Pee Shy (band)

Pee Shy
Left to right: Jenny Juristo, Mary Guidera, Cindy Wheeler (1996)
Background information
Origin	Tampa, Florida, U.S.
Genres	Alternative Indie pop Accordion Clarinet
Years active	1993–1998
Labels	Mercury Records/Blue Gorilla Screw Music Forever
Members	Cindy Wheeler (accordion, guitar, lead vocals) Jenny Juristo Morrison (clarinet, keyboards, guitar, accordion, vocals) Mary Catherine Guidera (bass) Billy Orrico (drums, 1997-98) Bil Bowman (drums, 1994-1996)

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.

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.