King Missile

For The Record...

Members include Dogbowl (left group, c. 1989, rejoined, 1995); John S. Hall, vocals; Roger Murdock (1989–94), drums; Dave Rick (1989–94), guitar; Chris Xefos (1989–94), keyboards. Group formed in New York, in 1986; signed to Shimmy Disc and released Fluting on the Hump, 1987;They, 1988; Mystical Shit/Fluting on the Hump, 1990; Mystical Shit, 1990; signed to Atlantic and released Way to Salvation, 1991, Happy Hour, 1992; King Missile, 1994; disbanded c. 1995. Addresses: Record company—Atlantic, 75 Rockefeller Plaza, New York, NY 10019. Internet-JOHNSHALL ©aol.com.

Rock band

King Missile, the alternative rock darlings of the collegiate circuit seemed to have not only actively pursued and courted fans of college music and the alternative scene but they managed to build and sustain their entire career on left of center lyricism and quirky odd ball pop tunes. The band formed in 1986 when wacky lyricist John S. Hall met and befriended Dog-bowl, who had formerly been a member of the Schizo-crats. After his father died in 1986, Hall received a $10, 000 inheritance that he was determined to squander on recording some of his and Dog bowl’s musical forays and the equipment associated with it.

Hall and Dogbowl hooked up with drummer Steve Danziger and decided to call themselves King Missile (Dog Fly Religion). The latter part of the band’s name was an invention of Dogbowl. King Missile then proceeded to work out a production and recording deal with the venerated alternative independent music producer Kramer. Kramer had just set up his new label Shimmy Disc and King Missile (Dog Fly Religion) were one of the first bands to record for his new label.

King Missile’s debut album, Fluting on the Hump, was released in 1987. Fluting on the Hump was followed the next year by King Missile’s second album, They. Dogbowl left left the band to pursue asolo career and to concentrate on other projects, after the release of They. After he left, Hall decided to drop the (Dog Fly Religion) part of the name since it was an invention of Dogbowl. By 1989, Danziger too had left, leaving Hall all by himself and forced with the unenviable task of searching for new members to fill out the line up for the second version of King Missile.

Hall’s new band was simply called King Missile. Hall recruited drummer Roger Murdock, keyboard and multi-instrumentalist Chris Xefos, and former Bongwa-ter guitarist Dave Rick. The new permutation of King Missile released its first album, and the third in the collective cannon of King Missile releases, in 1990. The album was entitled Mystical Shit. Mystical Shit was also packaged as a two in one album package deal with Fluting on the Hump released in 1990.

Mystical Shit contained the biggest college underground hit single of King Missile’s career up to that point, "Jesus Was Way Cool." Hall’s humorously absurd lyrics were brought to a wider audience than ever before and the success of "Jesus Was Way Cool" served to hint at the madcap may them that lay ahead for King Missile. Hall ommented on his song writing to Rolling Stone’s Carl Arrington, "I wrote to protect my sanity. Orto regain my insanity. Just to make sure that I could straighten things out at night or in the morning when I woke up. I guess it started from emotional traumas. I found that if I wrote about it for long enough, it made me feel better."

King Missile nearly broke up for the second time in its brief career after the release of Mystical Shit. Hall remarked on one of the web sites devoted to King Missile that, "Dave and Chris said they wouldn’t do another record for Shimmy. So if we hadn’t gotten signed [to Atlantic], we would n’t have survived." Atlantic signed the group and King Missile survived afterall. King Missile’s first release for Atlantic was Way to Salvation, released in 1991. Commenting on the musical stylings of King Missile, Rick told Chuck Crisafulli of Guitar Player that, "since we’re supporting John’s different word pieces, it’s kind of hard notto do a genre-hopping thing. We just try to satisfy ourselves as players and have some fun on stage."

