What it meant to me finding Bruce Springsteen on a Lou Reed album.
First, there is the violin and cello playing a five-note rhythm, around and around. There are little chirps of violin up and down. Then a synthesizer creeps up, with just one or two notes. Someone is laying heavy on the keys, like Fuck all this classical bullshit. The violin and cello continue. Then a guitar, an electric guitar, picks up the violin’s cry to mellow out the struggle. A bass, big stringed beast, fumbles in, quiets everything besides the violin. They are going to pull us through whatever the fuck this is. Then Lou Reed starts singing. And then it gets ugly.
The song “Street Hassle” closes the A-side of the 1978 album which bears its name. There are three parts: “Waltzing Matilda,” “Street Hassle,” and “Slipaway”. Each section has its own theme: Matilda is about a woman and a male prostitute, Hassle tells of a woman dying at a drug dealer’s apartment, and Slipaway relates the loss of a male lover, presumably from the POV of another man. In the writing about this song, Slipaway is often thought to be one of the most autobiographical bits Lou Reed ever allowed to be recorded, presuming it to be about his breakup with a trans woman, Rachel Humphreys.
Sandwiched between parts two and three is what we might call 3a. Hassle (part two) ends with the aforementioned death, and mournful lines about how some people can’t find their own voices and so they follow something, and that is bad luck. The violin and cello we heard at the beginning come back, but they wear the guise of an electric bass. Deep and low. It’s taking us down. The electric guitar comes in-line with it, then starts to fall out of step, saying uh-uh, uh-uh. Reprimanding. The violin returns, soaring. A cacophony of voices decay to a drum, a heartbeat. A sign of life. A new voice comes on, reassuring. “Well hey man that’s just a lie….”
The usual joyous, roadhouse, getting drunk and racing cars voice of Bruce Springsteen comes on like morning truth after a one night stand. The dream of the road meets the realities of the city. It’s heartbreak.
Wait man, that’s just a lie. It’s a lie she tells her friends. There’s a real song, a real song she wouldn’t even admit to herself, bleeding in her heart, it’s a song lots of people moan, it’s a painful song, with a lot of sad truths and life’s full of sad songs, a penny for wish, and wishing won’t make it so, where a pretty kiss, where a pretty face can’t have its way, though tramps like us we were born to pay.
“Street Hassle: Part III” as transcribed in Pass Through Fire: The Collected Lyrics
Slipaway comes on, with its plain naked need for love, like a sheep’s bleating in the field for an absent shepherd or a bee’s mad buzzing for lost flowers; it is the best part of the album, if not the entire Lou Reed Arista era. Lyrics so plain, simple, raw, that Reed didn’t even include them in his first book of lyrics, Between Thought and Expression. “Love has gone away, And there’s no one here now and there’s nothing left to say. But, oh, how I miss him, baby….” What else could you say? I miss my love.
In college at UCSD, I was, musically speaking, in a hodgepodge of media: a mix of tapes, albums bought as cheaply as possible from used record shops, and a few CDs. I bought my first CD player with the first student loan disbursement. I got a Columbia House 12 for a penny deal under a fake name. (Hope the statute of limitations has run out on that.) I was experimenting with Lou Reed, unsure of where he would place in my head. I bought Street Hassle on cassette from some big open wire-frame bins upstairs in the school bookstore. I already had an x-teenth generation LP of Velvet Underground and Nico, which lead me to eventually get a “Best of” on CD. (Best of? Yes, it exists.) But at the time, I was deep in the tank for Springsteen. We had Born in the USA on vinyl in the house growing up, and his videos in constant rotation, on a friend’s cable MTV and on late night “Friday Night Videos” on the public channels, were like golden tickets to a future I wanted very badly. Nebraska was one of the first CDs I bought at a store. The jewel case still has the “Best Value” sticker on it.
Bruce’s dark searing mood on Nebraska was pointing me in a direction I wasn’t sure of. And it didn’t help that his other albums, even the menacing Darkness at the Edge of Town–which he was recording when he ran into Lou–didn’t match what he was doing there. It was a one-off, a come on. Could that road even be trusted? I mean, this was the Racing in the Streets guy, the Rosalita Come out Tonight guy. (As I got older I did see the darkness and despair sewn in. I don’t need a lecture.) Nebraska was, shit… I took my brother’s job while he was at war and he came back, became a misfit, and now I might have to arrest him. That’s grim. That’s 10x “hide beneath your covers and study your pain.”
So maybe I’d give solo Lou a try. Horns and loud guitars. He called back to my all time favorite Velvets song, trashed it, and went barreling on. Like stripping off an old jacket and looking for new skin. This was a dude who knew what he was doing. Even the sarcastic “I Wanna be Black”, hell, I was a fucked-up middle class college student! And I didn’t want to be that, either! If he was kidding or lying or pretending, I wanted to go, too. Maybe I’d just be following him because I had no voice of my own, and this would be bad luck as he prophesied, but I was going to go as far as I could. I became a Lou Reed devote.
And then Street Hassle, the song. Part 3a. Bruce was here, in the deep darkness, too! The voice of my dreams and desires. And then it all clicked. What I wanted as a kid, what I wanted as a young adult. The mystery and pain of love tempered in the simplest lines. Oh. Oh, baby.
Come on, let’s slipaway.