POP MUSIC : Detachable Extremist : John S. Hall believes in keeping his image as spoken-word artist separate from his role as leader of offbeat rockers King Missile

John S. Hall looks around the patio of his West Hollywood hotel with nervous suspicion. The spoken-word artist and singer of the New York-based rock group King Missile studies his surroundings carefully, his dark eyes shifting from the passing waiter to the gleaming pool to his plate of wheat pancakes.

Though there’s nothing particularly intriguing about this environment to the average eye, Hall is an artist who thrives on the everyday. You get the feeling that he’s gathering images like a scavenger and reshaping them for another King Missile song--something like last year’s surprise hit “Detachable Penis,” in which Hall sleepily details the loss of his vital organ and his hung-over search for it the morning after.

Or he could be stockpiling info for a more disjointed ramble like “Sorry,” in which he apologizes for everything he hasn’t done in his lifetime. That song snowballs into absurdity: “I never played poker with a toothless, one-eyed pirate who kept picking his teeth with a bowie knife to distract me, while his parrot looked over my shoulder and told him what cards I had by using an elaborate code involving vomiting, chirping and sea chanteys.”

This lopsided wit has elevated Hall to a unique, two-pronged form of celebrity, as both an offbeat rock cult hero and a key player in the recent rise of spoken word--poetry-reading performances that have gone from the coffeehouse underground to the pop mainstream. MTV now sponsors rock-club tours featuring the skewed poetry of such artists as Maggie Estep and Reg E. Gaines, and spoken-word performance is one of the attractions at “Lollapalooza’s” cultural midway. Beck and Henry Rollins are two prominent alternative-rock figures who also operate in the spoken-word field.

“When I first started performing, poetry readings were for poets who wanted to be published in college journals,” says Hall, sipping his fourth cup of coffee of the morning while the L.A. sun wilts his dark, curly hair and beat-up black hat.

“They’d read stuff based on Greek myths and traditional poetry subject matter, then I’d have to get up and scream pieces like ‘Take Stuff From Work’ really loudly. To me, part of it was the incongruity of context. That’s what I like to play with.”

In King Missile’s concerts, Hall reels off his bizarre stories while keyboardist and bassist Chris Xefos, guitarist David Rick and drummer Roger Murdock create a dissonant backdrop that ranges from funk-tinged minimalism to experimental metal to avant-garde pop.

Xefos, a Long Island native who moved to San Francisco two years ago, writes his portion of the songs at home, then meets Hall and the rest of the band to unite the parts.

“I find it amazing how John works,” says Xefos in a separate interview. “He just writes stuff in his book and never really edits anything, therefore it either works or it doesn’t. That’s just one more thing I find strange about him.

“Also, his work is 100% personal. Like ‘Detachable Penis’ may be funny, but it’s also about his paranoia. You can look into it and see John. I think he always expresses himself in the words completely--it’s just that sometimes it’s more masked than others.”

Estep, who recently released an album called “No More Mr. Nice Girl,” is an old roommate of Hall’s who’s seen him develop over the past 10 years.

“John’s stuff is simple and direct, yet uncensored,” she says. “I think it hits people in the stomach and funny bone. All of us at one time or another might think something remotely like his stuff, but never really know we’re thinking it.”

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Hall, who declines to give his age but appears to be in his 30s, grew up in New York’s West Village, but his parents--his dad was a chemist for the Army and his mom was a homemaker--were hardly part of the area’s bohemian scene. Hall was introduced to the area’s alternative lifestyles through school friends.

“My friend had the ‘Hair’ soundtrack, so we were like 8 years old and listening to albums with cuss words on them. Other friends turned me on to Frank Zappa. I’d go over to their lofts where their mother was painting nudes--it was mind-expanding because I came from a very ‘Father Knows Best’ family.”

While attending Queens College in communications, he started a band called You Suck, which did tongue-in-cheek versions of Culture Club and Barry Manilow songs. He eventually left school and the band, got a job as a bank teller and hung out with a girlfriend who introduced him to the art and writing of the Dada movement.

“I thought, ‘These people are crazy like me,’ ” says Hall. “There’s something sort of anti-academic about it. I thought you had to be raised by artists to be an artist, but then thought if Dada is this art movement where you can just display a urinal in a museum, then maybe that’s the way for me. At the same time there was punk rock, and all these bands that couldn’t really play, they were do-it-yourself. Anti-virtuoso. That also spurred me on.”

Hall was soon fired from the bank, and spent most of his time listening to records by such poets as John Giorno, William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg and Patti Smith. After breaking in at open-mike readings around the underground poetry scene, he hooked up with the indie rock label Shimmy Disc in 1987 and made two King Missile records, backed by label founder Kramer and a guitarist named Dogbowl.

It was at Shimmy Disc that he met Chris Xefos and Dave Rick, who teamed with Hall on the 1990 King Missile album “Mystical S---.” They picked up drummer Murdock and made the big jump to a major label, Atlantic Records, which released “The Way to Salvation” in 1991. Last year’s “Happy Hour” and the current “King Missile” followed.

It’s not just Hall’s wit that’s made King Missile records No. 1 on the college charts and its videos a strong presence on MTV. The band’s quirky, catchy tunes draw an audience in that wouldn’t normally be attuned to a spoken-word performer.

“John S. Hall is his spoken-word pieces,” says Xefos, “whereas King Missile is a combination of that and music--two elements. Sometimes the music we do is pretty weird and wacky. I don’t know if as many people would hear it if it wasn’t attached to what John is doing, and vice versa.”

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The band’s left-field musical approach makes Hall feel at home, more so than he ever did with the straight-ahead rock of his first band.

“I had problems with the rhyming, metered and contrived nature of songwriting,” Hall says quietly, delivering his words in careful, compact packages. He rarely cracks a joke or strays too far from the subject under discussion. “That’s why I thought instead I’d write free-verse a la Kerouac or Ginsberg, and get some simple music behind it.

“At poetry readings I became the comic relief, then they asked me to ‘feature.’ I thought, ‘Can I do 40 minutes of reading my stuff? No, so I’ll have my friend come up and play guitar.’ Then that evolved into King Missile.”

Now Hall is more interested in expanding on the band’s musical side and bringing the music to the fore. “Rather than try and do the definitive spoken-word album while spoken word is at its height, we decided to evolve as a band into a more rock ‘n’ roll-ish thing.

“For me, the whole beginnings of this band were based in music. If you’re not gonna have music, then I might as well write a book,” says Hall, who also collaborates with several other artists and musicians around New York.

“I’m not known for my singing, but for my monologues. At shows, occasionally there will be this antagonistic attitude now, like, ‘I can’t hear the words!’ If you want to hear the words, I do spoken-word shows all the time. Forty-five minutes of me with no music. King Missile is not the end all and be all of me, it’s just one aspect of what I want to do.”*