Beach Boys, Carl and the Passions "So Tough" (side A)

In the Beach Boys' long and often confusing career, 1971's Carl and the Passions "So Tough" marks a particularly strange turn. By this point, Brian Wilson's creative output had diminished, and Dennis was injured at the time and unable to play drums. Carl Wilson asserted himself in a leadership role, with help from Ricky Fataar (who was later in the Rutles), Blondie Chaplin (who is part of the Rolling Stones' current tour line-up), and even Daryl "The Captain" Dragon (before he sang about muskrats). The resulting album is uniform in production (emphasizing 70s dry sounds with lots of panning and imbalanced mixes), but incredibly diverse and inconsistent in songwriting with so many personalities involved. Highlights include Brian Wilson's "You Need a Mess of Help to Stand Alone", and Chaplin/Fataar's "Hold on Dear Brother". The album gets even stranger in its packaging—the front cover does not mention the Beach Boys, but the US release was a double-album that included Pet Sounds, and the back cover features the classic image from that album cover with a different border and font (it's objectively a more tasteful design than the timeless green border).