Remembering the Guy from Smash Mouth

'All Star' Wasn't Their Best Song, Steve Harwell Told Me

Their second Smash Mouth album “Astro Lounge” was just being released, on the power of a popular new single, “All Star” in 1999 when I spoke to the gravelly-voiced lead singer of the band Steve Harwell, who died last week at 56. 

“It’s fun. It’s one of those songs you like to hear in spring and summer,” he said of “All Star.” But he added, “It’s definitely not the best song on the new record.”

At the time, “”All Star” was No. 3 on Billboard’s modern rock chart and about to be used in the 1999  superhero comedy “Mystery Man” that bombed at the box office. Nonetheless, the official “All Star” music video was filled with its stars that included Ben Stiller, William H. Macy, Hank Azaria and Paul Reubens. 

“All Star” was indeed catchy — and had a climate change message in its second verse! 

And “Mystery Man” wasn’t the only movie interested in its use. it was picked up for “Inspector Gadget” later that year and then “Digimon: the Movie” in 2000 and the Jerry Zucker comedy “Rat Race” in 2001, in which the band played the song live during the closing credits. 

But it was its use in 2001’s “Shrek” that provided its enduring lifespan. Originally it was used by animators as a place holder for a later, eventual song to open the film, but DreamWorks head Jeffrey Katzenberg said “All Star” worked just fine. 

The band agreed, and were even persuaded to cover The Monkees “I’m a Believer” for the movie’s conclusion. 

The tune even came up (via marching band) in “Shrek the Third” six years later.

By then, the tune had sold three million copies and was such a fixture at sporting events that Smash Mouth was asked to play it live, starting, of course, with the baseball’s 1999 all star game.

It became so embedded in the culture — along with the legions who grew up with “Shrek” — that it re-emerged more than a decade later as the fodder for hundreds of memes and dozens of funny remixes on YouTube that amassed million of viewers. 

Simply the first syllable of the lyrics - “Some” was enough to launch a million laughs  The band’s guitarist Greg Camp, who wrote the song, said he particularly liked a mash-up done between “All Star” and Simon & Garfunkel’s “The Sound of Silence.” (My personal favorite is a reimagined clip from the Rick Rubin -documentary “Paul McCartney 3,2,1” in which the two men marvel at the splendor of “All Star”).  

At the time, Smash Mouth had been used to having a single break k before an album came out. Their first big hit, “Walkin’ on the Sun,” was a hit in L.A. before it went national and appeared on their 1997 debut “Fush You Mang.” 

A nominally ska-punk band was becoming known for its kind of retro garage sound on both “Walkin’ on the Sun” and its followup, a cover of Question Mark and the Mysterions’ “Can’t Get Enough of You Baby,” that appeared on the “Can’t Hardly Wait” soundtrack in 1998. 

“We learned a lot off the first record,” Harwell told me. “We found out radio won’t play just anything, even if it’s a hit. If they play one thing they know you for, and you get stuck in a certain kind of style, they won’t play anything else.”

“We got stuck in this retro thing,” he said, “And they can’t get enough of it.” 

That wasn’t necessarily a bad thing, Harwell said. “We were falling into a sound — but we actually like it.” 

The retro sound became so associated with the band they had recently added a full time keyboardist to feature it.

“It filled up our band so much more and feels so much better,” Harwell said. “We can do a lot more things and experiment more live than when we were a four piece.” 

And as a result, the then-new, now-classic “All Star” was a hallmark. After all, Harwell said, “It sounds like Smash Mouth.”