Patrice Pike

When Patrice Pike takes the stage, she does so with the effect of an atom bomb. She levels all that is around her and she leaves you just a little more jaded than you were when you entered the club. When I last saw her nearly two years ago at Off Broadway, she came across as Pippi Longstocking (maybe it was the pigtails) but with a glee and energy that bordered on manic. Her infectious smile and way of connecting with the audience seemed ingrained and almost super-human. And she has pipes. Prior to the show, I read several articles about her and was struck by the need for writers to compare her to iconic female divas: “She’s Tina Turner, Bessie Smith, Janis Joplin and Robert Plant all rolled up into a tiny but explosive package,” raved Rollingstone.com, while Billboard tapped Pike as “one of the finest up and coming contemporary rock singers in America.” Call me cynical, but that has the same effect as a pizza place billing itself as “NY style”—hey, I’ll be the judge of that. After three songs, I started adding to the list: Rickie Lee Jones, Thin Lizzy, Aretha Franklin, Ella Fitzgerald, Liz Phair… Pike has an amazing voice. It is strong, it can snarl and coo, and it seems to go on without a break—always with a smile, always with enthusiasm. She kicks ass.

Pike was the lead singer, rhythm guitarist, and percussionist for the Austin, Texas–based national recording act Sister 7. The band recorded several increasingly successful albums but decided to break up after 2000’s Wrestling Over Tiny Matters (and the departure from Arista of chief fan Clive Davis). Pike’s first solo effort, Fencing Under Fire, was released on her own Zainwayne Records (which she owns with guitarist Wayne Sutton). Through an impressive amount of self-promotion, touring, and sheer willpower, the album charted in the top ten, putting Fencing in the very rare company of artists like Dar Williams and Nick Cave.

Pike has spent the last year touring (including showcasing at the Austin City Limits Music Festival in her hometown), and on January 16 she brings her immeasurable talents to Off Broadway. She is a big voice that deserves to be heard. Opening for Pike is our own personal big voice (who also deserves to be heard): Celia and her Big Rock Band.
- BY JIM DUNN Playback St. Louis

There is no record of Patrice Pike having to lift up a boiling cauldron of water and hot coals with her forearms, branding the symbol of an ancient musical order on her wrists as she earned her chops. Other than that, Pike's path to music pretty much resembled the training of a Shaolin monk: From birth she was surrounded by talent and people fostering her skills. From being raised in smoky Dallas bars by her musician stepfather to matriculating at the Booker T. Washington High School for the Performing and Visual Arts, where she had Erykah Badu as a classmate and a one-on-one lesson with Wynton Marsalis, Pike was as well trained as any bald-headed David Carradine look-alike. You can hear it in her voice. It isn't the over-trained perfection of a vibrato-obsessed diva, but the supple-yet-strong twang of a country gal who has mastered her instrument. When she barks, when she pleads, when she seduces, it is with intent, and you feel what she wants you to feel. Pike is a veteran, having traveled with the famed Austin jam band Sister Seven, whose members eventually focused and polished themselves out of t he noodling genre and into respectability -- and then of course broke up just as they were hitting their artistic peak.

Pike is still up there on the peak, crafting solid country rock and ballads for her own label, ZainWayne Records (founded with former Sister Seven member and longtime collaborator Wayne Sutton), and polishing and pumicing that stressed and gorgeous voice. She's not a grasshopper anymore.
- BY JORDAN HARPER Riverfront Times

It's our pleasure to invite you to spend an intimate evening with Austin singer/songwriter PATRICE PIKE. After more than a decade as the powerhouse vocalist and rhythm guitarist for the highly successful jam band Sister Seven, she is now charting new and exciting territory as a solo artist. She lends her simmering, streetwise voice to original songs that run the gamut from acoustic folk to alt-country to borderline funk. These solo shows (she'll have a percussionist, bass player, and lead guitar player in tow) showcase a dynamic performer and gifted songwriter at her most soulful and free.

Pike has performed at the H.O.R.D.E. Festival, Lilith Fair, and High Sierra, and either opened for or performed with the likes of the Dave Matthews Band, Sheryl Crow, Blues Traveler and the Allman Brothers, among many others. And as you might have guessed, she's a committed social and environmental activist. (Check out the article from the current issue of the Harbinger below.)

