Smash Mouth were like The Doors if Jim Morrison had any sense of whimsy. “Walking on the Sun” appeared out of nowhere in 1997 with Ray Manzarek organ riffs and a cynical look back at Woodstock-bound Hippies and their No Nukes descendants. That song smacked out of radios the world over for the entire year, and by the time you got to the reverb-into-oblivion outro it felt like these guys would be around forever, pumping out retro-soaked nods to the Hangover 90s and all the things we didn’t get from the 20th Century. Their sound was both intensely retro and just ahead of its time; Fush Yu Mang as an album only hinted at where Smash Mouth could go next.
So of course you know them from the Shrek soundtrack.
That’s only because you didn’t go to see Mystery Men in theaters and it didn’t become the absurd hit it deserved to be. (We’ll talk about that weekend at the movies sometime in August, but the fact that Dick and Mystery Men and The Thomas Crown Affair and The Iron Giant and The Sixth Sense were all slotted on the same release date speaks to what a fantastic and overcrowded year 1999 was at the movies. All of those films deserved to be runaway blockbusters.) And the internet has rewritten history to forever associate this song with the Scottish ogre, but the truth is that “All Star” had a gigantic life of its own well before Shrek. The single entered the Billboard Hot 100 a few weeks in advance of Smash Mouth’s sophomore effort Astro Lounge, promptly shooting all the way up to Number 75.
For one week.
…After which it promptly exploded in popularity, spending the rest of the year on the charts and settling at Number Four by the end of July. By that point the cool kids were already sick of it; I tried spinning it at a party around about July 20th and was vetoed before I could even get it in the CD player. We finally agreed on their cover of “Can’t Get Enough of You Baby” that had appeared on the Can’t Hardly Wait soundtrack, a song that was dominated by the same Wurlitzer mastery that had made “Walkin’ on the Sun” such a novelty. “All Star” felt apart from this sound; it lived through click-click guitar chords and Fisher-Price toddler toys in its percussion. The promise of Fush Yu Mang was nowhere to be found on this track. Where was the remixed Doors of which we were so enamored?
But Astro Lounge makes its intentions on that front clear from the very first track. In fact it opens with the noise that will come to define the fun-loving threat that Smash Mouth would be for the rest of their career: the wooshing sound of an approaching UFO. We’re going much farther back than The Doors with Smash Mouth on this album. “Who’s There” opens with outer-space noises and a Theremin and the lead chords from “Then He Kissed Me”. We’re back in 1963, all spies and little green men and Wall of Sound stomp. It’s all a mask of innocence on top of Smash Mouth’s cynicism; Astro Lounge often loops back to “Who’s There”‘s themes of obfuscation and double-speak, the search for real connection and real experiences destroyed by the modern world.
I was fifteen and these themes did not sink in for me for a long while. I was, however, the exact right audience for a band that loved alien invasion stories and who had decided they wanted to be ? and the Mysterions instead of The Doors. Can you blame them? If you asked me if I wanted to be the schlemiel stuck on the karaoke stage during the billion-year-long organ solo of “Light My Fire” or if I wanted to chase aliens to the tune of “96 Tears” I’m going to pick the latter every single time. This album was perfect for a teenager who was buying into the retro-future optimism of 1999, cool gadgets and dance parties and warm California nights that stretch from Los Angeles all the way to Manhattan. Here in 2024 I can only listen to “Waste” and stick on the lyrics decrying a life misspent:
Don’t want no one to ache
Oh, to be drunk and forgetful
To get out of this unscathed
Oh, to be free and inhuman
Steve Hartwell had a gift that was taken away too early. He could sell the intensely cynical but couch it and hide it in backwards-looking futurism and bouncy melodies. All credit to lead songwriter Greg Camp for giving the band the base to jump into these topics in ways that we gobbled up whole and wouldn’t fully understand for decades.
Also, not for nothin’, but Camp and “All Star” may have helped save Fenway from the wrecking ball. Sorry, Bostonians, but we’re not going to forget that you booed “Save Fenway Park” back in ’99. At least you still have your historic stadium; did you see what they did up in The Bronx? Anyway.
It’s a little astonishing to look back at the contemporary reviews for Smash Mouth and realize that they were treated more kindly by the pop-rock cognoscenti than I remembered. Robert Christgau called them an “unrad agglomeration of semiprofessional entertainers” but still had incredibly kind things to say about both Fush Yu Mang and Astro Lounge. (He really liked “I Just Wanna See”, and yeah I want more people standing up for Smash Mouth album tracks.) And I’m not sure that Astro Lounge is truly great or even better than Fush Yu Mang. “Road Man” feels like it sneaked on to the record from some late-90s kids show, and if you’re listening to the reissue of Astro Lounge you actually get that with a very bad Christmas song from How the Grinch Stole Christmas and a baffling cover of Steely Dan’s “Do It Again”. (That one was from the soundtrack of Me, Myself, and Irene! Remember that movie?)
If it lives on through Hartwell’s smacking insistent “SAMMM BAAD-eeee” vocal hook then it still lives on. “All Star” shows no sign of leaving the cultural zeitgeist anytime soon. Where there is one song there will be all the others eventually. Happy anniversary, Astro Lounge. You broke the mold. I wish there had been more albums like you.