Graded on a Curve:
Lou Reed,
Street Hassle

Street Hassle is a hassle indeed—this 1978 part live, part studio LP is a hot mess, and after listening to it for days, I still can’t tell you whether it’s a good album or not. It’s certainly an interesting album, and Lou sounds committed to doing whatever it is he’s doing, and in all I find myself drawn to it despite the fact that I’ve booked enough reservations about it to fill a commercial airliner headed for Perth, Western Australia, which is as far from “street poet” Lou’s muse, New York City, as you can get on this planet.

And I’m not alone. Critical opinions of Street Hassle are wildly divergent, with some calling it brilliant (“the best solo album Lou Reed has ever done” said Rolling Stone’s Tom Carson) and others calling it, well, let’s just say it was Tim Lott of the Record Mirror’s opinion that “Lou Reed has been a musical corpse for years now. Street Hassle is a creative nadir.” Me, I can only say that the fact that I can’t stop listening to it is proof that there’s something there—Lou Reed put out a whole slew of albums I’ve only listened to once, because listening to them twice would have made me a masochist.

Street Hassle is a true conundrum and act of polymorphous perversity—on the live tracks (although it’s hard to tell some are live because the crowd noise has been eliminated, and mucho overdubbing has been done) he does irreparable harm to one old Velvet Underground chestnut, does a bizarre but amusing riff on another one, tosses off some half-baked ditties (one of which I swear is a Bad Company ripoff), tosses in a joke of a song about how he wants to be black because then he’d be able to “shoot twenty feet of jism,” and centers the mess around one of the most brilliant and complex songs he would ever write as a solo artist.

The album sounds muddy. Most of the performances, which feature a touring band none of whose members I’m betting you’ve ever heard of, sound raw, murky, and makeshift, which may be one of the reasons I can’t stop listening to it—it’s Lou’s rawest effort since the Velvet Underground’s White Light/White Heat. It’s pretty obvious punk’s godfather had been absorbing lots of punk music, because this is as unpolished a solo record as Lou would ever make, unless you count 1975’s Metal Machine Music (which doesn’t have any instruments, vocals, or songs for that matter on it) or Street Hassle’s 1978 sequel Live: Take No Prisoners, the legendary talkathon of a comedy record on which Lou can’t decide whether he wants to be Don Rickles or Lenny Bruce.

Reed himself told an interviewer, “Street Hassle is the best album I’ve done,” something he’d said about previous albums and would go on to say about albums to come—he was never the best judge of his own work. He also called it “enormously commercial,” which simply proves my point—the album peaked at Number 89 on the Billboard charts and included nothing remotely resembling a hit single, although the title track (which clocks in at almost 11 minutes) was released and, no surprise here, failed to chart.

Lou himself explained his lack of radio success in typically colorful terms, telling an interviewer that the people who decide what’s going to be played on the radio “don’t want their kid ever to know he can snort coke or get a blow job at school or fuck his sister up the ass.” Damned radio programmers—I spent my entire adolescence not knowing I could fuck my sister up the ass!

Reed opens the album with “Gimmie Some Good Times,” which opens with the strains of “Sweet Jane” and someone (touring guitarist Jeffrey Ross, I think) saying “Hey, if that ain’t the rock ‘n’ roll animal himself, what you doing bro?” to which Lou replies “Standing on the corner” at which point Ross says, “Well, I can see that, what you got in your hand?” to which Lou replies “Suitcase in in my hand” before saying “Fucking faggot Johnson,” which I don’t remember hearing in “Sweet Jane.” Then the song morphs into a loose riff with Lou singing in unison with Ross. The basic message:

“Oh, gimmie, gimmie, gimmie some good times
Oh, Gimmie, gimmie, gimmie some pain
Don’t you know that most things look ugly
To me, they always look the same.”

This is not a good time song, just as this is anything but a good time album, as “Dirt” proves beyond a reasonable doubt. It’s basically one hug diss, directed, most agree, at Reed’s former manager Dennis Katz. The song rumbles along, Ross cranking it out on guitar while Michael Suchorsky pounds the drums. When Reed isn’t calling Katz (let’s assume it’s Katz) “cheap, cheap, cheap, cheap, uptown dirt,” he’s saying (about people like Katz)“They’d eat shit and say it tasted good/If there was some money in it for ’em” which is good but not nearly as good as what record label Jerry Wexler once said about fellow label executive David Geffen, to wit, “You’d jump into a pool of pus to come up with a nickel between your teeth!” Turns out mean-spirited Lou had nothing on your average aggrieved record label executive type.

Reed does a grave disservice to the hoary old Velvet Underground number (which never made it onto a studio album) “Real Good Time Together,” dispensing with its perky good-time vibe in favor of a kind of midtempo staccato drone, with Lou doing the robot with his vocals. It’s all echo and reverberation and anything but a good time, which was maybe the point. Later, the female backing vocalists come in sounding a lot like chipmunks, and only at the end, when Ross cranks up his guitar like a chainsaw and lets rip, and Marty Fogel cuts loose on saxophone, does the song build to a heavy metal thunder that should have been there from the beginning.

