Shoegazing In Sandals
Daniel Chavis of The Veldt
What a treat it was to welcome Daniel Chavis, lead singer of The Veldt, into Thunderlove Studio — it’s worth noting that Thunderlove Studio is less a physical place and more a state of mind.
Anywho, you may or may not have heard of The Veldt. From where I sit, you should have. As Daniel and I chatted and peeled back the layers of their career — to date — there may have been several reasons the band may not have achieved widespread commercial success back in the early to mid-90s — the least of which is their sound.
The Veldt — the band name taken from a Ray Bradbury short story — is often categorized as a “shoegaze” band. In fact, Pitchfork included their 1994 classic Afrodisiac in their “Top 50 Shoegaze Albums of All Time” list.
One spin of Afrodisiac and you’ll recognize its excellence… regardless of genre label.
With that being said, The Veldt, arguably, has just as much, if not more, in common with psychedelia.
On the Venn diagram of music genres, there is an overlap between shoegaze and psychedelia to be sure; but it’s 3:30 a.m. as I write this and I’m neither prepared nor are all of my cylinders firing enough to split those atoms (to be fair, I seldom am, and they rarely are).
Daniel and his identical twin brother, Danny, hail from Raleigh, North Carolina. After discovering a love of gospel, Motown, and Pink Floyd, the two began playing together in bands as teens. They woodshedded their songs and cut their chops coming up in the burgeoning Raleigh scene with bands like Archers of Loaf, Superchunk, and Squirrel Nut Zippers.
This was the late mid/late 80s into the early 90s so between the multi-platinum success of Living Colour (the band, not the television show) and the exploding hip-hop and rap scene, record labels were eager to flex their diversity muscle.
The Veldt is a rock and roll band led by identical black twin brothers, so record labels were snatching up those first-class seats from New York City and Los Angeles to Raleigh in the hope of signing the band.
It’s safe to say they were less eager to sign a band that gives a shit about their sound and career trajectory.
Capital Records eventually signed the band in 1989 and they went into the recording studio with Robin Guthrie of Cocteau Twins — a band who were just beginning to find commercial success on this side of the pond. Guthrie would become, and remains, a champion of The Veldt, and Daniel refers to him as the band’s George Martin (that’s two for two this season with George Martin references).
But, that album would end up being shelved by Capital Records. Some of those songs ended up being released on the EP, Marigolds. While the Guthrie-produced tracks were on ice, some of the tracks landed on The Veldt EP Marigolds, produced by longtime Guthrie ally Lincoln Fong.
The Veldt eventually cut ties with Capital and took off for Polygram Records, who released Marigolds via their Stardog Records imprint (yep, the Mother Love Bone label) in 1992.
Now, if you’re to believe the party message as to why that Guthrie-produced album was sidelined, and the band cut loose from Capital, then it was a result of a familiar refrain in the music biz. There was a merger and/or regime change up top and the ensuing bloodletting meant The Veldt got pushed aside.
Surely, the album couldn’t have been shelved because they were determined black guys playing rock and roll. Could it?
As Daniel intimated to me, and said more plainly in a 2016 interview with The Guardian:
“Other black bands were getting noticed, and every record company wanted their Living Colour. We didn’t fit into that mode. When it’s Kurt Cobain, it’s ‘He knows what he wants’, but we’re ‘difficult to work with’.”
They’re artists, of course, and they’re gonna be difficult to work with so I can’t help but wonder if they were difficult or if were they being marginalized by the new regime at Capital Records because no one on the new team had signed the band. Or maybe because they didn’t play by the “new” rules. Or maybe because they were black.
The incongruity of a rock and roll band led by black twins may have been more than executives could handle.
The band released Afrodisiac in 1996 to positive reviews; unfortunately, the album was met with a commercial shrug. To shake the “difficult” label, the Chavis brothers went so far as to rename themselves Apollo Heights in 2002.
Over the years, The Veldt did some serious record label hopscotch over the years but always remained active. Always lurking in the background was that shelved album — the Robin Guthrie-produced version of Marigolds, which had never seen the light of day.
To quote S.E. Hinton: “That was then, this is now.”
Over the past month, The Veldt have released a couple of songs bourne from those Robin Guthrie sessions — “The Everlasting Gobstopper” and “Aurora Borealis” — on their Bandcamp page — with the later featuring Guthrie’s former Cocteau Twins bandmate Elizabeth Fraser.
Daniel told me that they’re hoping to drop the whole Guthrie-produced set at the end of September.
Discovering The Veldt has been a real treat and they’re exactly the kind of band that makes this Abandoned Albums journey so much fun. I got to talk with Daniel about the band’s origin, being a black rock band, the influence of Afrodisiac, and WTF “White Music For Black People” means.
Gummies got eaten.
Stories got told.
Bonds got made.
Here is my conversation with Daniel Chavis of The Veldt:
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