Lou Reed's Street Hassle

very true about the inexplicable inability of british session guys to rock appropriately. Definitely a "too many notes" situation.

he shoulda used the spiders from mars for that record!

A too many of everything situation. Never got that with Sterl and Mo.

I've played this version of "Real Good Time Together" for a listening party, and you can't help but do an imitation of Lou being coked out of his mind singing this.

"we're gooo-NA have a REAL. GOOD. TIIIIME. tooo-GETHA!" *sniiiiiiiif*

Yeah, I've been on a real VU/Lou kick lately as well, Shakey. Played Berlin again yesterday after not hearing it some years and still don't think a whole lot of it. I think Street Hassle as an album has enough high points to make it worthwhile. I've never heard his first solo album...kinda scared to hear it, actually.

I've fallen in love with these videos on You Tube of him live in Paris, '74...but when I d/l this album entitled "The Olympia Theatre Paris, '74" the sound quality is absolutely horrible. Anyone know how I can get around this and find some more stuff like that?

yeah I think Berlin is pretty spotty myself. Ezrin's about as much of a mismatch for Reed as Wakeman in terms of overdoing things.

eventually I will get around to testing Alfred's early 80s trilogy theory

Get around to it!

I will check the sausage before I put it in the waffle, so to speak

Legendary Hearts is a great record that desperately cries out for remixing/remastering. burying Quine's guitar is never a good idea, imo. still great, tho. "Home of the Brave" has always been my fave.

wow this album is a total mess! so weird how disjointed and un-together a lot of the performances are. "Real Good Time Together", for example, has this fantastic guitar sound but any kind of steady tempo is completely undetectable for the first half or so while Reed fumbles around with the words/melody. "Wait" sorta drifts off aimlessly at the end. The band totally is not together on the opening track, the drummer stumbles in several places. The title track is fairly amazing but apart from that yeesh, I dunno... its kinda fascinating how completely unreliable Reed has been throughout his career.

Doesn't anyone like "Shooting Star"? I do.

Me too.

I also think the last track "Wait" is better than just about anything on this album except for the title track. But something about "Dirt" is very attractive, as well.

But yeah, Shakey, I agree he is completely unreliable, and that somehow this is fascinating about him. Can you think of anyone else in the music world who has shown the kind of genius he has in his career matched with the sheer volume of his mediocre stuff in comparison? I can't. When he's good he's bloody brilliant. But he rarely gets there. Ya gotta dig for the gems, and I'm glad I'm in a digging mood.

Also, if I may comment...*cough*... about this Alfred trilogy thing...
Alfred, you never really explained if it was actually Blue Mask you were thinking of as the first installment in that trilogy. For some reason I had assumed your trilogy began with New Sensations. I need to have this clarified. Also, allmusic says "Growing Up In Public" was released in 1980 and I don't know jack shit about that album. So please clarify your trilogy. Thanks!

The weird thing is I realized I did actually see Lou Reed during the Mistrial tour. I had completely forgotten this. I must have been 13??? I bought that album and don't remember a goddamn thing about it. I remember the damn "...Suzanne" video from New Sensations and that's about it.

Now, many years later the "New York" album he did is an entirely diff. story and um...I'm not really ready to play that right now. It was a good album, but too many memories for me. I'd rather let it lie.

xgau on the early-'80s trilogy (plus GUIP):

Growing Up in Public [Arista, 1980]
This unabashedly literate album isn't pretentious on paper--Lou's just an educated guy for whom middlebrow names like Poe and Vidal and Shakespeare and Escher mix as naturally into the conversation as dictionary words like "harridan" and "lucid" and "ore" and "encroachment." But musically he's trying too hard with no place to go--projects the opener from midway down the esophagus as if Street Hassle leads to Street-Legal, then doesn't even stick with that. Mostly these are intelligent songs that misfire slightly. The two gems are two of the simplest both verbally and vocally. In one Lou's father gives him shit while his mother dies. In the other he proposes. B

Rock and Roll Diary 1967-1980 [Arista, 1980]
In which Mr. Heroin promotes the '60s. Really. Just compare the studio-Velvets first side with the hodgepodge-Arista closer and tell me he wasn't more confidently himself--I mean happier--negating optimism than fumbling through its aftermath. Admittedly, beyond the inescapable "Street Hassle" the Arista song choices are perverse even for Lou--three from his album of six months ago, neither great one among them. And beyond the inescapable "Walk on the Wild Side" the RCA choices aren't much more coherent (cf. RCA's own Walk on the Wild Side). So Clive's minions hire Ellen Willis to make sense of it all--which, striving almost too mightily, she almost does. B

