Editor’s Note: By our name alone, one can easily deduce what we’re all about here at Albumism. Indeed, we celebrate albums of all stripes, all genres, all time periods, and all formats. With one exception, that is.

If there’s one type of album that we’re not particularly fond of, it’s those massively popular “Greatest Hits” and “Best Of” compilations. In our experience, most of them are dubious propositions, necessary evils to some extent. But we get it. Not everyone has the appetite or the financial wherewithal to seek out and stock up on the multiple entries that span an artist’s studio discography. It’s a helluva lot easier—and we suppose less risky for many—to simply skip the time-consuming exploratory work, in favor of embracing one consolidated sequence of an artist’s most successful or important songs.

The problem with this, however, is that these so-called perfect encapsulations of an artist’s recorded repertoire are invariably imperfect and incomplete, with plenty of gaps to be found in their track listings. Hence why we’ve decided to identify five worthy songs that were conspicuously left off the final running order of familiar hits packages. Our hope in shining a light on this quintet of songs is that it may prompt at least a few hits collection junkies to dig just a bit deeper and discover even more to love about the artists in question.

So without further ado, check out Jeremy Levine’s picks for five deserving songs missing from ‘The Who Hits 50’ (2014) below, and let us know which songs you would have added to the final track list via the comments section at bottom.

For a band known for writing music in the service of conceptual albums, not to mention one that never had a #1 hit, The Who have a hilarious number of Greatest Hits compilations. We could have picked many such compilations for this piece, but we focused on The Who Hits 50!, mostly because it’s the most recent and one of the most comprehensive at 42 tracks deep.

The Who | The Who Hits 50!
Polydor (2014)

Official Track Listing:

But, just for fun, let’s also include tracks found on The Ultimate Collection (2002). This compilation has plenty of overlap with The Who Hits 50!, but also adds these songs to our list:

With these huge chunks of the discography missing, there’s still plenty of great Who goodness to explore. To decide which five songs to include here, special attention was paid to finding tracks that best capture different eras of the band’s sound or the parts of their artistry that make them such an interesting group.

Five Great Songs Missing from The Who Hits 50!:

“So Sad About Us”
A Quick One (1966)

Before they started bringing high art to rock & roll, The Who were a club band. In this early period, their central aesthetic involved combining danceable pop music with a louder, sometimes darker, edge. While fabulous songs using this approach litter the band’s early catalog, few use the spirit of “Maximum R&B” to elevate the music to a new plane quite as well as “So Sad About Us.”

From the first few seconds, we know this is not a regular pop song. The “La la las” are sung more forcefully than they would be if coming from, say, the Beach Boys, while Keith Moon’s drumming is cymbal-driven and threatens to overtake the vocals. When this mania resolves into a verse, we find ourselves in a lyrical and melodic plane that could belong to a standard pop song, laid on top of a band that is still pushing the sound forward.

Later, the opening theme recapitulates, but resolves in an upward key change that leads a euphoric final verse. In a masterclass on tension and release, The Who use aggression to create one of the most fun moments in their entire repertoire.

“Overture”
Tommy (1969)

With all the noise and bluster that defined The Who, it's easy to lose sight of Townshend’s deep knowledge of classical music. “Overture” is one place where this background comes through, following in an operatic tradition to blend together themes from Tommy using an expanded instrumentation and clever harmonic shifts. For example, you’ve got the trumpets replacing the open guitar chords on the "Pinball Wizard" theme, and the organ that suggests the "Listening To You" theme without actually going there.

I was honestly astonished that “Overture” wasn’t included in either of these two hits collections, but then realized that so much of its power is contextual. “Overture” is more than an intellectual exercise or even the record’s opening statement. It isolates Tommy. It marks the rest of the album as territory that we cannot explore until we pass through the gates of its opening track.

“Overture” asks us to keep the rest of the world out while we sit with the story and think through it. Even with some of the brilliant musical choices throughout the track, the song’s contribution to the band’s legacy is its function as the bridge between the world we live in and the world of Tommy. Before this, no album had asked quite this much of us.

“The Song Is Over”
Who’s Next (1971)

While "The Song Is Over" doesn't sound like a Who song at all during its piano-driven verses, its complex form perfectly encapsulates the band's progressive era (essentially everything from 1968’s The Who Sell Out through 1973’s Quadrophenia).

