Forever:

Being born in the early `80s meant the prime time television I grew up on consisted of Roseanne, Degrassi (a must), Unsolved Mysteries (my favourite for years), Rescue 911 (with William Shatner!), Family Matters, Blossom and Full House.

When I was a kid, television was part of my household structure. I wasn’t raised in a family that held any kind of traditional rituals. We didn’t go to church and we didn’t say grace. We didn’t have days where we didn’t eat meat and we didn’t fast or give anything up. We celebrated major holidays and events with presents and candy, and our day to day lives consisted around what was for dinner, and what was on TV. I religiously watched the same shows every week.

I once turned down an invitation to go swimming on a beautiful summer night because I needed to watch a new episode of Unsolved Mysteries that promised stories about UFOs and Stonehenge.

I still love and watch TV, but if I miss an episode of something I don’t get bummed out about it like I did when I was a kid.

Except this year I’ve surprised myself by watching Full House reruns on a daily basis.

Even though I regularly watched the show growing up, I can’t say I ever a huge fan of the Tanner family. They were different from my family in so many ways: we were into nothing, while they were into everything: sports, broadcasting, music, horses, comedy. We had big fights, and they never had real fights, at least not the screaming, running, red-faced, sobbing, fist clenching, temper tantrums that I knew.



Michelle, the youngest kid on the show, never cried, and when she was sad or mad or did something stupid everyone reasoned with her like an adult. They all reasoned with each other, which is cute and nice and all but hard to relate to.

As the sappy music near the end of each episode cued and cast members prepared to hug out whatever conflict they’d run throughout the show’s first 20 minutes, my dad would sit there and sneer at the television and say, disgusted, “Oh, so touching. Very, very touching.”

When I was a kid the show made me wish things were as easy as the Tanners’ lives seemed to be and when I watch it now there are still moments too saccharine that I can’t stand.

But there was something that show had that no one else did, and if Full House had anything going for it, it was The Beach Boys.

When I was a kid, the Beach Boys were the first band I ever truly loved. I didn’t go for the popular stuff of the times: Madonna was off my radar. Guns N’ Roses scared the shit out of me (though I of course came to love them as I got a bit older). The chilly `80s synth stuff like Soft Cell seemed too cheesy and any pop princesses like Tiffany were too girlie for my taste.

Even though they were way out of style for the times (at least based on a survey of other kids in my Grade 4 class) the Beach Boys were what I liked.

I’ve been trying to remember where I first them. I don’t think it was through my parents, who preferred to listen to talk radio in the mornings and watch television more than anything. But when they did play music it was Elvis or Frank Sinatra or country, of my Alvin and the Chipmunks record.

It's quite likely that I first became a Beach Boys fan through Full House. Was it the episode when Mike Love came on and sang “Be True to Your School” on a telethon Danny Tanner was hosting? Or when they did a concert version of “Kokomo” for the show?



It must have been within the same year of seeing one of those episodes when I started seeing Beach Boys cassette tapes at garage sales, which was what my mom and I did together most weekends every spring and summer.
My dad would let me play the tapes whenever we were in the car. I liked the simultaneous warmth and sadness of the Beach Boys’ songs. I didn’t know anything about Brian Wilson at the time. I didn’t know about Mike Love’s questionable temperament. I didn’t know that the Beach Boys didn’t really live on a sunny beach in California. And even though I knew they were an older band I liked to study the photographs on the cassette sleeves and picture the songs being sung by the young men pictured there.

Those songs made me think of cars and cut-off shorts and pretty girls – pretty much what the Beach Boys’ music was supposed to do. Even though I was still years away from being a teenager, living in a half-industrial suburban neighbourhood, I had the clearest, cleanest views of beautiful beaches and golden summer days when those tapes were on.

I felt like I was Kevin-fucking-Arnold from the Wonder Years, okay?

I fell so hard for the Beach Boys that I used to ride my bike around my neighbourhood replaying an elaborate fantasy in my head.

It went like this: the Beach Boys were playing a show in Toronto, and were driving through my neighbourhood on their way downtown. (This would be a ridiculous, implausible route for them to take, but whatever.) They had all of their lyrics written down on a magic scroll, tied with red ribbon. Somehow the scroll fell out of their limo, without them noticing.

I, of course, was the one who found it at the side of the road. I chased them down on my bike and of course caught up with them. They were so grateful to have their magic scroll of lyrics back that they invited me to get in their limo, ride down to the show with them, and hang out backstage and be their friend forever, because they a) felt so indebted to me, and b) thought I was so instantly cool that they couldn’t imagine not having me in their life.

I eventually grew out of this fantasy but never out of the Beach Boys, who remain one of my all-time favourite bands.

This week, after settling in at home after spending a week away, I tuned into Full House and caught an episode I’d completely forgotten about: the one where John Stamos’ character Uncle Jessie gets famous when Jessie and the Rippers’ “Forever” becomes a hit – in Japan. He opens the concert by singing the Beach Boys’ “Barbara Ann” in Japanese but flubs the lines, so the song’s cut short. Bummer.

Even though the Beach Boys’ and their songs (“Forever” is a Beach Boys song, just in case anyone out there thought it came from some mutant Full House dream team) made repeated appearances throughout Full House’s run, I never learned until years after it had gone off the air just how closely linked the two were, with John Stamos even playing for later versions of the band, long, long after the Beach Boys’ original lineup had been shaken up one too many times, wholly and individually.

If it wasn’t for Full House, would I have become such a big Beach Boys fan?

I like to think that their music would have found me somehow, some other way. Maybe I would have taken a chance on those cassette tapes anyway.

But do the Beach Boys keep me coming back to Full House? Not sure about that one, but I do know that when their songs come on those reruns, the nostalgia gets turned all the way up to 10.