Pee Shy
Encyclopedia
Pee Shy 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.
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.
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.
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.
Produced by Brad Jones, who had worked on albums for bands such as Yo La Tengo
, Comfortable featured a crunchier, poppier, more guitar-driven sound than Monkeys and received generally much improved reviews. The Village Voice
called it "a phenomenal upgrade" and remarked that "Pee Shy make sexiness and marketability look cool and substantive," although the newspaper's critic also criticized the band as "introverted." Veteran Voice music critic Robert Christgau
listed two of Wheeler's songs from the album—the peppy love-gone-wrong lament Mr. Whisper and the mellower Much Obliged -- as "choice cuts," alongside We've Got It Goin' On by the Backstreet Boys
.
Mr. Whisper also received some airplay on commercial radio stations nationwide, including KROQ-FM
in Los Angeles. Another of Wheeler's songs, Rope Waltz, played in the background of a scene that year on the television series Melrose Place.
In March 1998, Pee Shy performed for a second time at South by Southwest
, to an audience that included the Indigo Girls
' Amy Ray
. This show was broadcast on the World Wide Web
by RollingStone.com
.
"We couldn't play a damn thing when we started, but the core of the talent was more of an energy, like a will," Juristo Morrison told the St. Petersburg Times in 2002. In the end, she told the newspaper: "We stopped having fun. ... It was a natural deterioration; it was time to stop."
Wheeler, Orrico and bass player Mary Catherine Guidera initially continued performing under the name 3 Wheeler, recording a demo that would not be released until late 2007. Wheeler and Guidera have since attracted a following as leaders of a Brooklyn-based band called the Caulfield Sisters
.
Juristo Morrison has continued recording and performing solo under the name GoJenny, and revived her radio show as an Internet broadcast in May 2005. She also has performed and recorded with musicians such as Megan Reilly and with bands such as Capt Qitn, Leels and the 100% Storms Ensemble.
Orrico lives in New Jersey, works as a feature film sound editor in New York City and has worked on such films as Tim Burton
's Sleepy Hollow
, Ice Age
, Robots
, Hedwig and the Angry Inch
and O Brother, Where Art Thou?
He also continues to perform in various original and cover bands in the New York/New Jersey area, as well as writing and recording his own material.
Bowman relocated to Northern California and has been involved with bands Caroliner Rainbow, The Zodiac Killers (featuring Greg Lowery, formerly of Supercharger
and The Rip-Offs), avant-metalers Blackqueen (with guitarist Pete Jay, formerly of Assück
) and Dimes
, an instrumental project featuring guitarist Nolan Cook of The Residents
. He currently is a member of the dark progressive rock band Human Anomaly, featuring ex-Noothgrush members. Bowman is also one-third of the heavy rock trio Totimoshi
, who are signed to Volcom Records
.
, Pee Shy and others." Band members explained that the name originated from a nickname that Wheeler had received from an old boyfriend. In their early days they also performed a song called "Pee Shy," in which urinary reticence became a metaphor for unexpressed longing—as exemplified in the crucial line, "If you won't leave, I can't start." The band apparently never recorded this song.
A December 2000 article in the Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, examining Ybor City's "bohemian
" culture of the mid-1990s, held up Pee Shy as a prototypical "DIY band turned corporate sellout," at least in the sense that the members' decision to sign with a major label had been controversial with some of their friends and indie rock
compatriots.
Pee Shy's primary musical innovation may have been accordion
feedback
, a yowling, oscillating sound that Wheeler created by pressing the instrument against a speaker as she played.
According to Wheeler, in 2003 the director Robert Altman
sought to use seven seconds of Mr. Whisper in the soundtrack to his ballet film The Company, starring Neve Campbell
. But the Universal Music Group
, which by then had acquired PolyGram, refused to waive its $10,000 fee.
Indie pop
Indie pop is a genre of alternative rock music that originated in the United Kingdom in the mid 1980s, with its roots in the Scottish post-punk bands on the Postcard Records label in the early '80s, such as Orange Juice, Josef K and Aztec Camera, and the dominant UK independent band of the mid...
band from Tampa
Tâmpa
Tâmpa may refer to several villages in Romania:* Tâmpa, a village in Băcia Commune, Hunedoara County* Tâmpa, a village in Miercurea Nirajului, Mureş County* Tâmpa, a mountain in Braşov city...
