After a three-decade run, the Incredible Casuals, a Cape Cod rock band described by Rolling Stone as “the Beach Boys meets the Who,” disbanded in 2013. The band had performed at the Wellfleet Beachcomber every Sunday for 30 summers and had put out five full-length records and 12 virtual albums, along with plenty of singles and compilation tracks, since its 1986 debut album, That’s That. But the Casuals “weren’t progressing,” says bassist Chandler Travis. The group — which at that point included Travis, drummer Rikki Bates, and guitarist Steve “Woo Woo” Woods — wasn’t producing new material or getting along all that well.
Ten years later, in the summer of 2023, Woods succeeded in convincing his bandmates that they still had a future.
“I didn’t need a whole lot of talking me into it,” says Travis. The band got back together under a new name: the Invincible Casuals. They’ll perform at Wellfleet Preservation Hall on Saturday, May 17. “We’re invincible,” says Travis, “because we rose from the dead.”
The Casuals rock out, inarguably, “but what genre we play is a little bit tricky, because of us all being so old,” he admits. When they started out, he says, the music they played was considered new. Recently, somebody labeled it “classic rock,” but he hates that term, which is used to describe “overplayed, big-money music.” The Casuals prefer to be more specific — “we come from the Kinks, the Beatles, the Who — stuff way the hell back there,” he says.
“Good music is rare,” says Travis. But when a piece of music speaks to him, “it’s heaven.” He’s “a record nut.” He loves the music of Thelonious Monk and Duke Ellington, he says — and the Romantic composer Gustav Mahler. What does Mahler have in common with the others? “Melody and strength,” says Travis: the non-negotiables.
The Invincible Casuals, in their own way, embody those traits. The band plays with an intoxicating groove, simultaneously laid back and forward-moving; some songs are clean and cool, others dance on the edge of absurdity. In a 2008 performance of their song “Jack the Ripper” at the Beachcomber, Wood rubbed the fretboard of his electric guitar against a surfboard hanging from the ceiling and produced a soloistic glissando.
All the members of the Casuals compose songs, says Travis. At home, he records new ideas every week. “I’m probably about an album-a-year kind of guy,” he says, “with lots of discards. A lot of what I’ve always tried to do is come up with something that’s really hard to describe.”
Travis’s other bands include the nine-piece Chandler Travis Philharmonic, the Catbirds, and the Chandler Travis Three-O.
The Casuals sometimes write “instant songs,” he says. To name the song, they decide how many words are in the title and then say that many random words aloud. Then they go, “One, two, three, four,” and start playing. “Most of it is garbage,” says Travis. “Occasionally, whole songs are immediately kind of great.”
One song, “Picnic Ape,” which Travis wrote with Bates in 1979, wasn’t exactly an instant song, since Travis came in with a bass riff in mind. The title was improvised on the spot, though. The song is dizzying, with multiple time changes and a rollicking chorus that burns with momentum. It’s only gotten stranger over the years, says Travis — because he’s performed with Bates for so long, the two, who make up the rhythm section, can “turn on a dime.”
Travis was born in New York City but raised in Wilton and then Darien, Conn. He attended Boston University for two and a half years. That’s where he met Steve Shook, one of his first bandmates, and the writer of much of the music on the Casuals’ first album. Around 1971, Travis moved to Orleans with Shook to live in a friend’s family’s house. Shook left the band in 1984 before the release of That’s That. Travis now lives in Harwich.
He says he loves every part of music-making: recording, rehearsing, performing. Working on a new song is “beautiful.” Part of the joy of making music, he says, is that he’ll never have it all figured out. “Maybe you will for three minutes, while you’re playing a song really well, but you might play it horribly the next day,” he says. “I’ll bet this is true of most obsessions, or most craftsmen, that you keep being fascinated by what you’re doing. There’s no point in us doing this if it’s not still wild and untamed.”
At Preservation Hall this weekend, the Casuals will play a range of their songs, both newly composed and “ancient.”
In performance, says Travis, the band — whose most rabid fans are called “Casualties” — has a goal: to keep the dance floor “full and wild.” A good set, he says, “builds momentum and makes the crowd do what you want them to do.”
Back From the Dead
The event: The Invincible Casuals in concert
The time: Saturday, May 17, 7 p.m.
The place: Wellfleet Preservation Hall, 335 Main St.
The cost: $17.85 at wellfleetpreservationhall.org