From the Editor's Note in the current issue of The Harbinger-

I was first introduced to the music of Patrice Pike by our good friend Megan Slankard—the Tracy folk phenom and Brushwood’s favorite little sister—who was opening for one of Patrice’s shows last summer in the valley. Patrice and her band, the Black Box Rebellion, played a blistering set, but I was just as struck by her demeanor and her stage presence, which is at once commanding and imminently accessible—both charismatic and endearing. There was a transparency and an authenticity about her that was palpable, that cannot be faked. Above all else, Patrice Pike knows how to connect with an audience.

That powerful, throaty wail simply has no business coming out of that diminutive body. To make sure I wasn’t hearing things, I took my wife Michelle to see her up at Lake Tahoe two nights later, and I got another little glimpse into the kind of human Patrice is. The opener for this particular show, a local singer/songwriter, was not faring well. About three songs into her set, the crowd was still congregated in the back of the room near the bar, completely disinterested, waiting for the main event. The poor gal then made the mistake of timidly pleading with the audience to come closer to the stage, a request that was roundly ignored. Suddenly Patrice came bounding out from backstage and plopped down cross-legged on the floor a few feet in front of the startled performer, and instantly others in the crowd joined her at the front. What was threatening to become an extremely embarrassing situation for this young aspiring musician ended happily. Patrice didn’t have to do that, and the fact that she did made as much of an impression on me, again, as her music, which is to say considerable. The thought that entered my mind? This woman was made for Brushwood!

I contacted her people, and a couple of months went by with no response. The receptionist at the agency alluded to the fact that Patrice was having a difficult summer, although I had no idea what was happening behind the scenes. But before we get to that, here’s the short version of the demise of Sister Seven, the highly successful jam band she fronted throughout the ’90s.

Sister Seven had a good long run, making two records for Arista (the band’s third label), playing the high profile festivals like H.O.R.D.E. and the Lilith Fair, and opening for the likes of the Dave Matthews Band, Sheryl Crow, Blues Traveler, and the Allman Brothers. They even charted a couple of Billboard hits. Rolling Stone said this of Patrice: “She’s Tina Turner, Bessie Smith, Janis Joplin, and Robert Plant all rolled up into a tiny but explosive package.”

In early 2000, she mailed off the demos for Sister Seven’s new record, “Wrestling Over Tiny Matters,” to Arista’s Clive Davis, the label’s legendary founder. Davis, who was coming off the stupendous success of Carlos Santana’s megaplatinum “Supernatural”, was blown away. Davis flew Patrice to New York for a meeting, told her “Tiny Matters” would be the band’s breakthrough album, that he would see to it personally. Unfortunately, the 66 year-old Davis was in the process of being unceremoniously shoved out the door by Arista’s parent company, BMG. In a story far too common in the music industry, Sister Seven found itself on the outs with the new management team, and “Tiny Matters” now collects dust in Patrice’s garage—a tremendous album few will ever hear. After almost a decade, emotionally drained and without the collective desire to pursue a fourth record deal, Sister Seven disbanded.

Even as the band was flaming out, Patrice was in the process of being reenergized as a songwriter. Her new material was taking a more narrative direction. She formed another band, the Black Box Rebellion, with Sister Seven lead guitarist Wayne Sutton. (“Black Box” is a reference to the book A Brief History of Everything by Ken Wilber.)

Fast forward to last summer’s tour in support of the Black Box Rebellion’s - Pride S. Wright

At some point between the last miserable day job and the first national tour, countless musicians have either chosen, or been forced, to take a new direction. Sometimes it's a crafty decision that pays off; sometimes you simply screw up and -- poof -- you're in the bargain bin. Sometimes it's just a matter of circumstance.
For Patrice Pike-Zain, a single event far beyond her control led to the breakup of her band, weeks of deep thinking while knocking back gallons of slippery elm tea, the adding of an appendix to her last name and, finally, the commencement of a rebellious trip down a new fast lane.

Vigorously piloting her five-speed Miata down Washington Avenue before a recent gig at the Satellite Lounge, Pike-Zain talks about shedding baggage. The 30-year-old former Sister Seven lead vocalist is recounting a visit to a friend's house in the woods near Austin, where she swam and read and cooked catfish. She also spontaneously dug a hole one night under the trees and buried several items from her backpack before pouring rose water over the shallow grave. She swears she was completely sober.

Among the items deep-sixed that night in late April were a cell-phone earpiece and a plane ticket -- tokens of flying four days a week for Sister Seven gigs and the tyranny of modern communications. Also entombed was a metal emblem bearing the likeness of an angel, representing the notion of placing faith in objects rather than oneself. Then she planted a copy of Fencing Under Fire, the first album of her new band, Patrice Pike and the Blackbox Rebellion. Perhaps she hoped the project would take root and blossom.

