“Help Me, Rhonda” by The Beach Boys

"Help Me, Rhonda" had two lives in 1965. Brian Wilson first slipped it onto The Beach Boys Today! as "Help Me, Ronda", then heard a hit in it and went back in, changing the arrangement and tweaking the words for a single that arrived that April and later landed on Summer Days (and Summer Nights!!). He wrote it with extra lyrics from Mike Love, and insisted Rhonda was nobody real.

The surprise is at the microphone: Al Jardine sings lead, a rare thing for the Beach Boys in those days, with Love, Brian, Carl and Dennis Wilson on backing vocals. Brian produced and played piano and Hammond organ, Carl played guitar, Hal Blaine drummed and Carol Kaye played bass, with Chuck Britz engineering. It went to number one on the Hot 100, their second chart-topper after "I Get Around".

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.