Smash Mouth were all the rage in the late ’90s and early ’00s, they gained overnight success with their chart topping single ‘Walkin’ on the Sun’ and were the soundtrack to one of the biggest animation movies of all time, Shrek. Sean Frazer chats to lead singer and chief songwriter Steve Harwell about their first tour in Australia, their road to success and how to make it in the music industry.
It’s the first time that Smash Mouth have been to Australia and the tour kicks off tonight in the Gold Coast. I assume that you guys have been here a couple of days already. How do you find Australia?
I’m having a blast! We’ve become pretty good friends with the representatives that have been hired to hang out with us. They took us to a cool party last night; we got to hang out with the guys from Skull Candy and Quicksilver. We’re getting ready to rock out tonight finally, it feels like I’ve been here for a week but I’ve only been here three days!
What was it that took Smash Mouth so long to finally make your way out here?
We were going to be out here with Robbie Williams many years ago but then 9/11 happened so that got scratched. We’ve also had a few personal problems that have happened that we’ve had to take care of which was really unfortunate because Australia is one of the top two places that I’ve been wanting to tour. And I thought that it was going to get cancelled again and I was like “NO, this can’t happen”. The tour got moved a couple of times and finally we’re here. As soon as I felt the aeroplane touch the ground I said, “Okay, we’re doing it”.
Let’s talk about the beginning of Smash Mouth and how you guys got signed. You didn’t play much locally but your main objective was to score a record deal. I hear that Carson Daly (American television and radio personality) was a big part of the band’s initial success?
Yeah, Carson Daly was a huge fan of the band and loved to hang out with us, we did everything together. We started to record our first album but were just doing a few demos. We recorded a song called ‘Nervous In The Alley’, which was one of my favourite ska/punk songs that we had written. I took the track to Carson and he was like “dude, we’ve got to play this on the radio,” and I said to him “how are you going to pull that off?”
At the time he was really popular as a radio personality so that wasn’t a problem for him. He then told us a time that he was going to be playing the track on-air and my mate Greg and I were sinking a few beers and we heard the song come on. Not long after it was first played on radio, the song started spreading real quickly up and down the coast of California. After it was played,we got a call from Bam Magazine, which was California’s version of the Rolling Stone, they called me and said that they wanted to do a photo shoot with us. I originally thought that we were going to get a cool little spread in the mag. We went and did the photo shoot and I asked the photographer “where is the photo going to go in the magazine?” and he said “it’s going on the cover” and I was like “what…. the…fuck?”. We got to see the issue get printed and saw all these big pallets filled with this magazine that had Smash Mouth all over the front cover. We were the only unsigned band to be on the front cover of that magazine. After all that, record labels were sort of going “who the hell is this band?”.
We all had day jobs, we worked and worked, so we didn’t play live a lot. We basically just rocked out in the studio and practiced every day of the week. Our objective was that in two years we were hoping to be locked in to a record deal. We finally made the record and Carson had been hired to be the morning DJ at K-ROCK in Los Angeles, which was the biggest alternative rock station in the country. I showed him the record and that afternoon they played it. Pretty much straight away, every record label in LA was trying to find me, that day we were the most requested band at 5pm.
Obviously you would’ve had a bit of faith in your own songwriting abilities, but even more, you must have seen a gap in the music industry where Smash Mouth were going to fit in and be successful?
I didn’t see it until after we’d finished the record. When the record was completed I knew that we had something different, I knew that there was nobody on the radio that had that sound. I thought that we were either going to be kicked out of the station or it was going to work. I also knew that I had to get the album in the right hands. I’d made friends with a heap of program directors and A&R guys to the point that after two years I could pick the phone up and call Kevin Williams from Warner Bros Music and I wouldn’t be waiting or being told that he was “busy”, they’d get me straight on the phone to him. I really worked on building as many relationships that I could so that by the time we did go down and showcase in LA at places like The Roxy Theatre, The Whiskey, The Viper Room or wherever it may be, everybody was there. All the other bands on the bill would be like “why are all these fucking A&R people here?” So we just really built a great relationship with the industry.
I was recently watching a music documentary and Dexter from The Offspring was talking about “overnight success” and how he dealt with it. ‘Walking on the Sun’ was a massive number one hit. What was it like around that time, how did you handle the fame?
I was raised pretty different so to me I never took it like “I’m better than everyone”, I took it like holy shit, it’s starting to come together and I’m going to be working my ass off, and that’s basically what happened. I don’t think I even had time to think about what was happening because we were thrown on tour within two weeks of getting signed and we were on a bus before you could blink, I didn’t come home for two years! We were just gone! As you’re playing these venues it really hits you when the crowds are getting bigger and bigger and bigger. It really sinks in when you get a call and the person on the other end of the line says, “Hey, this band called U2 wants you to open for them”
Some of your songs and covers have been featured for movie soundtracks, and you guys gained worldwide popularity when a few of your tracks were featured in Shrek. What’s the process of getting a song into a film?
The production company for the film Shrek got in contact with us. Our record was just out and at the same time ‘All Star’ was sitting at number one on the charts and they asked if they could put that song in the movie and pay us a bunch of money. I didn’t realise how big it was because we had put the song in a previous movie called Mystery Men and used the footage from that movie to make the video clip for the song. Mystery Men didn’t do too well at the box office.
While we were making our third record, Tom Whalley, who signed us, came to the studio and stopped what we were doing and said “hey, I really need you guys to record this song called ‘I’m A Believer’. He told us that DreamWorks had had another band record it but it didn’t come out the way that they would have liked and now they wanted us to record it. We put ‘I’m A Believer’ on the record that we were recording and when Shrek came out, that song became a hit too and it just took off like crazy all over again.
You don’t consider yourself to be a person stuck to just one genre, the band’s gone from ska to poppier stuff and you have even given country music a go. Before Smash Mouth you were in a Rap group. What can you tell me about your time in F.O.S?
I was young, and I was into every type of music that you could think of. It was a natural thing for me; I felt that I had a bit of a knack to do that kind of stuff [Rap]. I got signed to a record label while doing the rap thing but the record label was shady and I wasn’t feeling it. Around the same time Snoop Dogg came out and everything just went to shit. So I was able to get out of my record deal and I went straight to my manager and said that I wanted my own band, I want to sing in the band. I knew that he was also managing another band and I was interested in taking two guys from that band to start my new one. Paul (Paul De Lisle, bass) and Greg (Camp, guitar) knew that I had a record deal on a legitimate major label and they decided to join the band not long after because they had been trying to get a record deal for years. It wasn’t that I bullied them it was just that I was persistent.
Are you guys working on any new material?
Not yet, we’re still working on promoting the most recent record, we haven’t even put out the second single to it, but we hope for that to be released around summer. But before we do anything else, I’m going to finish up my country record which I’ve funded myself over the past three years and it’s something that I just have to do and I’m really close to finishing it. I’ve got a really good engineer that I’m working with so it’s going great.
Smash Mouth perform at the Cambridge Hotel, Newcastle, on Sunday March 10, 2013, and the Entrance Leagues Club on Thursday March 14, 2013.