How big a deal was this ritual to Pike-Zain? Consider that the next night, she was late to a gig for the first time in ten years.

"I was in this strange mood, I guess, but I really was able get a handle on what space I was in at various times over the last couple of years," she says. "There were a lot of things going on before Sister Seven broke up. I was connected to so many people that it burned me out and was challenging my free will. It's one of those things where you could just say 'Fuck it' and not do it anymore because you're trapped."

Some musicians would sacrifice a delicate body part or two to be "trapped" like Pike was in early 2000. S7 was making a decent living with steady touring and had tight connections with some of the biggest names in the industry. After Pike mailed some demos for a new record to Arista Records founder Clive Davis, she was summoned to appear before the man himself. Davis, then basking in the megaplatinum glow of Carlos Santana's Supernatural, told her that he thought the album, Wrestling over Tiny Matters, was killer. With elements of heavy metal, catchy heartland hooks, hair-raising riffs by underrated guitarist Wayne Sutton and a Garbage-inspired lead-off track that had alt-rock radio hit written all over it, Tiny Matters, Davis told her, would be the one. He would see to it personally.

But Arista's parent company, BMG, had other plans, and thus Tiny Matters is the best damn album some folks will never hear. Three months after her meeting with Davis, the mogul was toppled. In spite of his recent success, the bigwigs at BMG thought the 66-year-old Davis was too old to run a label, and they chose to replace him with Antonio "L.A." Reid. (In one of those delicious ironies the music business delivers up so regularly, Arista's schmaltzy 25th-anniversary tribute to Davis aired on NBC two weeks after his shit-canning.)

Tiny Matters was left championless and in limbo; the band was now some fired guy's unfinished business. By December 2000 the band members knew it was over with Arista, and five months later they knew the band itself was "done."

Today, Pike wrestles with crates of Tiny Matters stacked in her garage. (Perhaps a front-end loader might have helped her really finish off that rite in the woods.) With an insistent wave of her hand, she says she doesn't want to discuss that album, thank you very much.

She does want to talk about the present and the future. Instead of calling it quits after the Arista fiasco, Pike and Sutton -- musical partners since 1986 -- got busy. They still had piles of unreleased S7 demos, and they decided that they would continue making music with a new band and their own label. Pike says today that she is transformed, free of the self-imposed confines of a band that had become a prison. But it seems that she kept a souvenir from Sister Seven: The new appendage to her last name, Zain, just happens to translate to "seven" in Aramaic, the extinct language that Jesus spoke.

At the Satellite later that night, it's evident that Pike likes the new space she's carved out for herself, but space is at a premium in front of the stage. In accord with Pike's bisexual preference, a group of men admire her from stage right and a group of lesbian women, their arms wrapped around each other, stand transfixed at stage left. When - BY GREG BARR Houston Press

First of all, it's always assumed that I am gay. I am bisexual. I have always had wonderful, very satisfying relationships with men. But when I started dating a woman, I discovered that nobody wants you if you're bisexual."

There. Patrice Pike has just addressed the million-dollar question without batting a mascara-free lash. That she speaks so candidly is testament to her own strength of character. To any fan of Little Sister, Sister 7, or her newest band Black Box Rebellion, her candor is no surprise. Almost 32, Patrice Pike is a very confident woman.

"No one ever asked me if I was gay until a Chicago Tribune journalist did. Although I'm a really open person, it was shocking because no one ever asked. People just assumed and it wasn't important to me to clear it up. But when the journalist, who was lesbian, asked me, I was feeling pressured, just because it was a big paper. I was really excited about the interview and then out of the blue she asked me about my sexuality.

"It was one of those moments where I could give the easy answer and bond with her. I was dating a woman at the time and getting a lot of support from the gay community. But it was important to me at that moment to be clear and accurate about where I'm coming from.

"So I told her I was bisexual, and I could tell she was disappointed. It took some of the wind out of her sails, but I was happy. I don't want people to support me based on an image that's not real. For me, it's about the truth."

The truth. That's the phrase that keeps cropping up throughout the life of Patrice Pike. Her mother recognized it when she enrolled her 15-year-old daughter in Dallas' Booker T. Washington High School for Performing and Visual Arts. Visiting speaker Wynton Marsalis recognized it when he told the aspiring singer, "It's really just about being soulful, Patrice. Just do what you love." Her fans have always recognized it in her music. And it's been the preeminent characteristic of Pike's journey as a musician. The truth, as they say, is out there.

