Dave Coulier opened up this week about the first time he heard Alanis Morissette’s “You Oughta Know” – a song widely believed to be about him.
The former Full House star told Faction Talk he was driving in Detroit in 1995 when the Ottawa-born sister’s breakthrough single came on the radio.
“I was listening to the lyrics going, ‘Ooh, oh no! Oh, I can’t be this guy,’” Coulier recalled. He drove to a record store and bought a Jagged Little Pill CD and then sat in his car and listened to it.
“There was a lot of familiar stuff in there that her and I had talked about,” he said. On “Right Through You,” Morrissette sings “Your shake is like a fish” – which Coulier said evoked a “dead fish handshake” they had.
Asked about the “Would she go down on you in a theatre?” line in “You Oughta Know,” Coulier quipped: “You know, you do that popcorn cup trick one time and it backfires on you.”
Coulier said after listening to the whole album he thought, “I think I may have really hurt this woman.”
(Asked whether Coulier is the subject of “You Oughta Know” by Howard Stern earlier this year, Morissette replied: “People talk about who that song’s about and they will continue to and I never confirm or affirm who it’s about and I never will. Well, I say never and I really shouldn’t say never ‘cuz I may very well one day do it … The thing is, there was no one in the studio when I wrote that song so no one actually knows.”)
The actor, now 62, said he reconnected with Morissette several years later and “she couldn’t have been sweeter.”
Morrissette met Coulier at the 1993 NHL All-Star Game in Montreal, where she performed the national anthem. At the time she was four months shy of her 19th birthday and he was 33.
“I never saw this angry white girl thing that people have kind of coined her as,” Coulier said. “She was funny, she was sweet, she was super intelligent, super talented.”
He said when his sister Sharon was dying of cancer, Morissette drove from Toronto to Detroit with her guitar “and sat with my sister playing songs and singing to my sister in the hospital.
“That’s the kind of human being she is.”