Steve Harwell, former Smash Mouth lead singer, dies at 56
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Steve Harwell's death was confirmed by the band’s manager Robert Hayes, who said the cause was liver failure.
PHOTO: AFP
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NEW YORK – Steve Harwell, the former lead singer of American rock band Smash Mouth, died on Monday. He was 56.
His death at his home in Boise, Idaho, was confirmed by the band’s manager Robert Hayes, who said the cause was liver failure.
Smash Mouth were founded in 1994 in San Jose, California, and were made up of Harwell, guitarist Greg Camp, drummer Kevin Coleman and bassist Paul De Lisle.
They are best known for their 1999 hit All Star, but their first success came with the song Walkin’ On The Sun, from the band’s debut album, Fush Yu Mang (1997).
With songwriting credits going to all four band members, Walkin’ On The Sun is an upbeat track with a dark undertow, calling to mind both American rock band The Doors and contemporary ska-punk. The song went into steady rotation on MTV and topped Billboard’s alternative chart.
Its music video laid out the band’s aesthetic and attitude.
Dressed in short-sleeve shirts and shades, with fedoras and soul patches, the four members looked like rougher versions of the image-obsessed retro hipsters depicted in the 1996 comedy Swingers.
The video features a dance party straight out of a 1960s beach movie and ends with a drag-race crash, with Harwell – beefy, with tattoos on his arms – behind the wheel.
“The question of a particular style never once crossed our minds,” said Harwell in a 1997 interview. “We didn’t want to be labelled as a punk band, a ska band, a surf band, a rock band, a pop band or a whatever band. We just wanted to be us, Smash Mouth, and leave it to the people to interpret what we are.”
The band’s big-time crossover came with All Star, from their album Astro Lounge.
Backed by harder-driving guitars, Harwell, with a slight sneer, sang an outsiders’ anthem to ignore ridicule and shoot for the moon: “Hey now, you’re an all star/Get your game on, go play/Hey now, you’re a rock star/Get the show on, get paid.”
All Star – written by Camp – went to No. 4 on Billboard’s Hot 100 singles chart, the band’s best chart position, and found a lasting audience through movie soundtracks.
In 1999, it was used in the films Inspector Gadget and Mystery Men. Two years later, the song got its broadest exposure when it played during the opening credits of Shrek (2001), the animated hit featuring Canadian actor Mike Myers as a grouchy but good-hearted ogre.
The Shrek soundtrack – which also featured Smash Mouth’s amped-up version of American pop-rock band The Monkees’ I’m A Believer in the closing scene – went double platinum, and the film won an Academy Award for Best Animated Feature.
“We had no clue how big Shrek was going to be,” Harwell said in a 2019 article in Rolling Stone magazine. “We sold millions of records off that alone. The song was reborn again.”
Since then, All Star has lived on, becoming a rich source for online parodies.
Nearly 25 years later, the song has garnered nearly a billion streams on Spotify, and the sound of Harwell’s slightly raspy voice is still linked to the song’s recognisable opening lines: “Somebody once told me/The world is gonna roll me/I ain’t the sharpest tool in the shed.”
Steven Scott Harwell was born on Jan 9, 1967, and grew up in San Jose.
He began his musical career as a rapper with the group F.O.S., which stood for Freedom of Speech. With a sound reminiscent of West Coast groups of the late 1980s and early 1990s like N.W.A and Cypress Hill, they released a single, Big Black Boots, in 1993. But by then, Harwell was already restless.
“Around the time we were about to put out our single, this kid Snoop Dogg came out and changed everything,” he said in a 2017 interview with music website Stereogum.
“I was at a radio convention in Las Vegas watching MC Hammer, of all people, and I just looked at my manager, ‘I’m tired of all this hip-hop. I want to start an alternative rock band.’”
Steve Harwell performs at the after-party for Dr. Seuss’ Cat In The Hat at the Universal Studios Cinema in November 2003 in Los Angeles.
PHOTO: AFP
After Astro Lounge, Smash Mouth released five more studio albums through 2012, with diminishing success.
In 2006, Harwell was a cast member on The Surreal Life, a reality show on VH1 in which one-time celebrities live together.
His fellow cast members included Sherman Hemsley of American sitcom The Jeffersons (1975 to 1985), Florence Henderson of American sitcom The Brady Bunch (1969 to 1974) and Tawny Kitaen, known for her appearances in English hard rock band Whitesnake’s music videos.
For the last decade, Harwell’s career had been marked by health problems and occasionally erratic behaviour. In 2013, he was diagnosed with cardiomyopathy, a heart condition, and Wernicke’s encephalopathy, a neurological condition that can affect speech and memory.
In 2021, he left the band and retired from performing after a live show in New York during which he was seen slurring his words, using profanity and apparently giving a Nazi salute.
“I’ve tried so hard to power through my physical and mental health issues, and to play in front of you one last time, but I just wasn’t able to,” he said in a statement at the time.
He is survived by his fiancee Annette Jones; his brother Mark; and three sisters, Carla Crocker, Michelle Baroni and Julie Harwell. NYTIMES