, Florida
Florida
Florida is a state in the southeastern United States, located on the nation's Atlantic and Gulf coasts. It is bordered to the west by the Gulf of Mexico, to the north by Alabama and Georgia and to the east by the Atlantic Ocean. With a population of 18,801,310 as measured by the 2010 census, it...
, 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
Mercury Records
Mercury Records is a record label operating as a standalone company in the UK and as part of the Island Def Jam Motown Music Group in the US; both are subsidiaries of Universal Music Group. There is also a Mercury Records in Australia, which is a local artist and repertoire division of Universal...
, played with artists including Stereolab
Stereolab
Stereolab are an alternative music band formed in 1990 in London, England. The band originally comprised songwriting team Tim Gane and Lætitia Sadier , both of whom remained at the helm across many lineup changes...
, Luna
Luna (band)
Luna was a dream pop/indie pop band formed in 1991 by Dean Wareham after the breakup of Galaxie 500, with Stanley Demeski and Justin Harwood...
, the Village People
Village People
Village People is a concept disco group that formed in the United States in 1977, well known for their on-stage costumes depicting American cultural stereotypes, as well as their catchy tunes and suggestive lyrics....
and Shannon Wright
Shannon Wright
Shannon Wright is an American singer-songwriter from Atlanta, Georgia.-History:Wright moved from New York City to Chapel Hill, NC after her first band Crowsdell called it quits. While in Chapel Hill, Wright started experimenting and writing solo songs with a borrowed four-track recorder...
, and twice performed at the annual South by Southwest
South by Southwest
South by Southwest is an Austin, Texas based company dedicated to planning conferences, trade shows, festivals and other events. Their current roster of annual events include: SXSW Music, SXSW Film, SXSW Interactive, SXSWedu, and SXSWeco and take place every spring in Austin, Texas, United States...
music festival in Austin
Austin, Texas
Austin is the capital city of the U.S. state of :Texas and the seat of Travis County. Located in Central Texas on the eastern edge of the American Southwest, it is the fourth-largest city in Texas and the 14th most populous city in the United States. It was the third-fastest-growing large city in...
, Texas
Texas
Texas is the second largest U.S. state by both area and population, and the largest state by area in the contiguous United States.The name, based on the Caddo word "Tejas" meaning "friends" or "allies", was applied by the Spanish to the Caddo themselves and to the region of their settlement in...
. Their second album, Don't Get Too Comfortable, peaked at No. 2 in the national college music charts in February 1998.
Origins
Pee Shy began as a duo: Cindy Wheeler, a poet and bookstore owner in Tampa's trendy Ybor City neighborhood, primarily played accordionAccordion
The accordion is a box-shaped musical instrument of the bellows-driven free-reed aerophone family, sometimes referred to as a squeezebox. A person who plays the accordion is called an accordionist....
and sang lead vocals, while Jenny Juristo, a community radio
Community radio
Community radio is a type of radio service, that offers a third model of radio broadcasting beyond commercial broadcasting and public broadcasting. Community stations can serve geographic communities and communities of interest...
DJ
Disc jockey
A disc jockey, also known as DJ, is a person who selects and plays recorded music for an audience. Originally, "disc" referred to phonograph records, not the later Compact Discs. Today, the term includes all forms of music playback, no matter the medium.There are several types of disc jockeys...
who was training to be a speech-language pathologist, played clarinet
Clarinet
The clarinet is a musical instrument of woodwind type. The name derives from adding the suffix -et to the Italian word clarino , as the first clarinets had a strident tone similar to that of a trumpet. The instrument has an approximately cylindrical bore, and uses a single reed...
and keyboards
Keyboard instrument
A keyboard instrument is a musical instrument which is played using a musical keyboard. The most common of these is the piano. Other widely used keyboard instruments include organs of various types as well as other mechanical, electromechanical and electronic instruments...
and occasionally sang lead. (Juristo became Jenny Juristo Morrison following her 1997 marriage to fellow Tampa musician Eric Morrison, of the band Home
Home (band)
Home is an experimental pop band formed in Tampa, Florida in the early-1990s, before relocating to New York in 1996. The band released eight self-produced, sequentially-numbered, ultra-low-distribution albums on cheap Radio Shack cassettes before signing to Sony's Relativity Records label, which...
