had been planned for the summer of 1976, the Beach Boys' association with Guercio and his Caribou Management company ended early in the year. Stephen Love subsequently took over as the band's de facto business manager. Production Initial sessions In late 1975, Wilson volunteered himself into psychologist Eugene Landy's 24-hour therapy program. Encouraged by the positive results of Landy's treatment, Stephen Love and Wilson's bandmates requested that Wilson produce the group's several-months overdue album for Reprise. These sessions lasted from January 30 to May 15, 1976 at Brother Studios. Studio staff engineers Stephen Moffitt and Earle Mankey (a former member of Sparks) were enlisted for the project. Brian was officially credited as the sole producer for the first time on a Beach Boys LP since Pet Sounds (1966). Carl and Dennis assisted Brian with the instrumental tracks, while Al Jardine and Mike Love contributed just vocals. As a warm-up exercise, Brian first recorded a batch of oldies with many of the session musicians that he had worked with during the mid-1960s. Mankey remembered that Wilson found it difficult to engage with musicians in the studio that he was not familiar with. "They were the fastest sessions ever. The room would be full of musicians, all the old guys from the past, and there would be some acoustic basses and open mikes. ... At the end of the song Brian would say, 'That sounded great, guys!' and head for the door." Wilson recalled, "It was a little scary because [the Beach Boys and I] weren't as close. We had drifted apart, personality-wise. A lot of the guys had developed new personalities through meditation. It was a bit scary and shaky. But we went into the studio with the attitude that we had to get it done. After a week or two in the studio, we started to get the niche again." By this time, the Beach Boys were three albums behind schedule in their contract with Warner Bros. The original plan was for Wilson to produce one or two albums of all-original material after the oldies exercises were finished. Crawdaddy journalist Timothy White, who attended many of the album's sessions, explained that the premise "represented a compromise at a stage when the Boys felt stymied as a unit and reluctant to commit their own recent or stockpiled individual compositions to a communal album that didn't mainly feature Brian's work." According to