Great vibrations

Mike Love had the audacity Wednesday night to trade Yo Momma barbs with everyone’s favourite Uncle Jesse.

The Thunder Bay Auditorium crowd ate it up, roaring at the banter between the Beach Boys front man and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame band's sometime drummer and guitarist and former Full House star John Stamos, who has joined America’s band for a pro bono appearance during this leg of their 50^th anniversary tour.

As Love introduced their 1963 hit Be True to Your School, Stamos shot back.
“That was the year I was born.”

But Love got the last word.

“John, I ask you now, do I make fun of your mullet on Full House?”

But while there was plenty of chatter on stage, this was a show that was all about the music. And the Beach Boys showed they still know how to deliver, pounding out 39 songs in two powerful sets that had the Auditorium crowd dancing in the aisles.

The eight-piece outfit, which also includes longtime Beach Boy Bruce Johnston, John Cowsill, Sudbury’s Tim Bonhomme, Randell Kirsch, Scott Totten and Christian Love started the 2:15 performance with Catch a Wave, quickly capturing the crowd’s attention, and rolled into a series of hits that journeyed through the band’s early surfing phase, including Surf City and Surfing Safari, at which point the 70-year-old Love poked fun of his advancing age.

“This is wonderful,” he told the crowd. “Now we’d like to take an intermission – followed by a nap. That’s what you get for coming to see a slightly used rock act.”

The hits just kept coming, Little Surfer Girl morphing into Getcha Back from 1985’s Beach Boys album,

which eventually led to Wendy and Johnston performing his self-penned Disney Girls, after taking heat for a connection to crooner Barry Manilow by none other than Love.

“Much to my chagrin, he wrote I Write the Songs all by himself,” Love said. “You’re right up there with all the biggies – like Kokomo and (cough) Good Vibrations.”

The Beach Boys closed out the first half of their set with nuggets like 409, I Get Around, then after a 20-minute break, took a no-nonsense approach ramming out AM Radio gold standards like Sloop John B and Wouldn’t it Be Nice, the lead song from the group’s seminal 1966 album Pet Sounds, immediately followed by one of their catchiest hits California Girls.

Stamos, already the crowd favourite, endeared himself even further with his praise of Canada and talking about his quarter-century off-and-on relationship with the Beach Boys, something he called a dream come true.

“It’s been the highlight of my life playing with the Beach Boys,” he said, thanking Beach Boy original founding members Dennis, Carl and Brian Wilson for paving the way. “It really makes me so happy to see you laugh and sing and maybe forget about what’s going on in the world.”

Love couldn’t leave that one alone either.

“He says it’s the highlight of his life to play with us. Well, it’s not the highlight of his accountant’s life,” Love said, laughing.

“I play for nothing,” Stamos responded, before launching into Forever, the song made famous when his character Jesse Katsopoulis met the band during the episode he wed longtime love Becky Donaldson.

They finished with a bang, in their first appearance in Thunder Bay since a 1993 show on the CLE grounds.

God Only Knows led to Good Vibrations, which in turn was followed by Help Me Rhonda, Chuck Berry’s Rock and Roll Music, Eddie Cochran’s Summertime Blues and Do You Wanna Dance, which saw Stamos pull a lucky woman from the audience and dance with her throughout the song.

Four more female audience members joined the Beach Boys on stage for Barbara Ann, then the octet finished with a flurry, winding down with Surfin’ Safari, Kokomo and closing with Fun, Fun, Fun.

It was a fitting choice, as fun, fun, fun is what everyone at the Auditorium had Tuesday night.