.)
"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
Alice Cooper
Alice Cooper is an American rock singer, songwriter and musician whose career spans more than four decades...
, Guided by Voices
Guided by Voices
Guided by Voices is an American indie rock band originating from Dayton, Ohio. Beginning with the band's formation in 1983, it made frequent personnel changes but always maintained the presence of principal songwriter Robert Pollard...
, Daniel Johnston
Daniel Johnston
Daniel Dale Johnston is an American singer, songwriter, musician, and artist. Johnston was the subject of the 2006 documentary The Devil and Daniel Johnston. He currently lives in Waller, Texas....
and Tsunami
Tsunami (band)
Tsunami was an American indie rock band from Arlington, Virginia, formed by housemates Jenny Toomey and Kristin Thomson in late 1990 to play at New Year's party...
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
Interview (magazine)
Interview is an American magazine which has the nickname The Crystal Ball Of Pop. It was founded in late 1969 by artist Andy Warhol. The magazine features intimate conversations between some of the world's biggest celebrities, artists, musicians, and creative thinkers...
magazine in December 1994, along with what Wheeler later called a "bidding war" between Sony
Sony
, commonly referred to as Sony, is a Japanese multinational conglomerate corporation headquartered in Minato, Tokyo, Japan and the world's fifth largest media conglomerate measured by revenues....
and PolyGram
PolyGram
PolyGram was the name of the major label recording company started by Philips from as a holding company for its music interests in 1945. In 1999 it was sold to Seagram and merged into Universal Music Group.-Hollandsche Decca Distributie , 1929-1950:...
.
The members eventually signed a contract with PolyGram's Mercury Records
Mercury Records
Mercury Records is a record label operating as a standalone company in the UK and as part of the Island Def Jam Motown Music Group in the US; both are subsidiaries of Universal Music Group. There is also a Mercury Records in Australia, which is a local artist and repertoire division of Universal...
label, and in the spring of 1995 flew to New York City
New York City
New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...
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
Galaxie 500
Galaxie 500 was an American alternative rock band that formed in 1987 and split up in 1991 after releasing three albums.-History:Guitarist Dean Wareham, drummer Damon Krukowski and bassist Naomi Yang had met at the Dalton School in New York City in 1981, but began playing together during their time...
and Luna
Luna (band)
Luna was a dream pop/indie pop band formed in 1991 by Dean Wareham after the breakup of Galaxie 500, with Stanley Demeski and Justin Harwood...
frontman Dean Wareham
Dean Wareham
Dean Wareham is an American musician, who formed the band Galaxie 500 in 1987. Born in Wellington, New Zealand, Wareham moved with his parents to Sydney, Australia, before settling in New York City in 1977. Wareham attended high school at Dalton School in New York, and then attended Harvard...
, 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
South by Southwest
South by Southwest is an Austin, Texas based company dedicated to planning conferences, trade shows, festivals and other events. Their current roster of annual events include: SXSW Music, SXSW Film, SXSW Interactive, SXSWedu, and SXSWeco and take place every spring in Austin, Texas, United States...
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
St. Petersburg Times
The St. Petersburg Times is a United States newspaper. It is one of two major publications serving the Tampa Bay Area, the other being The Tampa Tribune, which the Times tops in both circulation and readership. Based in St...
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
Nielsen SoundScan
Nielsen SoundScan is an information and sales tracking system created by Mike Fine and Mike Shalett. Soundscan is the official method of tracking sales of music and music video products throughout the United States and Canada...
tracking service. At least one industry observer called Pee Shy a victim of bad timing, since its album came out just as alternative music
Alternative rock
Alternative rock is a genre of rock music and a term used to describe a diverse musical movement that emerged from the independent music underground of the 1980s and became widely popular by the 1990s...
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
New York City
New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...
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.
Produced by Brad Jones, who had worked on albums for bands such as Yo La Tengo
Yo La Tengo
Yo La Tengo, sometimes abbreviated as YLT, is an American alternative rock band formed in Hoboken, New Jersey in 1984. Since 1992, the lineup has consisted of Ira Kaplan , Georgia Hubley , and James McNew .Despite achieving limited mainstream success, Yo La Tengo has been called "the quintessential...
