Epilogue
In 1993, Eddie and Mitchell saw Peter for the last time. After receiving some modest royalties from the “Shut Up Little Man!” recordings, they sought him out at his new tenement. During this meeting, which was recorded and then transcribed on Eddie’s website, Eddie and Mitchell attempt to give Peter a portion of their royalty earnings (Sausage “Peter ‘Lady’ Haskett, Interview”). Throughout their interactions, Peter seems perplexed. He is confused about the tapes, denies that he and Raymond ever fought, and refuses to take their money. Eddie and Mitchell – who appear uncomfortable and apologetic, but at the same time unable to refrain from reveling in the humor of the situation (regularly putting on a “Peter voice”) – repeatedly try to get him to understand the situation and insist that they never meant to take advantage of him. Here, their own ethical discomfort with the “Shut Up Little Man!” phenomenon becomes apparent, but the situation ultimately remains unresolved. The interview, which comes across as mostly awkward and sad, concludes with Eddie and Mitchell leaving Peter at the bar without accepting their money. Three years later Peter passed away, seemingly oblivious to the strange kind of fame his vocal performances had obtained and certainly without receiving any direct financial benefit from them.
The “Shut Up Little Man!” recordings offer a compelling case for exploring the relationship between home and the auditory. They document a complex and multilayered domestic sonic encounter in which the boundaries between public and private space are blurred. The recordings mediate the eavesdropping practice of two young, middle-class men confronting the poverty and unheimlich domestic dysfunction of their next-door neighbors. Here, physical proximity does not produce intimacy but provides instead a sonic and spatial site for emphasizing and underscoring difference. As Eddie and Mitchell “get to know” Peter and Raymond, they transform their vocal expressions and sonic lives into comedic performances, humorous aesthetic curiosities to be consumed by a growing audience of fans. In so doing, they emphasize their own fundamental difference from those they record by offering a kind of poverty tour to their listeners. The initial murky ethics of these sonic encounters become even more questionable. Removed from the time and place of their creation, the painful and tragic realities of Peter and Raymond’s lives have, without their consent, been edited and arranged into albums for purchase.
This undeniable othering, built on social distance and the practice of recording, cannot help but confront glimmers of closeness. For both the creators of the audiotapes and their fans, there are moments of identification and familiarity. The recordings represent conditions of home and auditory that are not unrecognizable. They point to the fundamental permeability of one’s domestic sphere – particularly when that sphere is located in an urban apartment. Even as bourgeois ideologies of privacy and sanctuary espouse the superiority of quiet, the lived reality of the home so often refuses this fantasy. Sounds whose objects and bodies originate outside our domestic spaces are regularly heard within them, especially when we live in densely populated places and multi-unit dwellings. Our relationship to these sounds is complicated. How we deal with them, questions of ownership and response, publicity and privacy, proximity and distance, are all bound up in our confrontations with such sonic traces. Moreover, there is something uncannily familiar in Peter and Raymond’s vitriol, rage, and despair. Though taken to a strange and often tragic extreme, one cannot help but notice the familiarity of the catalysts of many of their conflicts, nor can one avoid acknowledging the nearly universal experience of fighting with the person with whom one shares a home.
For fans of “Shut Up Little Man!,” Peter and Raymond’s vocal performances are not funny only because of their strangeness but also because of their familiarity. Listening to Peter and Raymond, we sense that we are encountering something both strange and familiar, an expression of the unheimlich that might exist just beneath the surface of our own domestic lives. And yet, despite this affection for and identification with these two men (albeit an affection and identification permeated with irony), they remain strangers, accessible only as fragments stolen through apartment walls and remediated by others.
As I write this conclusion during the coronavirus pandemic, my life, like that of so many of us around the world, has been confined in large part to my home. Like me, most of my neighbors are also stuck in their domestic spaces, and their sonic traces pervade my home incessantly. I can hear music from my bathroom and footsteps from my desk. I can hear the constant stream of expletives from the video-gaming teenager next door. I can hear the cries, shrieks, and laughter of the toddlers across the hall, who have claimed this space as their personal playground. I can hear snippets of conversation and indices of movements, gleaning a certain knowledge of my neighbors’ routines – and the world outside my apartment – during this exceptional period of home confinement. The soundscape of my home is full of the sonic traces of others. I have been annoyed and intrigued by what I hear. I have put on headphones, slept with earplugs, strained to listen, and occasionally yelled through my own walls. And I have grown increasingly aware of the sounds I might be generating. I wonder if my neighbors have noticed my tendency to blast the Talking Heads while I make dinner or my cat’s habit of meowing in the middle of the night. As I engage in my own struggle to control my domestic soundscape, I am reminded of 237 Steiner Street and the illusory nature of auditory privacy. I wonder if the sounds of my home might be a source of frustration or amusement to my own neighbors. I remind myself that although physical proximity does not mean intimacy, our private spheres are in fact not really that private; at home, the auditory reaches out and reaches in, bringing us into sometimes uncomfortable confrontations with the sounds and lives of our neighbors.