Steve Harwell, the longtime lead singer for Smash Mouth, died Monday of liver failure brought on by years of alcoholism. He was 56 years old and had been in bad shape for a decade, several times appearing inebriated and disoriented on stage. He quit the band after a particularly ugly incident in 2021.
Smash Mouth wasn’t a one-hit wonder, but it might as well have been. They started out with a ska-influenced sound similar to their SoCal contemporaries No Doubt, and had a No. 1 rock chart hit with “Walkin’ on the Sun” in 1997. “All Star” was the lead single from their second album, “Astro Lounge,” in 1999, and it reached No. 4 on the Hot 100 that year. But it exploded into a No. 1 hit in 2001 when it was used in the wildly popular animated film “Shrek,” leading to a long afterlife in sports arenas, video games and internet memes.
Guitarist Greg Camp said he wrote the song after the suits at Sony listened to the tapes of the album-in-progress and uttered the phrase that every record executive repeats by rote – “I don’t hear a hit.” He wasn’t fond of the tune, and most of the band were similarly doubtful. Harwell, though, knew immediately it would be a smash, and their manager warned them it would change their careers.
Camp told Darryn King for the Ringer, “We definitely had to take a vote and go, ‘Are we going to do this?’” Despite their misgivings, “Nobody said, ‘Let’s just be broke and make sure our friends think we’re cool.’”
After the sudden success, thinking Smash Mouth was cool wasn’t an option; the song’s ubiquity turned it, and the band, into a joke. Tongue-in-cheek covers of the song abound. You can find it reinterpreted countless ways – as a Bach chorale, an emotional ballad, a bardcore lay, a barbershop quartet number – and it gets laughs every time.
Though bass player Paul DeLisle is the only original member remaining, Smash Mouth is still performing, and “All Star” still closes every show.
Their first hit still gets some airplay, but not enough to dispel the idea that Smash Mouth was a one-hit wonder.