, Comfortable featured a crunchier, poppier, more guitar-driven sound than Monkeys and received generally much improved reviews. The Village Voice
The Village Voice
The Village Voice is a free weekly newspaper and news and features website in New York City that features investigative articles, analysis of current affairs and culture, arts and music coverage, and events listings for New York City...
called it "a phenomenal upgrade" and remarked that "Pee Shy make sexiness and marketability look cool and substantive," although the newspaper's critic also criticized the band as "introverted." Veteran Voice music critic Robert Christgau
Robert Christgau
Robert Christgau is an American essayist, music journalist, and self-proclaimed "Dean of American Rock Critics".One of the earliest professional rock critics, Christgau is known for his terse capsule reviews, published since 1969 in his Consumer Guide columns...
listed two of Wheeler's songs from the album—the peppy love-gone-wrong lament Mr. Whisper and the mellower Much Obliged -- as "choice cuts," alongside We've Got It Goin' On by the Backstreet Boys
Backstreet Boys
The Backstreet Boys are an American vocal group, formed in Orlando, Florida in 1993. The band originally consisted of A. J. McLean, Howie Dorough, Brian Littrell, Nick Carter and Kevin Richardson. They rose to fame with their debut international album, Backstreet Boys...
.
Mr. Whisper also received some airplay on commercial radio stations nationwide, including KROQ-FM
KROQ-FM
KROQ-FM — branded 106.7 KROQ — is a commercial modern rock radio station licensed to Pasadena, California serving the Greater Los Angeles. The call sign is pronounced "kay rock." It is the flagship station of Loveline hosted by Dr...
in Los Angeles. Another of Wheeler's songs, Rope Waltz, played in the background of a scene that year on the television series Melrose Place.
In March 1998, Pee Shy performed for a second time at South by Southwest
South by Southwest
South by Southwest is an Austin, Texas based company dedicated to planning conferences, trade shows, festivals and other events. Their current roster of annual events include: SXSW Music, SXSW Film, SXSW Interactive, SXSWedu, and SXSWeco and take place every spring in Austin, Texas, United States...
, to an audience that included the Indigo Girls
Indigo Girls
The Indigo Girls are an American folk rock music duo, consisting of Amy Ray and Emily Saliers. They met in elementary school and began performing together as high school students in Decatur, Georgia, part of the Atlanta metropolitan area...
' Amy Ray
Amy Ray
Amy Elizabeth Ray is an American singer-songwriter and member of the contemporary folk duo Indigo Girls. She also pursues a solo career and has released four albums under her own name, and founded a record company, Daemon Records....
. This show was broadcast on the World Wide Web
World Wide Web
The World Wide Web is a system of interlinked hypertext documents accessed via the Internet...
by RollingStone.com
Rolling Stone
Rolling Stone is a US-based magazine devoted to music, liberal politics, and popular culture that is published every two weeks. Rolling Stone was founded in San Francisco in 1967 by Jann Wenner and music critic Ralph J...
.
Breaking up
Despite this apparent success, Pee Shy broke up later in 1998 for reasons Wheeler and Juristo would decline to discuss in detail."We couldn't play a damn thing when we started, but the core of the talent was more of an energy, like a will," Juristo Morrison told the St. Petersburg Times in 2002. In the end, she told the newspaper: "We stopped having fun. ... It was a natural deterioration; it was time to stop."
Wheeler, Orrico and bass player Mary Catherine Guidera initially continued performing under the name 3 Wheeler, recording a demo that would not be released until late 2007. Wheeler and Guidera have since attracted a following as leaders of a Brooklyn-based band called the Caulfield Sisters
Caulfield Sisters
The Caulfield Sisters are a critically praised independent band based in Brooklyn, New York, noted at times for their sonic similarity to Throwing Muses or Galaxie 500...
.
Juristo Morrison has continued recording and performing solo under the name GoJenny, and revived her radio show as an Internet broadcast in May 2005. She also has performed and recorded with musicians such as Megan Reilly and with bands such as Capt Qitn, Leels and the 100% Storms Ensemble.
Orrico lives in New Jersey, works as a feature film sound editor in New York City and has worked on such films as Tim Burton
Tim Burton
Timothy William "Tim" Burton is an American film director, film producer, writer and artist. He is famous for dark, quirky-themed movies such as Beetlejuice, Edward Scissorhands, The Nightmare Before Christmas, Ed Wood, Sleepy Hollow, Corpse Bride and Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet...
