My Only Smash Mouth Story

I saw the band Smash Mouth was trending early this morning. I’m not sure why that was. I only have one Smash Mouth story, and here it is.

In the fall 2001, when Susan was six months pregnant with Mason, I decided what I really needed to own was a Geo Tracker. My goal was to install a hard top, lower it, and add a crazy stereo system. I eventually did all of those things. It wasn’t the best timing, but it was fun.

When I drove the Tracker home I discovered a rattle coming from the glove box. I opened and closed the glove box multiple times, but couldn’t figure out where the rattle was coming from. After a few days of putting up with the rattle, I decided to figure out where it was coming from.

The glove box inside a Geo Tracker is designed like a US Postal Mailbox. When open, the rear of the glove box completely covers the rear opening that leads back into the dash area, but when closed, there’s a huge gap. In a big blue mailbox, this is intentional. When open it prevents people from sticking their hands down inside the box and grabbing other people’s mail. When closed, the rear opens up and your mail falls down into the mailbox. I don’t know why Geo decided to design a glove box in the same fashion, but they did. If the glove box was more than half full, when you closed it, everything over the halfway line fell out the back and down into the dash.

I can’t remember if I went in through the top or through the bottom, but eventually I was able to dig out everything that the previous owner had lost behind the dash: one mitten, a bottle of fingernail polish, and Smash Mouth’s debut CD, Fush Yu Mang. Apparently the previous owner thought so little of Smash Mouth that he or she never went looking for it.

It should be noted that the Tracker did not have a CD player when I purchased it — only a cassette deck. Because of that, after digging out the CD, I placed it in the glove box … and it eventually ended up back behind the dash again. I left it there, and when I sold the Tracker several years later, the CD was still there. I didn’t think enough about Smash Mouth to go looking for it again, either.