At one point, the brilliance of the Beach Boys seemed to have no top.
Principal architect Brian Wilson and a group of family and friends moved from strength to strength, releasing 1964 s I Get Around and When I Grow Up (To Be a Man), then 1965 s Help Me Rhonda and California Girls followed by 1966 s Wouldn t It Be Nice and God Only Knows. Everything came crashing to a halt after the release of
A follow-up album didn t arrive until September of the following year, with a historic stand-alone single they d already been working on as the lone stopgap. Wilson was stuck in a spiral of perfectionism that ultimately led to the shelving of an album he d intended to call