's Sleepy Hollow
Sleepy Hollow (film)
Sleepy Hollow is a 1999 American period horror film directed by Tim Burton. It is a film adaptation loosely inspired by the 1820 short story "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" by Washington Irving and stars Johnny Depp, Christina Ricci, Miranda Richardson, Marc Pickering, Michael Gambon, Jeffrey Jones,...
, Ice Age
Ice Age (film)
Ice Age is a 2002 American computer-animated film created by Blue Sky Studios and released by 20th Century Fox. It was directed by Carlos Saldanha and Chris Wedge from a story by Michael J. Wilson. The story follows three Paleolithical mammals attempting to return a lost human baby to its parents...
, Robots
Robots (film)
Robots is a 2005 American computer-animated comedy film produced by Blue Sky Studios for 20th Century Fox, and was released theatrically on March 11, 2005. The story was created by Chris Wedge and William Joyce, a children's book author/illustrator. The two were trying to create a film version of...
, Hedwig and the Angry Inch
Hedwig and the Angry Inch (film)
Hedwig and the Angry Inch is a 2001 American musical comedy-drama film based on the stage musical of the same title about a fictional rock band fronted by an East German transgender singer. The film was adapted and directed by John Cameron Mitchell, who also portrayed the title role...
and O Brother, Where Art Thou?
O Brother, Where Art Thou?
O Brother, Where Art Thou? is a 2000 comedy film directed by Joel and Ethan Coen and starring George Clooney, John Turturro, Tim Blake Nelson, John Goodman, Holly Hunter, and Charles Durning. Set in 1937 rural Mississippi during the Great Depression, the film's story is a modern satire loosely...
He also continues to perform in various original and cover bands in the New York/New Jersey area, as well as writing and recording his own material.
Bowman relocated to Northern California and has been involved with bands Caroliner Rainbow, The Zodiac Killers (featuring Greg Lowery, formerly of Supercharger
Supercharger
A supercharger is an air compressor used for forced induction of an internal combustion engine.The greater mass flow-rate provides more oxygen to support combustion than would be available in a naturally aspirated engine, which allows more fuel to be burned and more work to be done per cycle,...
and The Rip-Offs), avant-metalers Blackqueen (with guitarist Pete Jay, formerly of Assück
Assück
Assück was an anti-capitalist and anarchist grindcore and deathgrind band from Saint Petersburg Florida, active from 1987 to 1998. The band proved influential, with their album Anticapital voted number 4 in the Terrorizer list of their top 20 US grindcore albums, who described it as a "low-calibre...
) and Dimes
DIMES
is a subproject of the in the , .It is studying the structure and topology of the Internet to obtain a very accurate map and annotate it with:* delay loss* in the future available bandwidth* link capacity.- Concept and objective:...
, an instrumental project featuring guitarist Nolan Cook of The Residents
The Residents
The Residents is an American art collective best known for avant-garde music and multimedia works. The first official release under the name of The Residents was in 1972, and the group has since released over sixty albums, numerous music videos and short films, three CD-ROM projects and ten DVDs....
. He currently is a member of the dark progressive rock band Human Anomaly, featuring ex-Noothgrush members. Bowman is also one-third of the heavy rock trio Totimoshi
Totimoshi
Totimoshi is an American alternative rock band based in the San Francisco Bay Area. Since 2007, it publishes music under the Volcom Entertainment label.-Style and reception:...
, who are signed to Volcom Records
Volcom Entertainment
Volcom Entertainment, officially founded in 1995, in Newport Beach, California, and currently based in Costa Mesa, CA is the brainchild of Volcom founder Richard Woolcott and theLINE's singer/guitarist Ryan Immegart. Ryan being Volcom's first sponsored snowboarder and having a love for music...
.
Noteworthy aspects
The band's name drew no end of grief from label executives and music critics, and even prompted a columnist in The Tampa Tribune to bemoan "the decay of morality" demonstrated by "increasingly dicey" band names "a la Butthole SurfersButthole Surfers
Butthole Surfers is an American alternative rock band formed by Gibby Haynes and Paul Leary in San Antonio, Texas in 1981. The band has had numerous personnel changes, but its core lineup of Haynes, Leary, and drummer King Coffey has been consistent since 1983. Teresa Nervosa served as second...
