King Missile – Detachable Penis
1992 · Directed by Richard Kern
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Best comments
1.“When the going gets weird, the weird gets King Missile.”
More comments
- 2.“That's a young Zach Galifianakis on keyboards. Look it up.”
The story
Yes, that's really the title. And yes, it was a hit. King Missile frontman John S. Hall started out reading his work at open-mic poetry nights in 1985 and became a featured poet in Greenwich Village, and this is basically one of those poems with a band behind it. In a perfectly flat voice he tells the story of a guy who wakes up after a hard night of drinking to find a certain removable body part missing. He searches, makes phone calls, and finally finds it for sale at a street vendor's, where he buys it back for seventeen bucks. Underneath, the band grinds one distorted guitar riff that never changes chords.
Drummer Roger Murdock suggested Richard Kern to direct the video, and Hall called him the perfect choice. Kern shot the story literally, cutting between the band and an anonymous woman demonstrating the attach-and-detach routine with a prop, artificial anatomy included. Subtle it is not.
It was the first single from Happy Hour on Atlantic in 1992, reached number 25 on Billboard's Modern Rock chart and went top 20 in Australia and New Zealand. Hall said the success brought a backlash, and the band took to playing it early in their sets so the casual fans could leave. Rolling Stone wondered whether it was a parable about self-emasculation. Hall wasn't telling. He later went to law school and co-founded an entertainment law firm, which is the most rock and roll ending of all.
