After 1974, "Pet Sounds" went out-of-print. In Granata's description, the album subsequently "fell into obscurity" and was "relegated to the cutout bins" for decades. Sociomusicologist Simon Frith wrote in 1981 that "Pet Sounds" continued to be largely regarded by "the music world" as a "'weird' record". Writing in the first edition of "The Rolling Stone Record Guide" (1979), Dave Marsh gave the album four stars (out of a possible five) and described it as a "powerful, but spotty" collection on which the least experimental songs proved to be the best. In 1985, he wrote that the album was now considered a "classic", elaborating: ""Pet Sounds" wasn't a commercial flop, but it did signal that the group was losing contact with its listeners (a charge that could not be leveled against the Beatles during the same period)". Granata offered that, by the time the album reappeared on compact disc in 1990, it was "embraced by hard-core fanatics" yet "still considered an insider's record—a quasi-cult classic".