, Pee Shy and others." Band members explained that the name originated from a nickname that Wheeler had received from an old boyfriend. In their early days they also performed a song called "Pee Shy," in which urinary reticence became a metaphor for unexpressed longing—as exemplified in the crucial line, "If you won't leave, I can't start." The band apparently never recorded this song.
A December 2000 article in the Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, examining Ybor City's "bohemian
Bohemianism
Bohemianism is the practice of an unconventional lifestyle, often in the company of like-minded people, with few permanent ties, involving musical, artistic or literary pursuits...
" culture of the mid-1990s, held up Pee Shy as a prototypical "DIY band turned corporate sellout," at least in the sense that the members' decision to sign with a major label had been controversial with some of their friends and indie rock
Indie rock
Indie rock is a genre of alternative rock that originated in the United Kingdom and the United States in the 1980s. Indie rock is extremely diverse, with sub-genres that include lo-fi, post-rock, math rock, indie pop, dream pop, noise rock, space rock, sadcore, riot grrrl and emo, among others...
compatriots.
Pee Shy's primary musical innovation may have been accordion
Accordion
The accordion is a box-shaped musical instrument of the bellows-driven free-reed aerophone family, sometimes referred to as a squeezebox. A person who plays the accordion is called an accordionist....
feedback
Audio feedback
Audio feedback is a special kind of positive feedback which occurs when a sound loop exists between an audio input and an audio output...
, a yowling, oscillating sound that Wheeler created by pressing the instrument against a speaker as she played.
According to Wheeler, in 2003 the director Robert Altman
Robert Altman
Robert Bernard Altman was an American film director and screenwriter known for making films that are highly naturalistic, but with a stylized perspective. In 2006, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences recognized his body of work with an Academy Honorary Award.His films MASH , McCabe and...
sought to use seven seconds of Mr. Whisper in the soundtrack to his ballet film The Company, starring Neve Campbell
Neve Campbell
Neve Adrianne Campbell is a Canadian actress. After beginning her career on stage, and on numerous commercials, she starred on the Canadian television series Catwalk. She then rose to international fame on the Golden Globe-winning 1990s television series Party of Five, playing the role of teenager...
. But the Universal Music Group
Universal Music Group
Universal Music Group is an American music group, the largest of the "big four" record companies by its commanding market share and its multitude of global operations...
, which by then had acquired PolyGram, refused to waive its $10,000 fee.
Albums
- Don't Look! It's Pee Shy demo tape, 1994
- For Those Afraid to Rock, Pee Shy Salutes You demo tape, 1994
- Who Let All the Monkeys Out? CD (MercuryMercury RecordsMercury Records is a record label operating as a standalone company in the UK and as part of the Island Def Jam Motown Music Group in the US; both are subsidiaries of Universal Music Group. There is also a Mercury Records in Australia, which is a local artist and repertoire division of Universal...
/Blue Gorilla), 1996 - Don't Get Too Comfortable CD (MercuryMercury RecordsMercury Records is a record label operating as a standalone company in the UK and as part of the Island Def Jam Motown Music Group in the US; both are subsidiaries of Universal Music Group. There is also a Mercury Records in Australia, which is a local artist and repertoire division of Universal...
/Blue Gorilla), 1998
Singles
- Yellow Race Car b/w Back of Your Guitar 7-inch (Screw Music Forever), 1995
- Little Dudes promo CD single (MercuryMercury RecordsMercury Records is a record label operating as a standalone company in the UK and as part of the Island Def Jam Motown Music Group in the US; both are subsidiaries of Universal Music Group. There is also a Mercury Records in Australia, which is a local artist and repertoire division of Universal...
/Blue Gorilla), 1996 - Shazzam, split 7-inch with Home (Turducken Recordings), 1996
- Mr. Whisper b/w Little Dudes cassette single (MercuryMercury RecordsMercury Records is a record label operating as a standalone company in the UK and as part of the Island Def Jam Motown Music Group in the US; both are subsidiaries of Universal Music Group. There is also a Mercury Records in Australia, which is a local artist and repertoire division of Universal...
/Blue Gorilla), 1998
Known bootlegs
- CD release party at The Rubb, April 4, 1996
- Live Under the Brooklyn Bridge, July 1996
- Farewell to Tampa Bay, August 2, 1996
- Live at SXSW, March 1998