maintain the "subtle" nature of the songs in a live setting. On July 6, Friends debuted on the Billboard Top LPs chart at number 179 and subsequently peaked at number 126 while artists such as the Doors and Cream occupied the top positions. On July 8, the band released "Do It Again" as a standalone single backed with "Wake the World". "Do It Again" was recorded within the prior two months as a self-conscious throwback to the group's early surf songs, and the first time they had embraced the subject matter since 1964. It reached the top twenty in the U.S. and was a number one hit in the UK. When Friends was issued in Japan, the song was included in the album's track list. Love recalled that the album's commercial failure caused Capitol to "panic". On August 5, the label issued the greatest hits album Best of the Beach Boys Vol. 3 to recuperate from the LP's poor sales. Matijas-Mecca wrote that this was a sign that the label had "given up" on the group, repeating a tactic they used after the release of Pet Sounds and again with Smiley Smile. While the first two volumes were quickly certified as gold records, biographer David Leaf said that the label was "more than a little horrified to watch [the third volume] sink like a stone, unable to even outperform Friends." A collection of Beach Boys backing tracks, Stack-o-Tracks, was issued by Capitol on August 19. The album became the first Beach Boys LP that failed to chart in the U.S. and UK. Friends ended its 10-week stay on the Billboard charts on September 7. Ultimately, the album's record sales in the U.S. (estimated at 18,000 units) were the group's worst to date. In the UK, the album fared better, reaching number 13 on the UK Albums Chart. Critical reception Contemporary Friends received a number of positive reviews, but according to historian Keith Badman, most were published "too late to influence sales". According to a Mojo retrospective, the band's remaining fanbase reacted to the album with the abandonment of "any hope that Brian Wilson would deliver a true successor to his 1966 masterwork", Pet Sounds. Stebbins noted that its "quirky gentleness in the context of political protests, race riots, and the war-torn social landscape of 1968 [made] it about as square a peg as one can imagine". Music critic Richie Unterberger