John S. Hall

John S. Hall (born John Charles Hall, September 2, 1960) is an American poet, author, singer and lawyer perhaps best known for his work with King Missile, an avant-garde band that he co-founded in 1986 and has since led in various incarnations. John S. Hall was born in Brooklyn, New York and grew up in Manhattan's West Village. He recalls being "very quiet and shy" as a child and a social outcast as an adolescent. In 1978 he graduated from Stuyvesant High School. In the early 1980s, Hall began participating in the Lower East Side poetry scene. He read his poems at such venues as Speakeasy and ABC No Rio. According to performance poet Cristin O'Keefe Aptowicz, Hall "became an easily recognizable figure in the scene: pale, bald, dressed mostly in black and white, with wire-rimmed glasses and a porkpie hat." Hall has long been a vocal opponent of slam poetry, taking issue with its competitive nature and what he considers its lack of stylistic diversity. In a 2005 interview, he recalled seeing his first slam, at the Nuyorican Poets Café: I hated it. And it made me really uncomfortable and... it was very much like a sporting event, and I was interested in poetry in large part because it was like the antithesis of sports.... [I]t seemed to me like a very macho, masculine form of poetry and not at all what I was interested in. Despite his reservations about slam poetry, Hall has performed alongside slam poets on such television programs as PBS's The United States of Poetry, MTV's Spoken Word Unplugged, and HBO's Russell Simmons Presents Def Poetry. Hall performed in at least two musical groups before co-founding King Missile. One was Purple Sunshine, a "hippie band" Hall started because he "was really into hippies and LSD, and tuning in and dropping out, and all that stuff." The other was You Suck, which Hall says was inspired by a band led by punk musician Mykel Board: [Board]'s band blew my mind. The idea of having someone in the band that didn't sing or play an instrument was a revelation to me. Within a year, I had, with some friends, developed a band called You Suck, where most of the people on stage didn't play an instrument. Like there was a guy who did a Rubik's Cube, or a couple of people playing chess, or a guy with a dead fish on the end of a fishing line which he waved around the audience, or whatever. If you had some visual idea and cared to join us, we would let you. Over the course of a little over a year, over 100 people performed in You Suck. Mykel came to our first show and said that his face hurt from laughing so much. He ended up producing our only single and releasing it on his label: "The You Suck Chant" [backed with] "Get the Fuck off the Stage." It was weird, because those were practically our only original songs: we were a cover band. We would do any bad song we could think of... Over the band's objections, Board released the You Suck single with a pornographic album cover. The single was not a commercial success, and the band broke up shortly after its release. In 1985, Hall began presenting his work at open mic poetry readings. After three shows, he became a "featured" poet at the Backfence, a performance space just west of LaQuardia on Bleeker Street in Manhattan's West Village. In 1986, feeling that "20 minutes of me reading poetry would be totally boring", Hall asked his guitarist friend Dogbowl to augment his performances with original music. Dogbowl agreed, and, with the addition of bassist Alex DeLaszlo, drummer R. B. Korbet, and xylophonist George O'Malley, King Missile (Dog Fly Religion) was born. The band released two albums on the Shimmy Disc label, 1987's Fluting on the Hump and 1988's They, and then dissolved because Dogbowl wanted to pursue a solo career. After Dogbowl's departure, Hall asked Bongwater guitarist Dave Rick to help him put together a new band. Rick recruited multi-instrumentalist Chris Xefos, and Hall retained They drummer Steve Dansiger. Hall dubbed the new lineup King Missile, dropping the parenthetical "Dog Fly Religion" subtitle "since that was [Dogbowl's] idea." The band recorded the album Mystical Shit in late 1989 and early 1990 and released it in 1990 on Shimmy Disc. On the strength of the single "Jesus Was Way Cool", the album hit #1 on the CMJ charts, and the band was signed by a major label, Atlantic Records. This series of events led Hall to make a habit of joking, "'Jesus' got me signed to Atlantic Records." Shortly after getting signed, Hall released an album on Shimmy Disc with Atlantic's permission: Real Men, a side project recorded with producer and Shimmy Disc founder Mark Kramer. King Missile is featured in the 1990 documentary CutTime, which chronicles the East Village music scene at the time. King Missile recorded three albums for Atlantic: 1991's The Way to Salvation, 1992's Happy Hour, and 1994's King Missile. Happy Hour spawned a modest hit in "Detachable Penis," which reached No. 25 on the Billboard Modern Rock Tracks chart. Nonetheless, after the commercial failure of King Missile, the band was dropped from Atlantic, and they broke up shortly thereafter because, according to Hall, "there was no reason to stay together." In 1996, Hall released a "solo album", The Body Has a Head, on the German label Manifatture Criminali. The album featured considerable input from multi-instrumentalists Sasha Forte, Bradford Reed, and Jane Scarpantoni. With them, as well as They cellist Charles Curtis, Hall formed a new band, King Missile III (pronounced "the third"). In 1998, the new lineup released its "debut" album, Failure, on Shimmy Disc. Curtis and Scarpantoni left the band after its release, and King Missile III continued as a trio, releasing two more albums, 2003's The Psychopathology of Everyday Life and 2004's Royal Lunch. In 2015, Hall formed a new lineup of King Missile, King Missile IV, with the band LoveyDove. They toured New Zealand and released an EP, This Fuckin' Guy, on Powertool Records. King Missile's classic lineup also reunited for live shows in 2015, continuing through 2016 and 2017. In 2016, Hall started two new bands: Unusual Squirrel and Sensation Play. Unusual Squirrel released its debut album, Fuck Sandwich, on Bandcamp. In 2019, King Missile IV changed their name to You, Me and This Fuckin’ Guy and recorded its debut LP, Garden Variety Fuckers, released by Dromedary Records on April 17, 2020. In 2023, King Missile (Dog Fly Religion) began performing again. A new album, Quest For Fire, is forthcoming. The band is Hall, Dogbowl, Korbet (playing bass instead of drums), and percussionists Marlon Cherry and Susan Hwang. Hall has released two books, both on Soft Skull Press. The first, 1997's Jesus Was Way Cool, is a collection of 40 poems recorded on King Missile and Hall solo albums, plus a never-recorded poem, "Hope." The second, 2007's Daily Negations, is a dark-humored satire of self-help books. In it, Hall presents a negative thought for each day of the year (including Leap Day). He posts daily readings of these thoughts on his Facebook and Instagram pages. Beginning in October of 2020, Hall has published at least one new poem a day on social media. Beginning in 2022, He has published monthly books of these poems, all of which are available on Amazon. Asked in a 2003 interview to speak about the common themes of his work, Hall replied: I think these are some of the common themes: (a) life is hard, brutal, capricious and unfair, (b) sometimes there is a benefit to seeing it clearly, and acknowledging it truthfully..., and c) other times it is best to find something to laugh about, lest despair crush one completely. I find a lot of humor in shocking or so-called taboo things: castration, excrement, violence (usually self-inflicted or inflicted on the narrator, "[Martin] Scorsese" being an exception), sex and sexual perversions... etc. Other recurring subjects of Hall's work include religion and spirituality (e.g., "The Fish That Played the Ponies", "Jesus Was Way