The following year saw King Missile break out of the alternative college rock ghetto with the release of their second Atlantic album, Happy Hour. Happy Hour more than lived up to its name as it spawned the surprise cult-novelty hit "Detachable Penis." As Hall related to Arrington, "Detachable Penis" was a long time in the making. Hall stated that "the idea started one night in a club in 1989, when I announced that our next single would be called ‘Detachable Penis.’ All I had was the title, but it got this big reaction from the

crowd." After musing and mulling over the concept for the song, Hall created the story behind the song and with musical collaborations from Xefos, Murdock, and Rick, "Detachable Penis" was born. Commenting further, Hall explained, "what I think is great about ‘Detachable’ is that it works on the lowest common denominator of writing. You can look at the words and see how they work. There are some stupid puns in it, but also all these undercurrents of uncertainties regarding masculinity and castration anxiety. That’s a constant theme in my work. Self castration, actually. Arms, legs, heads. It’s like this masochistic Christian martyr thing."

The song "Detachable Penis" sold albums and lit up the radio airwaves. This was due, in no small part, to the somewhat obscenely taboo subject matter of the song. The second single from the album, "Martin Scorsese" was an oddly bizarre homage to the famous film director. It failed to ignite the charts as "Detachable Penis" had done. Despite this, Happy Hour became the most successful album of King Missile’s career.

An interlude of two years had passed before King Missile released their follow up to Happy Hour. During this interlude, the band toured for Happy Hour and worked on the songs that were to become their final album. The self titled King Missile was released in 1994 and by then, the band was starting to disintegrate. Tempers, tensions, and inter-band strife and stress were starting to flare up around the time of the making and release of King Missile. The album did not sell as well as its predecessor and subsequently Atlantic dropped King Missile. The band decided to disband after they were dropped. Elaborating on this in one of the King Missile web sites, Hall stated that, "we broke up after Atlantic dropped us because there was no reason for usto stay together. Nobody really liked being in the band, with the possible exception of Chris, who I think was the most reasonable and fairest member of the band. I know I certainly wasn’t." Adding in another King Missile website interview, Hall said that, "the people in King Missile didn’t ever get along with me very well. The only reason King Missile stayed together as long as it did was that people kept buying the records and coming to the shows. As soon as they stopped, we did."

After the demise of King Missile, Hall went back to his spoken word monologues and readings. He was accompanied by some musicians on these readings and he released a solo album called The Body Has a Head in 1995. Also around this same time, Hall reunited with Dogbowl and they conducted a 1995 King Missile (Dog Fly Religion) reunion tour and after that, laid the band to rest. On the legacy of King Missile, Halt told Arrington that, "my goal is to write in such a way that the songs can be followed on different levels. Like Dr. Seuss."

Selected discography
Fluting on the Hump, Shimmy Disc, 1987.
They, Shimmy Disc, 1988.
Mystical Shit/Fluting on the Hump, Shimmy Disc, 1990.
Mystical Shit (includes "Jesus is Way Cool"), Shimmy Disc, 1990.
Way to Salvation, Atlantic, 1991.
Happy Hour (includes "Detachable Penis" and "Martin Scorsese"), Atlantic, 1992.
King Missile, Atlantic, 1994.

Sources
Periodicals
Guitar Player, October, 1994.
Rolling Stone, April 15, 1993.

On-line
"John S. Hall," http://www.geocities.com/SunsetStrip/Towers/2441/interview.html (February 11, 1998).
"King Missile," http://www.indiana.edu/wius/kingmisvu.html (February 11, 1998).
"John S. Hall," http://www.jmu.edu/wxjm/oc1/johnshal.html (February 11, 1998).

