Pee Shy (1993–1998) were an indie pop band from Tampa, Florida, whose clever, literate lyrics and unorthodox if primitive instrumentation led them to a brief major label career that ended just as they were attracting national commercial radio airplay. They released two albums for Mercury Records, played with artists including Stereolab, Luna, the Village People and Shannon Wright, and twice performed at the annual South by Southwest music festival in Austin, Texas. Their second album, Don't Get Too Comfortable, peaked at No. 2 in the national college music charts in February 1998.
History
Origins
Pee Shy began as a duo: Cindy Wheeler, a poet and bookstore owner in Tampa's trendy Ybor City neighborhood, primarily played accordion and sang lead vocals, while Jenny Juristo, a community radio DJ who was training to be a speech-language pathologist, played clarinet and keyboards and occasionally sang lead. (Juristo became Jenny Juristo Morrison following her 1997 marriage to fellow Tampa musician Eric Morrison, of the band Home.)
"We talked a lot about doing music together, but I didn't know how to play any instruments," Wheeler recalled in an interview. "I started house sitting for some friends of mine at some point and they had an accordion. I kind of started teaching myself how to play it, just kind of fooling around -- Jenny came over with her clarinet and we tried writing some original stuff together." Their first public performance as Pee Shy was on September 23, 1993, at the weekly Thirsty Ear poetry reading in Ybor City's Eighth Avenue Bistro.
In 1994 and 1995, the band expanded to four members and added guitars, bass and drums to its musical arsenal, creating what one journalist called "a sweet circus of clarinets, guitars and little girl voices." Early influences such as Alice Cooper, Guided by Voices, Daniel Johnston and Tsunami yielded a melancholy yet at times absurdly joyful atmosphere to the band's concerts and recordings, in which tales of youthful boyfriends, fatal car crashes and piñata-like hearts would mix with alien abductions and Wheeler's obscenity-laden response to men who harass women on the street.
Major label contract
Though some local critics initially regarded the band's performances as "campy" and ragged, within little more than a year Pee Shy's two cassette demos and modest touring had begun attracting national attention. This manifested itself in a spread in Interview magazine in December 1994, along with what Wheeler later called a "bidding war" between Sony and PolyGram.
The members eventually signed a contract with PolyGram's Mercury Records label, and in the spring of 1995 flew to New York City to record their first album, Who Let All the Monkeys Out? The first single was to be Little Dudes, a song Wheeler had written about her and Juristo's taste in younger boyfriends.
That album, produced by Galaxie 500 and Luna frontman Dean Wareham, was not released until April 2, 1996, nearly a year later. In the meantime, Pee Shy released the vinyl 7-inch Yellow Race Car on the small, Tampa-based label Screw Music Forever, containing two Wareham-produced songs that had not made it onto Monkeys. On their own initiative, they also made their first appearance at South by Southwest in March 1996, an occasion made memorable when Juristo and Wheeler accidentally tumbled to the stage at the end of their set. "For any other band, it would have been an embarrassing show-stopper of an accident," the St. Petersburg Times reported. "For Pee Shy, it was an eye-catching, climactic moment."
Despite positive national reviews and Mercury's stated belief that Little Dudes (finally released in November) was "a potential sleeper hit," Monkeys sold only about 1,000 copies during the first four months after its release, according to the SoundScan tracking service. At least one industry observer called Pee Shy a victim of bad timing, since its album came out just as alternative music was experiencing a decline in sales, but Juristo said the band had learned to be "more aggressive and consistent" with the next album—if there was one.
New York and a new album
Hoping proximity might persuade the label to keep them on, Pee Shy departed Tampa Bay for New York City after holding a farewell concert at the State Theater in St. Petersburg on August 2, 1996. The band soon underwent a personnel change as well: Drummer Bil Bowman never made the trip north, and his role went to newcomer Billy Orrico.
In the end, the band members' hopes were fulfilled, and Mercury released Pee Shy's second album, Don't Get Too Comfortable, on January 27, 1998.