In the grand arc of things, “The Song Is Over” just uses a simple verse/chorus/bridge format, but when laid out over the long arc of the song, it feels like a journey. With the listener moving through a few different keys and nearly three minutes of music before the second verse arrives, “The Song Is Over” stretches a familiar format to a point where it becomes unrecognizable.

The song’s slowed-down nature also gives us a look at the fascinating instrumental interplay that’s usually happening at full speed in The Who. Let’s focus in on the end of the second chorus: Moon fills the white spaces with melodic drumming, while Entwistle offers a short melody to fill the gap left by the suddenly-absent synthesizer. When the synth returns, Entwistle is back to laying foundation and Moon sets the beat. Without creating any sense of disruption, the group has given melodic control to three different instruments (none of which are voice or guitar) within seconds. It takes a lot of care to make this kind of instrumental balancing make sense.

“The Song Is Over” has one more gift: the coda. This final minute of the song references “Pure And Easy,” the central theme to Lifehouse—the abandoned operatic concept from whose ashes Who’s Next rose. While Lifehouse’s fingerprints are all over the record that would eventually be released, “Pure And Easy” contains the only reference to the mythical Note that was at the center of Townshend’s intended follow-up to Tommy.

Sea and Sand
Quadrophenia (1973)

I'm prepared to argue that that this is The Who’s best song period, not just the best song left off these two collections. "Sea and Sand" is a meticulously crafted piece.

For the unfamiliar: Quadrophenia is the story of a young mod named Jimmy who lives in London. Jimmy feels like his personality is split four ways, a feeling that’s partly the result of mental illness as well as the complicated social demands of both his home life and his gang.

This is important background because only in the context of the tensions of Quadrophenia does “Sea and Sand” make any sense. Otherwise, it’s just a weirdly assembled song. The track hosts three different musical themes that take center stage to evoke different parts of Jimmy’s internal processes; you can hear his personality change gears as Townshend seizes the microphone on the "But how come the other tickets look much better" lyric. In the grand context of the band, this moment is hugely significant: while formal experimentation is the name of the game for The Who, rarely does that experimentation pay off so well in terms of breathing meaning into the songs.

What's perhaps most noteworthy about "Sea and Sand" is that it's a foot soldier, one small part in the sprawling project of Quadrophenia. The attention to detail in this record is preposterous, and "Sea and Sand” is only as good as it is because it mattered so much to Townshend that this story be told as fully as possible. You need these smaller pieces to build the full, vivid world of the opera. Without songs like “Sea and Sand,” there’s also no “See Me, Feel Me,” “5:15,” or “Love Reign O’er Me.” In this sense, it’s quintessential Who.

The performances themselves are stunning. Daltrey offers two completely different vocal styles. The band perfectly hits the transitions between each mini-movement. In the slow sections, Entwistle offers tender counterpoint while perfectly matching Moon’s mania in the fast parts. “Sea and Sand” is everything the Who could do.

How Many Friends
The Who By Numbers (1975)

After their progressive era, which ended with Quadrophenia, The Who’s sound varies considerably from album to album. As they drift away from operatic structures as well as instrumental experimentation, the band finds its way into a less-busy sound and a tendency to give each song more of its own identity. This rock & roll normalcy also gives us a more intimate songwriting idiom than we had seen in the previous, high-minded records.

While not all of these shifts in direction worked for every track in every instance, the moments they come together give us some songs that are unparalleled in the band’s complex catalogue. “How Many Friends” is one such tune, in which Daltrey sings straightforward, confessional lyrics that channel Townshend’s sense of social isolation within the music industry. The vocal delivery is complex—Daltrey is high up in his register, using a softer tone than we’re used to, before crashing into his usual scream in the chorus.

Perhaps the most noteworthy thing about this track, apart from the expertly-crafted juxtaposition between verse and chorus, is the guitar part. Typically, Townshend plays rhythm guitar, offering big, chunky chords around which Moon and Entwistle can pour their cacophony. In “How Many Friends,” the bass and drums are pulled much further back while Townshend plays a melodic guitar part that complements the vocals. This sort of approach is standard-issue for many ‘70s rock bands, but it actually sets “How Many Friends” apart for The Who. After their intense experimental period, The Who got back to basics and put out an exceptionally good rock & roll album—the sort of thing you wouldn’t expect a group that went so conceptual to do so well.

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