The Public Lives of Private Fights
In 1989, after seventeen months at 237 Steiner, Eddie and Mitchell moved out, leaving the city and their exceptionally noisy neighbors behind. But the echoes of Peter and Raymond’s arguments continued to follow them. Their tapes were circulated, consumed, and enjoyed by fans of obscure audio recordings and vocal eruptions. In 1992, they were contacted by the underground magazine Bananafish (Sausage 1993). Fans of the tapes, the editors interviewed Eddie and facilitated the release of a collection of Peter and Raymond’s “best” vocal performances on the underground recording label Ectoplasm. With the release of this “official” album, Peter and Raymond’s sonic assaults became known to a broader audience. People were fascinated by their relationship, turns of phrase, and vocal intonations. Selected parts of their recordings were played on the radio and eventually released as CDs. In addition to the recordings themselves, Peter and Raymond also inspired a stage play, a comic book, and at least one song (“Shut Up, Little Man!” by the Devo side project, The Wipeouters). There have also been several attempts to turn Peter and Raymond’s fights into a fiction film, but no cinematic adaptation ever came to fruition until the 2011 documentary (Bate 2011).
The popularity of the “Shut Up Little Man!” recordings is in part due to the technological affordances and cultural life of cassette tapes. As scholars such as Peter Manuel (1993), Annabelle Sreberny-Mohammadi and Ali Mohammadi (1994), and Andre Millard (2005) have theorized, audio cassettes have proven to be essential tools for creative expression and political mobilization. Cassettes are two-way by design, cheap to acquire, simple to use, easy to circulate, and, therefore, can be deployed outside of established mass media institutions and in ways that evade corporate and political control. Indeed, since their introduction, cassettes have been fundamental to the emergence of independent, local, and subaltern music industries, as well as serving as important communication tools for political revolutions. In the United States they were crucial to the emergence of hip-hop and other audio subcultures, providing an affordable and efficient means of producing, distributing, and consuming sound media outside of corporate industries (Millard 2005: 313–327). Although the “Shut Up Little Man!” tapes are relatively marginal within cassette culture, their existence, circulation, and subsequent popularity are a product of its history.
In particular, the “Shut Up Little Man!” tapes are part of a genre of audio media produced through a practice that Smith, following Goffman, has dubbed “bugging the backstage” (Goffman as cited in Smith 2008: 165). Smith focuses his analysis on sound media, such as Allen Funt’s Candid Microphone and the “Tube Bar” tapes, whose comedy lies in the provocation, surreptitious recording, and publication of people’s emotional outbursts. Both Funt’s radio program and the audio recordings of prank phone calls attempt to capture the private, “backstage” performances of their victims, seeking to provoke anger, exasperation, and a general “flooding out” of emotions.[7] Obviously, this practice is ethically troubling, if not fully exploitative. Goading strangers into uncontrolled and uninhibited explosions of rage and frustration and secretly recording them for one’s own and one’s audience’s amusement involves at least some degree of cruelty. In “bugging the backstage,” sound recorders and prank callers transform their victims’ angry outbursts and painful reactions into entertainment (Smith 2008: 165–241). This documentation of incidents of apparent suffering are made available to a public audience and read by knowing listeners as specimens of the comedic absurd.
Like Funt’s show and prank call recordings, Eddie and Mitchell’s “Shut Up, Little Man!” tapes were a form of “bugging the backstage,” presenting Peter and Raymond’s domestic screaming matches as humorous entertainment. Initially, their practice was relatively passive: Eddie and Mitchell witnessed, rather than provoked, Peter and Raymond’s screaming matches, while electing to bug their own backstage. As time went on, however, their practice evolved. No longer content with merely capturing fights when they occurred, Eddie and Mitchell began to actively intervene in Peter and Raymond’s lives. Abandoning their roles as “field recordists,” they began prank calling their neighbors, goading them into angry explosions in order to capture the entire exchange on tape. In their prank calls, Eddie and Mitchell regularly applied a practice of provocation similar to that of the callers analyzed by Smith. In one recording, Eddie pretends to be conducting a newspaper telephone survey on alcoholism, trying to get Raymond to tell him how much he drinks. And on several occasions, Mitchell calls and pretends to be “Ardell,” a character who claims to be an old friend of Tony’s.
