Sometimes the punk rocker on my right shoulder supersedes the true hippie on my left shoulder and I come up with some frightfully clever but mostly transgressive idea to foist upon the innocent and unsuspecting. This year it’s the Negative thirteen days of XMAS. I thought I would post some really weird videos every day until Christmas and then spin around and start posting lovely, positive, spiritual videos for the Twelve Days of Christmas.
After listening to this video, I decided I don’t want to do that, the weird ones anyway.
Almost thirty-four years ago, I was working at a small printing company in Emeryville, CA, a strange little town tucked in between Oakland and Berkeley right where the Bay Bridge hits the east shore of the bay. One afternoon, i was in the front all by myself and this strange hipster dude came in. He wanted to print five sets of cassette case inserts. Each featured a drawing of a couple drunks in the style of Ralph Steadman, who illustrated “Fear & Loathing In Las Vegas.” The headline was “Ray and Pete, Vol. I” and a subhead “Gay Alcoholics.”
I was in my first year of sobriety (in fact, today, Sunday the 16th of December, is the 35th anniversary of the last time I ever drank alcohol) and these weird covers fascinated me. I asked the guy a bunch of questions and was just blown away by the absurdity of the whole thing (read the story—it’s more detailed than what he told me at the time). He was the first guy to try to monetize the recordings. Naturally i bought all five cassettes and used to listen to them over and over. I was an early Ray and Pete cultist, I suppose.
After a while, one burns out on their endless drunken arguments and I haven’t listed to any recordings in at least ten years. I lost the cassettes in one of my many subsequent moves since those days.
I asked Google Gemini to summarize the Ray and Pete story … see below. I listen to this excerpt and it brought back memories.
Enjoy and we will have more traditional holiday fare going forward.
The story of Pete and Ray and the Shut Up, Little Man! recordings is a strange and complex tale of overheard arguments that accidentally became an underground pop-culture phenomenon.
The Subjects: Peter Haskett and Raymond Huffman
Pete (Peter J. Haskett) and Ray (Raymond Huffman) were two middle-aged, alcoholic men living together in a low-rent apartment in San Francisco’s Lower Haight district in the late 1980s.
They were an unlikely and highly volatile pair: Peter was an openly gay man, and Ray was a raging homophobe, yet they were also described by some as being extremely close friends despite their constant, vitriolic fights.
Their relationship was defined by near-constant, vodka-fueled arguments, shouting, and verbal abuse—often loud enough to be clearly heard through their apartment’s thin walls.
The Recordings: “Shut Up, Little Man!”
In 1987, two young roommates, Eddie Lee Sausage and Mitchell D. (Mitch Deprey), moved into the adjacent apartment in the bright pink building (which they nicknamed the “Pepto-Bismol Palace”).
Tormented by the endless noise and fearing for their safety after one of them received a death threat from Ray, Eddie and Mitchell began to secretly record the arguments.
They used a microphone taped to a lampstand and placed near Ray and Peter’s window to capture the “audio goldmine” of their neighbors’ drunken battles.
The recordings were compiled and named “Shut Up, Little Man!” after one of Peter’s frequent barbs directed at Ray.
The Phenomenon
Eddie and Mitchell began sharing the tapes with friends, who in turn made copies and passed them on. In the pre-internet age of the early 1990s, the recordings became a “viral” sensation on the underground cassette tape trading circuit.
The tapes gained a cult following due to the absurd, surreal, and often darkly comedic nature of Peter and Ray’s dialogue.
The recordings inspired comic books (like those by Daniel Clowes), theatrical productions, films (like the 2011 documentary Shut Up Little Man! – An Audio Misadventure), and were sampled by various musicians and featured on programs like This American Life.
The Aftermath and Ethical Questions
The recordings became a huge part of pop culture, yet Peter and Ray were largely unaware of their fame.
Raymond Huffman died in 1992, and Peter Haskett died in 1996, both due to complications from alcoholism.
The story is not without controversy, as the exploitation of two genuinely troubled, alcoholic men for entertainment and profit has been heavily debated. The documentary explores the ethical questions surrounding audio vérité and voyeurism.
It’s a story that blurs the line between art, documentation, comedy, and exploitation, showing how a private, destructive relationship was inadvertently broadcast to the world, becoming an early example of reality culture.
Here’s an excerpt from Vol. 2
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