"There’s a great photo of the quarter-full Boy Scouts Hall in Anderson, California that played host to the very first public performance of the Americas. It’s taken from high up, so that both the band and the crowd can be distinguished. Those from the latter camp are frozen in varying visages of unbelievability. Shock, even.

Travis and Casey are consumed by some forbidden inner musical alchemy in the shot, and the crowd’s collective brains are being systematically blenderized. It’s a photo I think about all the time. I was there. What the fuck were we looking at? What were we hearing? It was extraterrestrial. We had no idea how to rock to this yet. Nothing could have prepared us for The Americas. And yet, there we were. Few shows have stuck with me the way that first show did. The first time hearing them was like taking a harpoon to my forehead. I couldn’t understand what was happening. I couldn’t hear music the same way again.

I remember wondering why their bass player hadn’t shown up, then understanding after a few jaw-dropping tunes that no bassist could follow or fit into the complex visceral theater pulsating from the stage—though you can hear on this album an early attempt at incorporating a bassist (Redding legend Mat Calderon) on “Lots of Jay Squeezin’ It” during their sixth show.

The heartbeat of the magic of the Americas was a thrum audible to Casey and Travis alone. Together, they were singular. I can’t think of a better live duo. I don’t think bands like the Americas can be plotted out. Mapped. Their routing is wired sub-perceptually, like a fever dream you can’t remember the moment you wake up. They are poetry and pain in equal parts. A kind of secret lullaby for an underground full of freaks so tired of rules they practically willed this band into existence.

There was no contextual prism through which to comprehend what they were doing, musically. At least not then. It was spastic. Manic. Unhinged, beautiful noise. And it wasn’t only music. It was art. The ravings of two madmen at war with their instruments, and sometimes with each other. There was sweat, intensity, passion and a chemistry like some kind of fucked-up wonderful secret handshake that could only be decoded by copious, repeated listens.

And they were/are fucking funny, too. This was music that, once unleashed into your ear holes, was bound to systematically mutate your DNA. So the humor had to be subtle, sometimes, like how “As Of Yet Titled” just...never became titled. Or how the beginning few seconds of this live album features Travis yelling “ChicOOOOOOOOO!” as he and Casey suss out an improvised arena-rock greeting. Sometimes it was more overt, and came in flourishes, unexpectedly, sometimes frighteningly so, as you can hear a little in the improvised chaos of the quieter bits of this live cut of “Enslave the Elderly.” They had some kind of ESP I’ll never understand that allowed them to play off each other so easily, often with bad PAs, in bad rooms, whatever. The Americas show was where you went to go see two gentle mind-readers beat the shit out of their instruments, themselves, the audience (emotionally, spiritually maybe) and hug everyone afterward.

Seeing the gentleness and fury in so close a proximity was jarring. Travis’s ferocious vocal atonality would gently rock his looping guitar to sleep, only to be coaxed back to pulverizing cacophonous mayhem by Morse code stick clicks from Casey. It was like a jigsaw puzzle being stitched together by the Odd Couple live on stage, cerebral and snarky.

Every show, they peppered in bizarre instrumental skewerings they hadn’t done before, wingin’ it (you’d think) until they dropped right back in where they needed to be for the next part of the song. It was uncanny. There were false starts, mid-song tunings, full-on song abandonment if things went too sideways... They tended to transcend the liquid parameters of the avant-garde like a two-chambered sponge, sucking in microbes of punk, fusion, prog, even jazz, though still autonomous to themselves.

The roiling, coy intro of “Siam Brass Knuckles” is the kind of song that after having heard it, all contemporaries borrowed at least some part of it to add to their own writing...or tried to anyway. It was this song, too, that first compelled closer listens to Travis’ vocals—the attempted comprehension of the onslaught of the music being the most immediate task at hand—and it was easy to become so tuned into that third melodic instrument he wielded. It had the tendency to get swallowed up a bit in the live setting, which made Travis push it further, which made everyone rock the fuck out more.

I don’t think I ever even asked Casey or Travis why they named their band the Americas, for the same reason I (somewhat ashamedly now) never inquired about what topics, if any specifically, their lyrics may have tackled. I don’t know if I need to know. I never talked to one person who saw this band live who wasn’t blown away by what they were seeing and hearing. Metalheads. Druggies. Punx. Emos. Scholarly eggheads. Jazz freaks. My dad. My boss. Other assorted old people. Random scene bros I thought were dumbshits...

Everyone agreed: Wow. Wow and holy shit.

In the years after, when they became a staple of the Northern California music community, I would look around at the faces in the crowd during an Americas set and see the same look of inconceivability I experienced at that first show in Anderson everywhere. They had no contemporaries. They were an entity entirely unto themselves. They were the most exciting fucking thing I’d ever seen, and I feel lucky to have been mired in the same strange soupy community with them for as long as I was.

Listening to the crowd banter on ...And You, You’re Alive between notes, between songs and after songs is like hearing the ghosts of much cooler times waving hello, when it didn’t seem like everything in the entire goddamn world was about to capsize. That energy translates over to these live tracks—and how couldn’t it? These songs were made to last far beyond the immediate confines of the coffee houses, the living rooms and bars where they were recorded.

These misbehaving cosmic echoes, beamed in from the unknown frequencies of the bizarre, tender corners of our youth, were meant to last somewhere closer to forever. And now, in a strange way, they can. Just in the nick of time."

- Ryan J. Prado

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Photo by Chris Miller.
(the) americas 2000-2020.