This week, the music world mourned the loss of life of Steve Harwell, a founding member and frontman of Smash Mouth whose distinctive supply helped flip “Walkin’ on the Sun” and “All Star” into multi-generational pop hits. Until his retirement in 2021, he and bassist Paul Delisle have been the two constant members of the band’s lineup since their 1994 inception. And whereas guitarist Greg Camp served as the songwriter behind the group’s best-known tunes, Harwell was its iconic voice — in additional methods than one.
For the higher half of the decade, Smash Mouth has loved one thing of a cult following on Twitter, the place the band was recognized to combine it up with followers, feud with the Oakland A’s, and snort about being often known as “the Shrek band.” Because the unpolished feed is precisely the reverse of the calculated celeb branding you’re used to, it felt extra genuine, inclusive, and enjoyable, whether or not you have been seeing Harwell prepare dinner with celeb doppelganger Guy Fieri (to show that they weren’t the similar particular person) or proudly stand in assist of the trans group for Pride Month.
Through all of it, Harwell and Smash Mouth created a template for the way another rock outfit that was huge in the Nineties may proceed to shock and allure the public effectively into the twenty first century. Never too critical (except they have been telling bigots to fuck off), they have been free to talk their minds — partially as a result of the top of their fame was behind them.
To study extra about the magic of Smash Mouth’s account, Rolling Stone reached out to Ron Xepoleas, Smash Mouth’s social media supervisor. He explains that he tends to put up for the band on Twitter whereas hanging out with a number of of them. “I’ve been round these guys since junior excessive, so we’re all ingrained with comparable opinions on tradition, social points, favourite sports activities groups, and so forth.,” he says. Exactly who every tweet comes from will depend on the subject. Where it involves Bay Area baseball, as an example, that’s simply him and Delisle.
But one of Harwell’s contributions to @smashmouth lore unquestionably belongs to the web corridor of fame. In 2018, a years-old DJ Khaled interview on The Breakfast Club resurfaced and went massively viral because of a curious confession the producer made throughout the dialog: he expects to obtain oral intercourse in his relationship, however doesn’t reciprocate. “Hell nah… I can’t try this. I don’t try this,” he stated. Yet he wouldn’t settle for such a refusal from his fiancée (now spouse). “You gotta perceive I’m the Don, I’m the king,” he argued.
Khaled’s feedback prompted a wave of mockery, memes, and basic disbelief, with the controversy inevitably crossing Smash Mouth’s radar. The end result was a Harwell quip for the ages. “I used to be with Steve after we learn [Khaled] doesn’t carry out oral intercourse on girls,” Xepoleas remembers. Harwell expressed his disapproval in poetic vogue. “That was Steve’s direct response, so I tweeted it,” says Xepoleas. Some 220,000 likes later, it’s enshrined as each Twitter and Smash Mouth canon:
Besides delighting followers, that sort of elite, bulletproof, no-fucks-given posting meant each Harwell and the Smash Mouth account provided a blueprint to different artists trying to break unfastened and be themselves on the platform. Among them was Max Collins, the frontman of band Eve 6, finest recognized for the 1998 single “Inside Out” (or “the heart in a blender song“). Collins emerged as a Twitter famous person in 2020 because of his candid, Harwell-esque humor about the ups and downs of rock semi-stardom. He wrote a poignant goodbye to Harwell on Eve 6’s Patreon web page, discussing the singer’s longtime struggles with alcohol abuse and alluding to the tragic loss of life of his toddler son Presley at the age of six months because of acute lymphocytic leukemia in 2001.
Harwell’s tweets, Collins tells Rolling Stone, have been like Smash Mouth songs “in that they have been easy however impeccably cast for prime leisure worth.”
“They had the impact of making you assume, ‘I can’t consider the Smash Mouth man simply stated that’ and ‘Of course, the Smash Mouth man simply stated that,’ concurrently,” says Collins. “The DJ Khaled second definitely exemplified this. That rub was stunning and was positively an inspiration to me once I was nonetheless a latent poster.”
It’s a curious ingredient to a musician’s legacy, although the pleasure it dropped at others can’t be denied. Perhaps finest of all, Harwell’s dunk on Khaled wasn’t Smash Mouth’s solely endorsement of cunnilingus, which had beforehand come up when a fan knowledgeable them that he’d carried out the act on his girlfriend with “All Star” enjoying. The guys couldn’t have been extra proud.
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