10/26/2022 0 Comments Karaoke somewhere jesus and john wayne![]() SPIN talked to all the major players about the missing member that freaked the world. But the song itself would have an afterlife for years on alternative radio - and that’s not even taking into account the Foo Fighters accidentally ripping it off. The song was born from colorful circumstances that, two decades later, are still in dispute, and as it turned out, would mark the beginning of the end for the band. “Detachable Penis” was the final song recorded for those sessions, and would go on to become their biggest hit, by far, reaching No. 1 record on CMJ, you could expect a call from Atlantic.”Īfter a first album for the label, 1991’s The Way to Salvation, the band regrouped with Kramer in 1992 to record their break-out Happy Hour. “When it came to alternative music, Atlantic had no idea what was good and what wasn’t,” says Hall. ![]() The album spawned a college-radio hit, “Jesus Is Way Cool,” which caught the attention of Atlantic Records. The band splintered and Hall pulled in guitarist Dave Rick and bassist Chris Xefos for 1990’s more rock-oriented Mystical Shit. That lineup recorded two oddball psychedelic folk/spoken-word albums as King Missile (Dog Fly Religion) with the outré producer Mark Kramer, for his Shimmy Disc label. He recruited a guitarist who went by the moniker Dogbowl, and later a saxophonist and a drummer. Hall was a sardonic New York City poet, who’d formed the band in the mid-’80s in order to make his spoken-word performances more dynamic. ![]() Released in the final weeks of 1992 and delivered to MTV in 1993, the whole story is relayed in deadpan spoken word by the band’s frontman and founder John S. The Flaming Lips, Butthole Surfers, Ween, Primus, and the Meat Puppets all scored at least minor radio hits, but few weirdo-rock success stories better speak to just how warped pop music had become than King Missile’s “Detachable Penis,” a musical tale of a man who loses his prized package while drunk at a party, only to find it later being hawked by a street vendor in New York’s East Village. But major-label conceptions of “alternative” turned out to mean anything from Better Than Ezra to Butt Trumpet. The success of bands like R.E.M., the Red Hot Chili Peppers, and especially Nirvana had convinced major labels that “alternative” was the next big thing, and those labels decided they had to start signing bands that could fit the bill. It’s easy to forget just how weird the landscape of popular music was in the early-to-mid-’90s. ![]()
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