Are You Ready for the Country

During the month of May, Tuesday at the Saxon Pub belonged to Patrice Pike, much as Thursdays are traditionally Rusty Wier's, a definite contrast in age, gender, and genre. Performers such as Pike and Bob Schneider represent the decidedly younger singer-songwriters supported by the club, and Pike's shows routinely pulled good audience numbers for her 8pm time slot. It's also the opportunity to hear Pike's vocals, soaring from a sensual growl and scat singing to powerhouse rock.
Solo shows are also Pike's way of keeping herself in tune, so to speak. She likes coming off the road and expressing herself there. "I don't have three people behind me waiting to play the next song," she explains. "I can talk about where the song came from, an experience I had during the day. There's no A&R guy in the audience, and I can tell stories if I want to."

That makes Wayne Sutton, her partner in groove, laugh. "She knows I hate it when she talks between songs." He should know: The two have been musical partners for 12 years.

Sutton and his guitar are often part of those solo shows, as is BBR percussionist John Bush. By appearances, it's Black Box Rebellion unplugged, without bassist Danny Beltran and drummer Mike Hale, but spiritually it's Pike at her most soulful and free. Sutton notes that she does play by herself, "but I think it makes her more comfortable when I play with her."

Sutton grew up in the Metroplex suburb of Plano and learned to play saxophone in the school marching band before taking up guitar. While playing a chance gig at a street festival in Dallas in the late Eighties, he met another Metroplex teenager also singing in a band. Her name was Patrice Pike.

"I was about 17 and she was about 16. We kept in touch when I moved here to Austin; she'd come stay with me for South by Southwest. When I moved back to Plano, we started writing together. The two of us played for a couple months and decided we wanted to start a band. In '91, we formed Little Sister."

But 1991 and Little Sister were still a long way from the young girl Sutton met. Pike came from a musically inclined family, who gave her a blue ukulele at age 2. With a grin, she recalls being in the country and singing heart-wrenching blues "about how the cows can't cross the road because of all the cars." Pike also recalls witnessing the nightlife firsthand, well before she lost her baby teeth.

"My stepfather was a guitarist in Dallas," recounts the singer. "A couple of weeks ago we played a club in Fort Worth that used to be the Hop. It was the first bar I went to. I was three. They served Italian food, pizza, salads, and they had rock bands. Nitzinger, Bugs Henderson . . . I'd have my dinner, stay up to a point, and then I was supposed to go back in the dressing room and go to sleep. They'd carry me out at the end of the night, put me in the Volkswagen bug, and we'd go home."

- BY MARGARET MOSER Austin Chronicle

Patrice Pike insists that her new career as a solo artist has been going well since the breakup of her former band, the Austin-based Sister 7. That group made it to the H.O.R.D.E. music tour and opened for acts including Sheryl Crow, Dave Matthews, Blues Traveler and the Allman Brothers.

Touring is a bit different as an independent musician though, Pike says. It's a generally unprofitable venture that includes long stretches of being away from home with very little money, with the hope of finding new fans the only motivator.

This summer's tour, in support of Pike's new album "Fencing Under Fire," was particularly difficult.

After the band's trailer was broken into and all its equipment stolen in Austin, Pike's purse was stolen at a club in Dallas. Two days later, the band's tour bus caught on fire while driving though Chicago.

"A train that was going by the highway actually stopped to help us," Pike said. "The engineer jumped out and ran down the hill with a fire extinguisher and, I'm not kidding, said 'I couldn't help but notice you guys were on fire.'"

"Fortunately, everyone's consensus is that bad things happen in threes, so maybe it's over now."

Things are better now that the band is home in Austin, on a sabbatical while guitarist Wayne Sutton and his wife are expecting the arrival of a new baby boy. They're just touring locally at the moment, driving down to Corpus Christi for a gig tonight at the Executive Surf Club.

"This is the time for us to be at home and nearby, where we have the most support and can make money and not spend it, recover from touring expenses," Pike said.

Pike says she still retains a fanbase from her Sister 7 days, though it's a different crowd than those who were attracted to the band by their one hit single on alternative radio. The Black Box Rebellion, Pike's new band, has also allowed the singer to work differently than she did with Sister 7.

"A lot of the Sister 7 stuff I wrote was more abstract lyrically - not anything that was so intense and complex that no one could figure it out - but now my songs are more narratives. Being complex and wordy doesn't really serve the purpose of communicating," Pike said. - By Brendan Walsh