a band with. That’s the thing about John. He was the first one to go solo, but he always wanted to be in a band. He didn’t even want to call it The John Entwistle Band. But I said, ‘John, call it whatever you want, but it will just say featuring John Entwistle of The Who, and he eventually became very proud of it, called it JEB. He was a musician, a player. Yes, he was a rock icon, but at the end of the day, he was just a guy you want in your band. People should learn from that freedom and the ability to let the dog off the leash.”
The Who Links
SPILL FEATURE: WHO SONGS? I DON’T KNOW ANY – A CONVERSATION WITH JOHN ENTWISTLE’S PARTNER-IN-CRIME STEVE LUONGO
