All Star is a song that has enjoyed more prosperous returns than Tyson Fury – and it almost didn't appear on their second album, Astro Lounge.
The San Jose quartet had previously enjoyed chart success in 1997 with their first major single Walkin' on the Sun, a '60s-tinged plea for the world to get along. The song itself was an audio catfish which lured fans in with the promise of more psychedelic soul, when in fact their debut Fush You Mang was a bit of a mish-mash of ska, punk and thrash.
"We were kids when we made Fush Yu Mang," vocalist Steve Harwell told Rolling Stone. "We didn’t know who we were. It sounds like somebody didn’t know what they were doing and were confused."
Whatever it was and whatever they were, Smash Mouth topped the US Billboard Modern Rock Tracks chart with their single and it landed at number two on the Billboard Hot 100 Airplay chart, which kicked open many doors for the band. They opened for U2 on their Pop Mart tour that year and appeared on an episode of medical telly series ER the following year.
The band relocated to Los Gatos Hills in the Santa Cruz mountains foothills in order to work on the follow-up in 1998. Guitarist Greg Camp – who had a knack for writing pop songs – was tasked with writing the album.
After recording at HOS Recording in Redwood City in California, the band delivered their second full-length to Interscope. The album was barely over before label boss Jimmy Iovine told the band to get back to the studio and write a hit, or words to that effect.
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To inspire Camp, their manager Robert Hayes pushed a copy of Billboard in front of him and urged him to look at the names populating the Top 50 charts. On top of Smash Mouth’s sound, he was told to sprinkle a little piece of something like “Sugar Ray, Third Eye Blind, Vertical Horizon, Barenaked Ladies, Marcy Playground, Chumbawamba” into the mix.
“He left, and two days later he walks into my office with a cassette tape,” Hayes told Rolling Stone. “I popped it in and there was All Star on this cassette. I stopped, and I looked at him. He goes, 'What? You don’t like it?' I said, 'Are you friggin’ kidding me? This is a smash!'"
About 85-90 percent of our mail was from these kids who were being bullied or their brothers or older siblings were giving them shit for liking Smash Mouth. We were like, 'We should write a song for fans.'
Greg Camp
“I was embarrassed turning that song in because it was an obvious hit,” Camp later told Salon, whose tape also included the future single Then the Morning Comes. “I didn’t feel like it represented what we were doing before that. Here’s the poppiest song I could possibly come up with. It was almost a little smart-alecky in a way to write a song like that.”
Despite writing a song based on his manager's improvised formula, Camp was inspired by their fans who'd described themselves as "outcasts", the ones who'd written to the band on "paper and pencils and typewriters and stuff". It was the late '90s, after all.
"We would get these big bags of fan mail and we would take them to the Laundromat and do our laundry and read it while we were sitting around waiting for our clothes to get dry," the guitarist told Song Facts. "About 85-90 percent of the mail was from these kids who were being bullied or their brothers or older siblings were giving them shit for liking Smash Mouth, or liking whatever they're doing, or the way they dressed and stuff. We were like, 'We should write a song for fans.'"
For a dash of authenticity, Camp – who was in his early 20s at this point – made sure to include some of his own personal experiences of being criticised by his partner for keeping unsociable hours while playing guitar in a wedding band.
"The whole ‘L on the forehead’ thing is actually a true story," he told Rolling Stone of the song's first verse. "Every morning, this person that I was with would have to get up and go to work, and I would be able to just kind of stay in bed because I didn’t work until later. There was a lot of jealousy happening, and it sort of came in the form of, 'You’re a loser, dude. What are you going to do, sleep all day? This is going to end someday. You’re gonna have to actually grow up and get a job.'”
He may have grown up, but the threat of a "real job" never materialised.
All Star was released as a single in May 1999 and its promo video was a tie-in for the superhero comedy Mystery Men. Featuring cameos from some of its cast including Ben Stiller, William H. Macy, Kel Mitchell and Dane Cook, it was a staple on MTV back in the days when the M stood for 'music'.
Why would I get bored of playing it? This is what puts bread and butter on my table.
Steve Harwell
The band were no longer a one-hit wonder – something of a concern after gaining popularity quickly on the back of their first single Walkin' on the Sun – reaching number one in the Billboard Pop Airplay and Adult Pop Airplay charts. The song also landed in the Top 10 in Australia, Belgium, and Canada.
Two years later, the Dreamworks movie Shrek took the song's popularity to a whole new level. Camp said he was personally reluctant to sign off on its use for the animated film starring Mike Myers and Eddie Murphy, while his bandmates thought otherwise.
"Back then, that’s what it was – you don’t put your songs in commercials. Maybe a cool film or something," Camp told Song Facts. “[With] Shrek, I was kind of like, ‘Well, this is going to put us into this sort of Disney zone, and we’re going to have to stay there and we’re going to have to be writing for children and families now. I don’t think that we should do that.’
"Everyone else was, like, ‘No, we just need to make a ton of money’ [but] I’m like, ‘Yeah, but we need longevity and credibility," he added. "We have to keep these things and keep our fans, and our fans are going to turn their backs if we start putting our songs in Pizza Hut commercials’… I was voted out on those things.”
The song enjoyed a resurgence in the mid 2010s, thanks to a flood of often nostalgic and usually daft memes which exposed the band to another generation of music fans.
“It’s entertaining, I get it," Harwell told Stereogum. "It doesn’t bother me, but at the same time, I don’t love it."
Harwell quit Smash Mouth in 2021 due to physical and mental health issues, and passed away two years later due to acute liver disease. But during his tenure as the band's frontman, he maintained he never, ever tired of performing All Star.
"It’s weird, people ask me, 'Do you get bored of playing these songs?' I’m like, 'Why would I get bored of playing them? This is what puts bread and butter on my table.'" he told Vice. "You know, there’s always somebody in the crowd who hasn’t heard it. Or hasn’t seen it live. When I go out onstage, I look at it that way. Once that classic song starts, people just go bananas. Has Free Bird ever got old?"
Not according to Spotify, where the Lynyrd Skynyrd classic has notched up over 899,000,000 plays on Spotify alone. All Star, however, has joined the streaming platform's elite Billions Club with 1.3 billion plays.
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