O.C. POP MUSIC REVIEW : Hall: A Guided Missile : He Targets Rock Cliches to Amuse, Not Abuse

SAN JUAN CAPISTRANO —  The smartest nerds get their revenge by becoming rock stars.

What better turning of tables than for teen-age nobodies to emerge some years later as charismatic conduits for passion, insight and sex appeal, holding the spotlight and the admiration of the same sorts who used to mock and ignore them.

John S. Hall, singer of King Missile, is a nerd who doesn’t seem to care about revenge.

Fronting the New York City band at the Coach House on Thursday, Hall was as awkward and nerd-like, in a relaxed sort of way, as anybody in command of loud amplification is ever apt to be.

Since many of his songs are satiric sendups of pop icons and attitudes, you’d think that his deliberate dweebness would have an edge, that the unspoken agenda of all his unabashedly weedy, bleating singing, his willfully ungainly dancing and his studied naivete would be to thumb his nose at the cliches of rock performance and expose the boredom, stupidity and corruption of supposed normalcy.

But rather than drive home the ironies in his songs or lace his satire with acid, Hall was unassuming, almost detached. The targets, or, more accurately, the subjects, of his droll musical spoofs were not to be lambasted and ridiculed.

Instead, they were curiosities to be held up for inspection, amusing examples of life’s comical oddities, small ironies, and prevalent neuroses. In short, nothing to get steamed over.

If he didn’t exact vengeance, Hall at least had some fun tweaking pop-culture heroes.

At the end of the stormy but nonsensical “Metanoia,” he parodied a pompous Bono, crouching in a spotlight while mouthing the words “into the arms of America,” the portent-laden closing line from U2’s “Bullet the Blue Sky.”

In “Martin Scorcese,” he play-acted the part of a Scorcese fan who resembles a Scorcese creation--a violent, excessively foul-mouthed character who can’t express his admiration for the director without frothing and fuming and threatening mayhem.

As the 70-minute set progressed, Hall took on broader character types. He became a masochist who relishes the thought of being tied up and abused, even gouged with a pickax.

He played the part of an inarticulate funk-metal stud, a supersensitive, wistfully Stipe-like folk-rocker, and a stoned, smitten hippie gushing over how “way cool” Jesus was: “He could play guitar better than Hendrix! He could’ve scored more goals than Wayne Gretzky!”

Ultimately, his attitude toward this menagerie of characters was too noncommittal to add up to true satire, which requires a slicing edge that cuts its target. Hall came off like a guy who takes an absurdist view of life to keep himself amused, leaving the passing of judgments to others.

He didn’t even get riled when a substantial part of the small audience, evidently there to see the opening bands, chattered away while he tried to introduce a song. “What’s everyone talkin’ about? I feel totally left out,” he said, in a tone devoid of complaint.

Rather than blast them, he gave a summation of King Missile’s recent travels, assuming the wide-eyed, cheerily dumbed-down tone often heard in the educational films shown to grade-schoolers. This naive narrative was just another role to play; there wasn’t any apparent spite in it.

When Hall wasn’t singing, he was doing an odd dance, slouching and swaying and jerking about with his arms doing paddle strokes in front of him, as if he had taken his dance cues from both Steve Martin’s wild-and-crazy guy and a very stoned Deadhead.

Between his role-playing, his dancing, and his occasional strolls through the house (during which he hobnobbed with fans and, at one point, sat down at a table and watched King Missile’s three other members jam), Hall kept himself amused--and managed to be amusing in the process.

Guitarist Dave Rick, drummer Roger Murdock and Chris Xefos, who doubled on keyboards and bass, were an effective, if raw-sounding trio who were able to switch styles almost as readily as Hall switched personas.

There was an element of parody in their forays into ‘60s psychedelia and contemporary hard-rock grunge, but they pulled those styles off enthusiastically enough to prove that they also appreciate them.

The show’s most sincere moment came when Xefos dedicated a closing rendition of Elton John’s “Love Lies Bleeding” to his sister, who evidently has contributed to keeping his body and soul together while he pursues a career in the dicey world of college/alternative rock (a world in which King Missile has begun to make some headway with the novelty hit, “Detachable Penis”).

“I wouldn’t be eating, I wouldn’t be on the stage if it wasn’t for Gloria,” he said, noting that he first heard the Elton John song on an album she had bought him. They gave it a game, if ragged, shot.

The second-billed Shrinky Dinx offered all manner of extracurricular diversion in a half-hour set that attempted to turn a rock show into a particularly brainless frat party.

Fans got to see more stage fog than any local band has ever expended at the Coach House, some mock pyrotechnics (two hand-held sparklers) during a mock guitar solo, and the enactment of a homoerotic fantasy in which singer Mark McGrath gamboled with a hot-pants clad pizza deliveryman he introduced as “my boyfriend, Boo-Boo.”

McGrath’s antics dominated the show, whether he was swiping a patron’s tortilla chips, wielding a hockey stick as if it were the holy rod of Moses, or flicking his tongue with such salacious frequency that you wondered whether he might be the offspring of some unnatural union between Gene Simmons and a viper.

That sort of stuff gets tiresome if it seems calculated rather than flowing from the music. Shrinky Dinx’s chaotic acting out was action for its own sake, with no discernible ties to the songs.

Not that there was much shape to the music--a bunch of unintelligible screaming, set to competent but formulaic metal-trio bashing that echoed AC/DC at one point and covered Ted Nugent’s “Wango Tango” at another.

Shrinky Dinx is certainly brash, and the band can bash. But that doesn’t count for much if the songs are just formless, meaningless excuses to bash and be brash. On the evidence of this set, Shrinky Dinx makes AC/DC look like a think tank, and Nugent like a Nobel laureate.