album Smile, which was advertised as the follow-up to the sophistication of Pet Sounds and "Good Vibrations" (both 1966). Instead, the group were making a deliberate choice to produce music that was simpler and less refined. Commenting on Wild Honey, Mike Love said the band made a conscious decision to be "completely out of the mainstream for what was going on at that time, which was all hard rock/psychedelic music. [The album] just didn’t have anything to do with what was going on." Wild Honey saw a reduced share of involvement from the group's producer and principal songwriter, Brian Wilson. Although Wild Honey charted higher than Smiley Smile in the US, it was ultimately the group's lowest-selling album to that point. Apart from a two-week U.S. tour in November 1967, the band was not performing live during this period, and their finances were rapidly diminishing. That same month, the group stopped wearing their longtime striped-shirt stage uniforms in favor of matching white, polyester suits that were similar to a Las Vegas show band. Dennis Wilson, Al Jardine, and Mike Love were among the many rock musicians who discovered the teachings of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi following the Beatles' public endorsement of his Transcendental Meditation technique in August 1967. In December, the touring group attended a lecture by the Maharishi at a UNICEF Variety Gala in Paris and were moved by the simplicity and effectiveness of his meditation process as a means to obtaining inner peace. They were invited to meet the Maharishi in his hotel room the same day, and according to Brian, "they came back and [Carl was] just floating. ... it got to me through him." He recalled that he had "already been initiated" beforehand, but "for some ridiculous reason I hadn't followed through with it, and when you don't follow through with something you can get all clogged up. ... we're all meditating together now." In a January 1968 interview, Brian stated that the group was unsure what their next production would be, but that "it won't be very long now until I come up with a song about meditation. It shouldn't be more than a month." He also expressed an interest in "pull[ing] out of conventional sound making and get[ting] into sounds that have never been made before ever." In early February, the group performed scattered gigs in the U.S. with Buffalo Springfield. The Beach Boys attended