About Me
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 yet notable 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 Austin's annual SXSW music festival. Two of the members, Cindy Wheeler and Mary Catherine Guidera, have since attracted even more of a following as leaders of a Brooklyn-based band called the Caulfield Sisters.----Pee Shy began as a duo: Wheeler, a bookstore owner in Tampa's trendy Ybor City section, primarily played accordion and sang lead vocals, while Jenny Juristo, a community radio DJ who was training to be a speech pathologist, played clarinet and keyboards and occasionally sang lead. Eventually the band expanded to four members and added guitars, bass and drums to its musical repertoire. Early influences such as Alice Cooper, Guided By Voices and Blondie 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 piata-like hearts would mix with alien abductions and Wheeler's obscenity-laden response to men who harass women on the street.----The band's name, which drew no end of grief from label executives and music critics, 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.----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. Wheeler has continued using that technique in the Caulfield Sisters.----Pee Shy moved from Tampa to New York City in 1996 and broke up two years later.