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Biography

Essentially a vehicle for the musings of John S. Hall, King Missile merged off-kilter spoken word monologues with eclectic, mildly psychedelic rock & roll. Hall's dry, absurdist sense of humor colored much of the group's output, blurring the lines between comedy, Beat poetry, narrative prose, and simple rock lyrics. Yet in spite of their focus on Hall's literary bent and all its New York artiness, King Missile was most definitely a band, and relied on music to play a much more than perfunctory role in their overall effect. The band initially won a following on college radio with several albums for producer Kramer's eccentric Shimmy-Disc label, while surviving a major lineup overhaul. Signed to a major-label deal with Atlantic, they scored a highly unlikely novelty hit with 1992's "Detachable Penis," which conquered MTV and college radio despite its subject matter. Their new audience didn't stick, however, and the second lineup split after another album; Hall later organized a third version of King Missile, and continued recording. New York-based poet John S. Hall founded King Missile in 1985, having given several spoken word performances around Manhattan's Lower East Side. Seeking a more engaging method of presentation, he recruited his friend, guitarist Dogbowl (b. Stephen Tunney) to accompany him. Eventually, the two put together a full band -- with the full name King Missile (Dog Fly Religion) -- featuring saxophonist Alex Delaszlo and drummer R.B. Korbet, and went into the studio to cut a demo with engineer Kramer. Kramer was just setting up his own label, Shimmy-Disc, and offered to release the demo; thus, their debut mini-album, Fluting on the Hump, appeared in 1987. With Kramer contributing musical assistance on bass and other instruments, King Missile's early sound was somewhat akin to the Velvet Underground, with elements of '60s folk-rock and psychedelia. Although Hall sang on some of the material, it was wry observations like "Take Stuff From Work," "Sensitive Artist," "Wuss," and "Dick" that began to earn the group a following on college radio. King Missile cycled through several drummers during the recording of their second album, 1988's They, including Dave Licht and Steve Dansiger. Following its completion, Dogbowl departed for a solo career, recording frequently for Shimmy-Disc into the '90s. Hall dropped the "(Dog Fly Religion)" part of the band's name, and with Kramer's help, he recruited a new lineup featuring guitarist Dave Rick (also of Kramer's Bongwater, B.A.L.L., and Phantom Tollbooth) and multi-instrumentalist Chris Xefos (of When People Were Shorter and Lived Near the Water). Rick and Xefos brought a louder, more muscular musical sensibility to the group, by turns funkier and harder-rocking, while Hall -- now clearly the focal point -- settled into his comfort zone as a vocalist and writer: more of a monologist than a singer, his humor more abstract than jokey. With Dansiger returning on drums, the revamped King Missile issued Mystical Shit in 1990. With the band's best-known approach crystallizing, Hall's drolly ironic celebrations of religion ("Jesus Was Way Cool") and kinky sex ("Gary and Melissa") provided their biggest college radio hits yet. Particular attention to "Jesus Was Way Cool," oddly enough, helped earn King Missile a shot with major label Atlantic. Their debut, 1991's The Way to Salvation, was produced by Lou Giordano and featured Hypnolovewheel's Dave Ramirez as a fill-in drummer. At a supporting show, Hall cracked to the audience that the title of their next single would be "Detachable Penis." He later went ahead and wrote the song, in the meantime releasing his first solo album, Real Men, which featured musical backing by Kramer. "Detachable Penis" appeared on King Missile's second major-label album, 1992's Happy Hour, which featured drumming from Roger Murdock. Despite predictable resistance from mainstream radio, "Detachable Penis" was a substantial -- if somewhat controversial -- hit on MTV and alternative radio, and made King Missile a near-household name for a brief period. The follow-up single, a gleefully violent and profane salute to "Martin Scorsese," failed to make as much of an impact (at least commercially). Although King Missile had been the de facto joke band of choice for many an English major, their artier and more abstract moments also worked against their retaining much of the audience that had come on board with "Detachable Penis." Their self-titled follow-up album was released in 1994, and fell by the wayside without drawing much notice. The band subsequently broke up, and in 1995, Hall reunited with Dogbowl for a limited tour, concentrating on their early King Missile material together. The following year, Hall completed a second solo album, The Body Has a Head, which was released on a German label. Returning to a band format, Hall put together a new lineup of King Missile, logically dubbed King Missile III, with multi-instrumentalist and programmer Bradford Reed and violinist Sasha Forte. They returned to Shimmy-Disc and recorded Failure in 1998, but fell silent for several years, as Hall temporarily left music to attend law school. After opening his own practice dedicated to entertainment law, Hall reconvened King Missile III for The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, which was released by Instinct in early 2003. ~ Steve Huey, Rovi

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