Ancient Web: No Kill I Played Star Trek Punk in Sacramento

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.

No Kill I did not merely write songs about Star Trek. The Sacramento punk band's members performed as Captain Kirk, Mr. Spock, Yeoman Rand, a red-shirted expendable crewman, and a creature called Mugatu. Their website suggests that remaining in costume was sometimes the least of their problems.

Visit No Kill I's surviving band homepage.

The band dates itself to around 1993, though its own history page admits uncertainty about the year. It remembers early Cattle Club appearances, punk-house concerts, broken instruments, encounters with venue staff, and a 1998 reunion at Sacramento's Old Ironsides. The stories are deliberately unruly, full of exaggeration, self-mockery, and the rough language of the local punk circuit.

By 2003 the band had enough of a reputation to appear in the documentary Trekkies 2, according to its homepage. The site says a tenth-anniversary show on July 26 that year was filmed for the movie. Its archived news also links reviews of Sacramento and Hollywood premieres in 2004.

The recording studio was sometimes a third-generation tape

The recording log lists a self-titled cassette tentatively dated 1995, appearances on compilation releases in 1996 and 1997, and a session whose master tape was reportedly lost before a copy surfaced again. It advertises MP3s copied from an old tape and cheerfully apologizes for their poor fidelity.

The songs page and navigation also promise lyrics, photographs, concert reports, reviews, and a list of other Star Trek bands. On the homepage, the musicians offer their recordings for noncommercial sharing under a Creative Commons license. That willingness to circulate the songs sits beside the personal stories in a familiar early-Web arrangement: an independent band maintains the archive itself.

One dated detail matters. The homepage says it was updated April 17, 2007, and its visitor counter was added December 13, 2000. Neither is evidence that the band still performs today. The site's line about not seeking shows anymore should be read as a statement from that older version of the website.

The charm is not that these are polished memoirs. It is that a group of musicians kept their little universe of fake starship personnel, local clubs, broken gear, and recordings connected through ordinary hyperlinks.

Read the band's self-described history and recording log.

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.