In both telephone interactions, Eddie and Mitchell successfully provoke Raymond into “flooding out” in the form of a homophobic tirade by suggesting that he is repressing his own homosexual desires. Furthermore, the character of Ardell, with his fake Southern accent and “hillbilly” persona, follows a trend established by other prank callers to pose as members of different classes, races, or ethnicities, using this masquerade and the anonymity of the telephone to elicit reactions from their victims (Smith 2008: 200–201). These prank calls serve to exploit the malevolence and power implicit in all forms of “bugging the backstage.” They served as a means for Eddie and Mitchell to retaliate against Peter and Raymond, while also rendering them impotent. Through such acts of provocation, Eddie and Mitchell reemphasize the distance that they have already established through their social position and recording practice. They exploit the power they now wield over their neighbors, orchestrating a comedic telephonic performance of “flooding out” explicitly designed for their audiotapes. In this way, Eddie and Mitchell become producers of their own over-hearing, transforming their neighbors’ sonic explosions into humorous media and further affirming their separation from the unheimlich domesticity that continues to pour through their apartment walls.
The act of turning their private recordings into public albums, including the aesthetic qualities of their tracks, not only underscores Eddie and Mitchell’s distance from their former neighbors, but also instrumentalizes these neighbors as media commodities. While Eddie and Mitchell originally recorded their neighbors as a tactical response to the sonic situation in their own domestic space, the subsequent cultural life of “Shut Up Little Man!” mediates and remediates this initial confrontation. Peter and Raymond become sources of comedy and otherness that can be consumed and enjoyed by people without any connection to the initial situation. In the tapes, Peter, Raymond, and Tony’s words have been taken out of the context of their lives, extracted from their histories, and severed from their larger relationships. Their voices have been taken without their consent and edited together to produce commercial products, comedic albums offering iconic insults and witty one-liners. Through these productions, Eddie and Mitchell take the public on a mediated poverty tour, giving them access to a spectacle of the unheimlich and ostensibly encouraging them to laugh at the poor.
At first, these recordings were disseminated rather spontaneously. According to Eddie and Mitchell’s retelling, they had included some clips of Peter and Raymond on mixtapes given to friends who, in turn, shared them with others, and they eventually came to the attention of an independent record label. It was not until almost five years after Eddie and Mitchell left Steiner Street that the first full “Shut Up Little Man!” album was released. This album, billed as a “best of,” was followed by the “complete recordings,” a seven-disc set, released independently by Eddie in 2008 – all of which are available for purchase through Eddie’s website and can be streamed digitally on Spotify, Amazon, or Apple music. The artists listed on these albums are “Peter and Raymond,” but the recordings clearly belong to Eddie and Mitchell. They are the ones who recorded the fights, edited the tracks, and benefit financially from their popularity. This is where the ethical issues of “Shut Up Little Man!” most clearly show up as exploitation. Eddie and Mitchell are no longer scared neighbors recording out of fear but conscious media producers far from the Haight who package, sell, and distribute their recordings. It is Eddie and Mitchell who own the copyright, trademark Peter’s catchphrase, appear in Matthew Bate’s documentary, and profit from their former neighbors’ stolen voices – exploiting them for (some) financial gain and subcultural capital.
The “best of” album, which was the only recording in circulation for fifteen years, is not simply a presentation of Eddie and Mitchell’s initial recordings. It is a curated and edited remediation of Peter and Raymond’s “best” performances. And as such, it does much to alter and decontextualize the sonic traces of Peter, Raymond, and Tony (Peter and Raymond 1993). On this album – consisting of thirty-six tracks that range in length from twenty-six seconds to six and a half minutes – Peter, Raymond, and Tony’s voices are edited into short, digestible clips, often punctuated by a particularly salient insult, iconic line, or moment of drunken display. Indeed, the length of the tracks does much to ensure their comedic quality. By reducing an argument or fight to a short series of exchanges, one loses the tragic monotony present in the complete recordings. Instead of an ongoing, painful, sad, and sometimes boring drama of domestic dysfunction – the overarching effect, I believe, of the complete recordings, whose tracks can last up to twenty minutes – the “best of” edits and organizes Peter and Raymond’s fights into a cult-spectacle of the domestic grotesque. Filtered through Eddie and Mitchell, the “Shut Up Little Man!” tapes mediate eavesdropping into entertainment. As sonic commodities and audio media texts, they circulate outside the spatial conditions of 237 Steiner to be consumed by a group of fans who delight in their comedic (re)presentation of the unheimlich.
