Mohinder
Named after the clerk that worked the counter at the "7-11" convenience store off of Stevens Creek Boulevard in the sunny town of Cupertino, Mohinder was a band that started and ended in the mid 1990s and are as different from Codeine as birds are from turtles.
They hold only a minuscule footnote in the history of punk rock music, but for some it is a truly personal and widely emphatic one. The length of their career seemed to mimic the length of their songs: short, sweet, and with a lot of screaming. Ken Shipley quit the band around 1995, by way of taping a note to the door of the room where the band practiced (in a sleepy suburb called Sunnyvale) that said, simply, "I quit." He started a band called "September", which only lasted the length of the month --- though their songs stretched for several minutes whereas Mohinder's bursts were much shorter. Other members later formed other bands, all of which seemed to record music that grew increasingly slower than the songs Mohinder played, and in fact the main reincarnation was a band called, fittingly, "Calm". It does not need to be pointed out, but: the arc of these people's music matches beautifully with the arc of most people's adolescence --- from fast, loud, dramatic and seemingly juvenile all the way to a more thoughtful, patient, and seemingly "grown up" type of songs.
This is only a snippet, the story is wonderful and wonderfully intricate and know that I've got a bit of it pinned down I'm quickly realizing how much it grows in scope at both ends. There's a huge arm that reaches out from Mohinder and pulls towards a time I wasn't a part of, and there's a whole other arm reaching out towards nowness. The internet was not in many homes even in 1994 or 1995, and the small homemade record labels of the time certainly were not using the net as their means of distribution, let alone for cataloging the happenings of the time. There were zines, glorious xeroxed zines --- the ones I remember were all written by Ken Shipley. It is a divine pleasure to read them now, they seem all the more precious in their rarity; not only because they were made by hand, but because they held true to a belief that is now all but extinct: make it yourself in small batches and smile when no one wants any of it.
So, for now, there's just Mohinder. Soon, I hope, will come: Indian Summer, Cupertino Library, Tree Records, September, and maybe a general summary of the time as I remember it. Mohinder, though, was for me the start of it all, and its a nice thing to revisit from time to time the little songs of youth.
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