Photo by Heidi K. Beach
Pit er Pat
Issue #23
The Chicago trio is off to a rock-solid start with Shakey debut
By Charlotte Robinson
Published: March 1st, 2005 | 4:31pm
When asked to pick a place to meet for our interview, the three members of Chicago's Pit er Pat opted for fish and chips at the Duke of Perth, a comfy Scottish pub in the cheerfully un-rocknroll Lakeview neighborhood. The low-key venue was an appropriate place to spend a Sunday afternoon with the subdued but friendly trio of Fay Davis-Jeffers (keyboards, vocals), Rob Doran (bass, vocals), and Butchy Fuego (drums, vocals). Between bites of greasy food and swigs of beer, the conversation veered from the weird buzzing sound in the pub to Star Trek IV (in which, as Doran explained, the Enterprise crew comes to Earth to save the whales) to George W. Bush's cocaine use. When the forks went down and the tape recorder switched on, however, the talk turned to the band's music, which recalls jazz-influenced post-rock bands like Tortoise, but is infused with a sense of adventure and childlike whimsy largely absent from any "scene."
Pit er Pat started out a few years ago under the name Blackbirds as a backing band for a local singer-guitarist. When he left Chicago for New York, the remaining trio decided to carry on without him. "Initially, when we broke from doing that, we were a lot more experimental and playing a lot with form and electronics and stuff," Fuego said. Although the band eventually incorporated vocals into its sound, Davis-Jeffers' keyboard still plays a prominent role in the songs' melodies. "[A] thing that I think is kind of exciting about our band now is, not having a guitar player or anything, we're essentially a backing band still," Doran said. "It's basically like a rhythm section, because the piano is technically a percussion instrument."
Pit er Pat took its name from a logo in a painting by Jim Nutt, a Chicago artist who was part of the Hairy Who movement in the late1960s, and all three members of the band are artists as well as musicians. Art school is what initially lured Doran and Davis-Jeffers to Chicago. Davis-Jeffers is a visual artist, designer, photographer, and filmmaker; Doran is a visual artist and runs a design company called Wound Crust; and Fuego participates in many visual and sound projects and has released a solo album. Far from diverting their attention from Pit er Pat, these extracurricular pursuits feed the trio's creativity. As Fuego explained, "Diversity, to me personally, is a big part of what we're doing, as far as the overall sound and trying to keep the things that influence the band really diverse — that we're not limiting ourselves and painting ourselves into a corner musically."
Other than a few tour dates with Tortoise and 90 Day Men, Pit er Pat hasn't played outside the Windy City much, but non-Chicagoans can check out the Emergency EP (Overcoat) and will hear more this spring when Thrill Jockey drops the band's first full-length, Shakey, which was recorded in just six days. The Fleetwood Mac model of spending two years in the studio with a mountain of coke is not for Pit er Pat. "If you had that amount of time — you always wish you had more — you'd just keep rethinking and rethinking," Davis-Jeffers explained. "You've got to move on at some point." But, Doran admitted, "Stevie Nicks is pretty rad."
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