I wish they all could be California girls—and Jersey boys.
John Stamos, who has performed with the Beach Boys since the ’80s, says the band’s September show at the Sea Hear Now festival in Asbury Park was, surprisingly, one of their best ever.
During an interview this week with Howard Stern, the Full House star said that when he initially saw the Beach Boys were slated to play the hip Shore music festival, he expressed some reservations to the guys, as the lineup included “heavy hitters” like the Foo Fighters, Weezer and the Killers. “I said, ‘You’re an oldies band,'” Stamos, 60, recalls telling singer Mike Love.
When the group said they actually wanted Stamos to play with them, that caused even more hesitation. “I was sort of dreading it,” he says.
But all that changed when he stepped out onstage at the beachside venue. “We walk onstage and it was 35, 40,000 people. And they went batshit, screaming for me, screaming for the Beach Boys,” recalls Stamos of the concert.
“We only had an hour, so it was hit, hit, hit, hit, hit, and it was one of the greatest shows I’ve ever played with them.”
[RELATED: 24 Hours in Asbury Park]
Stamos, a Golden State native like the original members of the Beach Boys, plays drums and percussion with the “California Girls”-crooning legends, who even made a number of appearances on Full House because of their strong relationship with the star.
For Stamos, one of the most personally touching moments of Sea Hear Now was talking to Dave Grohl of the Foo Fighters about the group’s late drummer, Taylor Hawkins, who was also a close friend of Stamos’. “He actually was consoling me,” Stamos says of Grohl. “… I could tell he knew I needed to hear that.”
Sea Hear Now, cofounded in 2018 by renowned music photographer Danny Clinch and music journalist turned event promoter Tim Donnelly, is one of the most hotly anticipated events at the Shore each year. When Clinch caught wind of Stamos’ comments about the festival, he wrote on social media: “Did John Stamos just tell Howard Stern that the best gig ever with The Beach Boys was at Sea Hear Now , on the beach ??? I thought so !”
Stamos has been making the press rounds as of late to promote his candid new memoir, “If You Would Have Told Me,” which delves into personal topics from his painful divorce from Rebecca Romijn to a claim that he found then-girlfriend Toni Copley in bed with Tony Danza (she later told People that she and Stamos had already split by then).
He also comments on his Full House star Lori Loughlin’s involvement in the massive college admissions scandal of the late 2010s, and writes of his late costar Bob Saget and his costars Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen, who did not act in the recent reboot Fuller House alongside Stamos, Saget and most of the rest of the original cast.
He told Stern of the Olsen twins: “They came to Bob’s funeral, and it was so beautiful. They got us all together and said, ‘We love you. We loved our childhood. We’re grateful for you guys, we thank you for making those eight years so beautiful for us. We have such fond memories. And everyone just needed to hear that.”
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