The desire to witness the unheimlich spectacle of Peter and Raymond is evident, not only in the initial popularity of the tapes but also in their repeated adaptation and revision. The nuances of Peter and Raymond’s relationship were scripted in a stage play and optioned for a fiction film. Their voices were incorporated into music compositions, and their dialogues inspired comic strips. When you search for the recordings on YouTube, you can find short cinematic adaptations of the “best of” clips, brought to life by puppets. Indeed, the 2011 documentary treats “Shut Up Little Man!” as an early example of analogue virality, while serving to further increase Peter and Raymond’s popularity, expanding their voices beyond their position as cult object to that of a more mainstream phenomenon. There is an undeniable fascination with Peter and Raymond, their strange dynamics and distinct vocal performances, a fascination that has lingered for decades and fostered a multitude of creative practices. Many people are still drawn to Eddie and Mitchell’s old apartment and the pleasure of eavesdropping on Peter and Raymond’s unheimlich domesticity.
But the pleasure fans experience through the “Shut Up Little Man!” recordings does not lie exclusively in Peter and Raymond’s unfamiliarity. Just as the unheimlich relies on its distortion of the familiar, comforting, and homelike for the feelings of horror and discomfort it produces, the “Shut Up Little Man!” tapes mobilize, for their comedic effects, a kind of recognition of or identification with domestic disputes of its protagonists. Peter and Raymond are othered in the recordings, their domestic life presented as strange and abject. And yet, as with so many instances of othering, to some extent Peter and Raymond are fetishized. Their domestic disputes are comedy, their biting insults and vocal patterns turned into irresistible catch phrases.
There is a desire among fans to see themselves in Peter and Raymond, to recognize themselves in their (othered) world. When listening to the “Shut Up Little Man!” tapes, one cannot help but notice that Peter and Raymond’s seemingly endless conflicts arise from catalysts that are not completely unfamiliar. They fight about cooking dinner, going to Walgreens, cleaning the bathroom, personal hygiene, and what to watch on television, arguments not completely foreign to anyone who has cohabited with another person. Thus, the “Shut Up Little Man!” recordings engage with seemingly universal domestic conflicts. They elicit identification and perhaps even entice listeners (myself included) to want to employ Peter’s most iconic insults and yell “shut up little man!” in a moment of exacerbation. The recordings, then, turn out to be unheimlich comedy not merely because they are strange but because they take familiar tensions to their extremes, transforming everyday conflicts into dramatic exhibitions of dysfunction and violence.
This sense of solidarity with Peter and Raymond is explicitly mobilized through the liner notes of the “Shut Up Little Man!” recordings and the rhetoric on Eddie’s website. In these writings, their fans are affectionately referred to using Peter and Raymond’s choice insults and behaviors. They are “pieces of shit,” “dirty little men and women, alcoholic lunatic fringe, and feverish eaters of corned beef hash,” people assumed – in a join-the-club sort of way – to be just slightly dysfunctional and deranged, given their appreciation for these recordings (Sausage 2008). Although this solidarity is more performative than anything else, it is legible throughout the “Shut Up Little Man!” fandom. In the “Hatemail” page on Eddie’s website, fans regularly adopt Peter and Raymond’s language. They express their admiration for the tapes with a tirade of insults and self-deprecating stories that are a way of identifying with Peter and Raymond. The pleasure of listening to others, the recognition of one’s own similarity to both Eddie and Mitchell and Peter and Raymond, and the lingering sense that one’s own home might suddenly become unhomely pervade the experience of listening to the “Shut Up Little Man!” recordings. It is difficult to listen to the sounds of someone else’s home as they listen to their neighbors without also thinking about one’s own domestic soundscape and the inescapable reality of its sonic permeability.