own identity without their founding architect." A photograph of Brian hiding behind an eye examination chart does appear on the gatefold cover. Release and reception Lead single "Bluebirds over the Mountain" (backed with "Never Learn Not to Love") was issued on November 29, 1968, in the UK (number 33) and three days later in the U.S. (number 61), becoming the group's lowest-charting single since their 1961 debut "Surfin'". After touring the UK in December, the Beach Boys returned to the studio to work on the album that would become Sunflower (1970). Released on February 10, 1969, 20/20 sold better than Friends, peaking at number 3 in the UK and reaching number 68 in the US. Rolling Stone reviewer Arthur Schmidt said the album was "good, [but] flawed mainly by a lack of direction (a sense of direction being last evident in Wild Honey), more a collection than a whole." An uncredited writer from Hit Parader opined that it was the band's best album since Pet Sounds and an improvement over the "baffling" Friends and Wild Honey. A reviewer for the underground paper Rat Subterranean News commented that even though it was "against all my carefully established principles to like The Beach Boys," he enjoyed the LP, yet described most of side one as "weak". In August, Charles Manson and his cult of followers committed the Tate–LaBianca murders, and three months later, were apprehended by police. Their former connections with Dennis and the Beach Boys became the subject of media attention. Manson was later convicted for several counts of murder and conspiracy to murder. During the trial, Manson released his debut album, Lie: The Love and Terror Cult, which included his original arrangement of "Cease to Exist". Among retrospective assessments of 20/20, critic Richie Unterberger wrote that it was "one of their better post-Pet Sounds records ... The highlights, however, were a couple of Smile-session-era tunes ... as hard as they were trying to establish their identity as an integrated band in the late '60s, their new recordings were overshadowed by the bits and pieces of Smile that emerged at the time." Biographer David Leaf called it "one of the most artistically interesting releases of their career and certainly one of the stronger later LPs." Peter Ames Carlin wrote that "whatever the album lacked in thematic coherence, it made up in the quality of the pieces contributed by each band member."