Creativity Quote by John Entwistle

Entwistle is talking like someone who’s spent a lifetime standing in the blast radius of rock and refusing to pretend the body is optional. On paper, “bass” is just a frequency range. Onstage, it’s physics with an attitude: low-end doesn’t merely get heard, it gets felt in the ribcage, in the soles of your feet, in that involuntary sense of propulsion that turns a band from competent to dangerous. His insistence that “the vibration has to happen on stage” is a quiet rebuke to the idea that sound is something you can outsource to the front-of-house mix and call it a day.

The specific intent is practical - he’s defending big rigs and real stage volume - but the subtext is aesthetic and even moral. A rock show, in Entwistle’s world, is an embodied contract between players. If the drummer isn’t physically pushed by the bass, if the guitarist can’t lock into the low-end swell, the band’s internal timekeeping and emotional intensity thin out. “Otherwise the feel is wrong” is a musician’s way of saying: you can’t fake communion.

Context matters: Entwistle played in The Who, a band built on explosive dynamics and brute-force presence. He wasn’t just providing low notes; he was shaping the architecture of the chaos. The line about not scaling down “too far” isn’t nostalgia for excess so much as skepticism toward frictionless modernity - silent stages, in-ears, perfect control. He’s arguing that some kinds of meaning require inconvenience, mass, and a little risk.