This week, the music world mourned the death of Steve Harwell, a founding member and frontman of Smash Mouth whose distinctive delivery helped turn “Walkin’ on the Sun” and “All Star” into multi-generational pop hits. Until his retirement in 2021, he and bassist Paul Delisle were the two consistent members of the band’s lineup since their 1994 inception. And while guitarist Greg Camp served as the songwriter behind the group’s best-known tunes, Harwell was its iconic voice — in more ways than one.
For the better part of the decade, Smash Mouth has enjoyed something of a cult following on Twitter, where the band was known to mix it up with fans, feud with the Oakland A’s, and laugh about being known as “the Shrek band.” Because the unpolished feed is exactly the opposite of the calculated celebrity branding you’re used to, it felt more authentic, inclusive, and fun, whether you were seeing Harwell cook with celeb doppelganger Guy Fieri (to prove that they weren’t the same person) or proudly stand in support of the trans community for Pride Month.
Through it all, Harwell and Smash Mouth created a template for how an alternative rock outfit that was big in the Nineties could continue to surprise and charm the public well into the 21st century. Never too serious (unless they were telling bigots to fuck off), they were free to speak their minds — in part because the height of their fame was behind them.
To learn more about the magic of Smash Mouth’s account, Rolling Stone reached out to Ron Xepoleas, Smash Mouth’s social media manager. He explains that he tends to post for the band on Twitter while hanging out with one or more of them. “I’ve been around these guys since junior high, so we are all ingrained with similar opinions on culture, social issues, favorite sports teams, etc.,” he says. Exactly who each tweet comes from depends on the topic. Where it comes to Bay Area baseball, for instance, that’s just him and Delisle.
But one of Harwell’s contributions to @smashmouth lore unquestionably belongs to the internet hall of fame. In 2018, a years-old DJ Khaled interview on The Breakfast Club resurfaced and went massively viral thanks to a curious confession the producer made during the conversation: He expects to receive oral sex in his relationship, but doesn’t reciprocate. “Hell nah … I can’t do that. I don’t do that,” he said. Yet he wouldn’t accept such a refusal from his fiancée (now wife). “You gotta understand I’m the Don, I’m the king,” he argued.
Khaled’s comments prompted a wave of mockery, memes, and general disbelief, with the controversy inevitably crossing Smash Mouth’s radar. The result was a Harwell quip for the ages. “I was with Steve when we read [Khaled] doesn’t perform oral sex on women,” Xepoleas recalls. Harwell expressed his disapproval in poetic fashion. “That was Steve’s direct response, so I tweeted it,” says Xepoleas. Some 220,000 likes later, it is enshrined as both Twitter and Smash Mouth canon:
Besides delighting fans, that kind of elite, bulletproof, no-fucks-given posting meant both Harwell and the Smash Mouth account offered a blueprint to other artists looking to break loose and be themselves on the platform. Among them was Max Collins, the frontman of band Eve 6, best known for the 1998 single “Inside Out” (or “the heart in a blender song“). Collins emerged as a Twitter superstar in 2020 thanks to 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 page, discussing the singer’s longtime struggles with alcohol abuse and alluding to the tragic death of his infant son Presley at the age of six months due to acute lymphocytic leukemia in 2001.
Harwell’s tweets, Collins tells Rolling Stone, were like Smash Mouth songs “in that they were simple but impeccably forged for high entertainment value.”
“They had the effect of making you think, ‘I can’t believe the Smash Mouth guy just said that’ and ‘Of course, the Smash Mouth guy just said that,’ simultaneously,” says Collins. “The DJ Khaled moment certainly exemplified this. That rub was beautiful and was definitely an inspiration to me when I was still a latent poster.”
It’s a curious element to a musician’s legacy, though the joy it brought to others can’t be denied. Perhaps best of all, Harwell’s dunk on Khaled wasn’t Smash Mouth’s only endorsement of cunnilingus, which had previously come up when a fan informed them that he’d performed the act on his girlfriend with “All Star” playing. The guys couldn’t have been more proud.