The jazzy and riff-based “I Wanna Be Black” is an audacious parody song that’s offensive and Lou knows it, playing as he does with the coarsest of stereotypes; black guys are pimps with cocks who “fuck up Jews” and Lou wants in because he doesn’t “wanna be a fucked up, middle class/College student anymore.” He tosses in the cute couplet “I wanna be like Martin Luther King/And get myself shot in spring” just to up the outrage quotient, and basically what we have here is a novelty song in questionable taste that is better than any parody song Reed enemy Frank Zappa ever wrote, not like that’s saying much. Unlike the other songs on the album, I listened to it exactly once.

Lou swiped (I swear) the obviously live (you can actually hear the crowd) and very heavy duty “Shooting Star” from Bad Company, not directly of course, but I can’t believe that the Bad Company original wasn’t banging around somewhere in the back of his head when he wrote it—you can hear it in the melody and chorus. Basically, it’s a raw and simple riff powered by Ross’ guitar and Fogel’s saxophone, with Lou on top sounding… strange. My friend Martijn de Vries described it this way: “I like the way Lou’s voice is looking for his notes. It sounds like he found them by accident. Like a drunk man placing his feet in the general direction of his heaven-sent direction, come what may and for the hell of it.” I should add that Martijn is Dutch and the Dutch know everything.

And if “Shooting Star” is heavy, follow-up “Leave Me Alone” is doubly so—you get a rumbling, heavy metal riff with Fogel’s sax riding atop it, and that’s all you get—the band has no time for choruses or bridges or anything fancy. And Lou makes no effort to enunciate or sing—he obviously doesn’t give a shit if you can understand the words coming out of his mouth, if only because everything you need to know is in the title. This song is sheer muscle from beginning to end, a blunt instrument, and I like it.

“Wait” is rough, too, but upbeat, happy almost, and has Lou singing in tandem with some female backing vocalists. It’s certainly more melodic than most of the songs on the album, perkier too, for damn sure, and other than a brief moment just short of the two-minute mark, when things come to a brief stop to let the women deliver four drawn-out “oohs,” it never stops.

The three-part, eleven-minute “Street Hassle” is the album’s centerpiece and highlight, and hardly seems to fit on the LP—its ambition stands in sharp contrast to the primal knock-offs around it. The first section, “Waltzing Matilda,” is all Eros set to a droning and lovely string section. Lou sings “Sha-la-la-la-la” a lot cuz he’s happy, wants to slip away, and there’s some good sex along the lines of:

“Luscious and gorgeous, oh, what humping muscle
Call out the National Guard
She creamed in her jeans as he picked up her knees
From off of the Formica topped bar.”

At the end of the night they part, the music stops, and a lone female voice drones wordlessly to introduce the second section, “Street Hassle,” a monologue by Lou about a very bad scene—basically he has a couple in his pad, and the woman is dead, the victim of a drug overdose. And Lou comes off as a real weasel as he tosses off lines like:

“Hey, that cunt’s not breathing
I think she’s had too much of something or other
Hey, man, you know what I mean?
I don’t mean to scare you
But you’re the one who came here
And you’re the one who’s gotta take her when you leave.”

And:

“But when someone turns that blue, well, it’s a universal truth
Then you just know that bitch will never fuck again.”

And, coldest of all:

“And I know this ain’t no way to treat a guest
But why don’t you grab your old lady by the feet
And just lay her out in the darkest street
And by morning, she’s just another hit-and-run.”

Why, its sordidness takes you all the way back to “Sister Ray,” it does, and when Lou draws out a “Sha-la-la-la-la” this time he’s being sarcastic and you can be damn sure he won’t be winning any Host of the Year awards. And he ends the section with some truly dark thoughts:

“You know, some people got no choice
And they can never find a voice
To talk with that they can even call their own
So the first thing that they see that allows them the right to be
Why, they follow it, you know, it’s called bad luck.”

The third section commences with a really cool bass line, then Reed comes in with a wiry old school Velvet Underground guitar riff and this goes on for awhile before surprise, surprise in comes Bruce Springsteen, and things quiet down as the Boss talks about how “life’s full of songs” before playing a riff on perhaps his most famous line, saying, “Joe, tramps like us were born to pay.”

Then Reed returns in dirge mode to sing “Love has gone away” and “I miss him baby” as the strings come droning back, and Lou sounds as pained and honest as he ever will, he’s oozing heartbreak, and it’s generally agreed that he’s singing about the loss of his lover Rache Humphreys, a trans woman who would die from AIDS in 1990. And the anguish is palpable as he ends the song with the lines:

“Come on, baby, I need you, baby
Oh, please don’t slip away
I need your loving so bad, babe
Please don’t slip away.”

It’s a triumph, one of Reed’s very best solo songs if not his very best, and if it doesn’t particularly fit on the album—which is pretty primitive otherwise—it cements my opinion that in the end Street Hassle is indeed a good Lou Reed album because it marked the return of Lou the primitivist. It’s the antithesis of the overly polite Transformer; there’s an immediacy to these songs that is impossible to ignore, and it simply doesn’t matter if some of them are nothing more than simple riffs—what was “Sister Ray,” after all? Reed may sound like he’s just fucking about, but he’s not—he’s simply being perverse, and making a din that’s truer to the spirit of the early Velvet Underground than any other album he would ever make.

GRADED ON A CURVE:
B+

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