The Who Might Have Been the First Band to Start the “Leftovers” Album Trend in 1974

It has become common practice for rock bands who have been around for a while to release a collection of songs not included within the main thrust of their discography. We’re talking about B-sides, EP tracks, and any other songs finished but ultimately left on the cutting-room floor.

Perhaps the first band to pull off such a collection with a great degree of notoriety and effectiveness was The Who. Their 1974 collection Odds & Sods set the bar pretty high for all such musical vault excavations to come.

The Ox as Curator

The Who entered 1974 at the absolute peak of their powers. Based on the incredible stretch of albums that they were enjoying, including back-to-back-to-back masterpieces Tommy, Who’s Next, and Quadrophenia, they could make as good a claim as any to being the world’s finest rock band at the time.

They were also headed to the movies. A film version of Tommy went into production. All four members would appear in performance sequences. In addition, Pete Townshend helped write the script, while Roger Daltrey and Keith Moon had acting roles aside from their appearances with the band.

With a little less to do than the rest, Who bassist John Entwistle grabbed another assignment to keep him busy. He decided to pull together unused material from throughout the band’s time together and put it together as an album for release in 1974 in between the group’s actual studio LPs. This project became Odds & Sods.

Beating the Bootleggers

At the time The Who took this course of action, the bootleg market was playing havoc with rock bands. Wily entrepreneurs found ways of collecting rare material from the top acts. They then hastily assembled these songs, stuck a title on them (à la Who’s Zoo), and made a lot of money selling them to excited fans looking for something special that no one else had.

Of course, the artists didn’t see a cent from any of that. The Who decided to beat the bootleggers to the punch with Odds & Sods. Luckily, they had plenty of unreleased stuff from which to choose.

Several songs on Odds & Sods came from a planned EP that never saw the light of day. Others emanated from the abandoned Lifehouse project, which also sent a slew of songs to the Who’s Next album. The band added some overdubs so that certain unfinished tracks sounded ready for their closeups.

Excellent ‘Odds’

If you didn’t know beforehand that Odds & Sods was an album of castoffs and oddballs, you probably wouldn’t be able to tell by listening. And that’s not just because songs like “Pure And Easy” and “Join Together” quickly soared in popularity after the album’s release to become among the band’s most beloved.

The album succeeds because the band’s unmistakable alchemy is present throughout these leftovers, albeit freed from the conceptual bent of most of their work. Over the years, the band has released updated versions of the collection with much more good stuff from their unheard past.

Meanwhile, a slew of rock bands followed in The Who’s footsteps with their own collections of cutting-room floor music. But all the subsequent imitators might as well have been playing for second in that department behind Odds & Sods, the imposing standard-setter.

(Photo by Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images)

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