Digging Your Scenes.
On Smash Mouth, Labor Days, the people we were and who we want to be.
"And the children gather and wonder: who's there?"
It is Labor Day 1999 and for a moment I'm fifteen years old. On either side of the summer I found myself with some money in my pocket and I blew nearly all of it on albums. In late August I stocked up on catalog stuff so that I could speak the language of my peers who I thought were so much cooler than I was, reaching in to get stuff like my very first copy of Dark Side of the Moon. But back at Memorial Day? I needed the newest in new. Every single one of these records is etched deep in my brain to this day, but the one I spent the most time defending both in this summer of questionable artistic decisions and well after it was Smash Mouth's Astro Lounge.
"Every day a new disguise, every night a Halloween"
It was Labor Day 1999 and I was all of fifteen years old and that meant that I was learning how to drive. I was learning how to drive in a Jeep that we would soon learn had a defective serpentine belt and an AC unit that could shut down the whole thing at will. Every time I drove that thing out it felt like an adventure, like some big action hero who drove on back roads at thirty MPH with his mother supervising. Didn't matter, I was fifteen behind the wheel of a car. So on days when I felt like going full WipE'out" I would bring along the Lola Rennt soundtrack, and if I felt like hunting aliens on a cross-country mystery I'd queue up Astro Lounge.
"Mister Moon checkin' on how y'all livin', the stars all winkin' on a day that's dimmin'"
It was Labor Day 1999 and I was a month into being fifteen and life felt so much better than it had even back in May. Most of all it sounded perfect. There are hundreds--okay, definitely thousands--of songs from these days where if you play them I can drop fully back in time and tell you everything that was happening when I heard them. It's so strange to have songs live on in the world simply as background filler for "the 90s" or as memetics. For a younger generation these songs have simply existed forever, or are at least completely divorced from their original meanings. Some of us ran out to see Mystery Men on opening weekend because I used to be a predictable bellwether for superhero movies that will eventually gain cult status. We knew that "All Star" could be used for lovable losers years before that became part of the internet's lingua franca. Shrek didn't show up for another two years, a music choice that was the artists' version of "eh, whatever" cementing Smash Mouth's place in the worldwide canon.
"Some may say I love to let a good thing go to waste"
It is Labor Day 1999 and some people are already fucking sick of "All Star". I had spent the better part of the summer at a writers' workshop, getting to live and create around kids who were my kind of driven and prolific and weird as hell. While helping to craft a mixtape for all of us to take home I struck it up with a young poet I fancied, who pointed me towards Sleater-Kinney and The Bouncing Souls. He saw my copy of Astro Lounge and warned against including "All Star". I remember him saying it was barely artistic and certainly commercial, annoying with nothing to contribute. We eventually settled on the closing track, that ripping cover of "Can't Get Enough of You Baby". I guess nobody can really argue with ? and the Mysterians.
"Didn't make sense not to live for fun..."
It is Labor Day 2023 and I am trying to reckon with what thirty-nine feels like and how time moves. Steve Harwell, erstwhile singer for Smash Mouth, died this morning in hospice care. The rocknrollers of my youth were not that much older than I was and it doesn't make sense that they're gone, especially when their bands soldier on. (Did you know that the new lead singer of Smash Mouth used to be in a Weezer cover band? It's true! By all accounts a fantastic guy, too.) I'm now a little bit too old to go out and live the touring life, even if I could get a band together to play those songs I write once every papal installation. But the key thing is that I'm here. We're all still here. Astro Lounge made me think I could be a parapsychologist international super-spy in orbit, drinking martinis while everyone was dressed like Sandra Benes or Lady Miss Kier. I bought Santana's Supernatural and "Weird" Al Yankovic's Running with Scissors on the same day, but only one of those albums made me think that Post-Y2K was going to be full of futuristic freaky-deaky happenings.
"I can't see my tomorrow and yesterday has come and gone"
It is about 3:30 in the afternoon and I'm writing this because I felt so awful about Steve Harwell. I feel like his band had become a punchline, and that felt like a disservice to a band that had at least two really good records. Maybe this is a way to thank the man by proxy for creating music that shaped the way I saw my future and myself. Now the future's arrived and I don't know what to do with it. Is it the fact that we are some of us hell-bent on both observing a terrible present and making the future even worse? I am already tense after a very difficult summer, and I don't know how to just keep going. Truth be told I have spent a lot of the summer trying to figure out what I want this space to be. I want to bring you joy, so I have to aim for that. Just returning to the past is maudlin, doom-saying the present helps nobody, and it takes a rare person to invent a future where we can aspire to lounge out in the stars.
It's Labor Day. End of the summer. Time to get back to work. I'll find something here to truly love, even if it's just the old records. I hope you'll stick around in the Labyrinth with me.
"So push rewind just in time, thank anybody--"