The Blue Mask [RCA Victor, 1982]
After this becomes a cult classic, in a week or so, noncultists are gonna start complaining. "My Dedalus to your Bloom/Was such a perfect wit"? And then bringing in "perfect" again for a rhyme? What kind of "spirit of pure poetry" is that? One that honors the way people really talk. Never has Lou sounded more Ginsbergian, more let-it-all-hang-out than on this, his most controlled, plainspoken, deeply felt, and uninhibited album. Even his unnecessarily ideological heterosexuality is more an expression of mood than a statement of policy; he sounds glad to be alive, so that horror and pain become occasions for courage and eloquence as well as bitterness and sarcasm. Every song comes at the world from a slightly different angle, and every one makes the others stronger. Reed's voice--precise, conversational, stirring whether offhand or inspirational--sings his love of language itself, with Fernando Saunders's bass articulating his tenderness and the guitars of Robert Quine and Reed himself slashing out with an anger he understands better all the time. A

Legendary Hearts [RCA Victor, 1983]
If The Blue Mask was a tonic, the follow-up's a long drink of water, trading impact and intensity for the stated goal of this (final?) phase of Reed's music: continuity, making do, the long haul. The greatest songs on The Blue Mask honored the extremes he was learning to live without while "My House" and the like copped to the implicit sentimentality of his resolution. Here both ends approach the middle. "Legendary Hearts" and "Betrayed" clarify Reed's commitment by laying out the down side of romantic marriage; "Bottoming Out" and "The Last Shot" and the elegiac "Home of the Brave" excise melodrama from his waves of fear. Equally important, "Martial Law" and "Don't Talk to Me About Work" and the almost, well, liberal "Powwow" prove that sometimes his great new band is just a way for him to write great new songs, which is what his endurance had better be about in the end. A

New Sensations [RCA Victor, 1984]
This wonderful record feels like product at first--a solid but expedient bunch of songs like The Bells or Coney Island Baby or even Sally Can't Dance. Although the title cut is definitely the centerpiece, and thematic at that, there are no grand statements like "Women" or "Legendary Hearts" and no tours de force like "The Gun" or "Betrayed." And boy, does it sneak up on you. Instead of straining fruitlessly to top himself, Reed has settled into a pattern as satisfying as what he had going with the Velvets, though by definition it isn't as epochal. The music is simple and inevitable, and even the sarcastic songs are good sarcastic songs, with many of the others avoiding type altogether. Think he can keep doing this till he's fifty? Hope so. A

All you really need to know (no offence to Alfred--i say this as a total xgau groupie, duh)

oops, forgot to nuke the Rock and Roll Diary review. oh well...

The Cello riff on this is just increadible,

yes, bur is it edible?

I dunno, for all the bookishness and the "thought and expression", howcome the Lou I like best is the "I love you susanne" stuff?

Lou likes pop music too.

well, '50s/'60s-style pop music, anyhow.

I dunno, for all the bookishness and the "thought and expression", howcome the Lou I like best is the "I love you susanne" stuff?

...which is why New Sensations is my favorite solo album, terrible production and all.

ideological heterosexuality

haha

yeah, that line jumped out at me, too. christgau can be a funny dude. i may be in the minority, but i think that "Blue Mask" is maybe slightly overrated? I like it, and the band is obviously pretty awesome. But I'm not nuts about the JFK song or "The Heroine" ... The highs are pretty high -- but I think that Quine is my favorite thing about it. His solo on "Waves of Fear" is off the hook. mentioned above, but it would be really interesting to hear rough mixes of the Legendary Hearts album with Quine more prominent. Great story in the Lou bio about Robert smashing his cassette of that album to bits with a hammer. More awesome Quine-age on that "Live In Italy" import ...

The instrumental interplay in the first 45 seconds of "My House" is my favorite solo Lou moment.

Wow, dude did "Caroline Says" on Letterman last night.

Shakey, have you tried the "Rock and Roll Heart" (1976) album yet? I tried that one last night and I think I like it more than even the Coney Island Baby album! Surpisingly consistently great.

http://tbn0.google.com/images?q=tbn:emPkzwTRLC63UM:http://ak.buy.com/db_assets/large_images/536/203051536.jpg

I dig Rock & Roll Heart but I'm not really into Coney Island Baby. Street Hassle is up there with the early 70s albums for me though

No shiiiit, what it is!

Probably my favorite Lou solo record, when I heard the news that he died, this was was the record that I reached for

It sounds so weird, so 1977

Now I'm pissed I don't have this on my iPod I want to listen to it right now

Was just listening to "Leave Me Alone", what other major artist would dare to be that bracingly moronic? Perhaps Neil Young ("Got mashed potatoes/ Ain't got no T-Bone"). And three chords? Lou only needs one and a half!

The title track was the song I went to when he died too.

I love how start of this album is like MST3K taking on "Loaded".

The Springsteen part of Street Hassle is so odd. It sounds like Bruce is doing an Elvis impersonation.

Haha I read this thread again and I'd forgotten I'd ever listened to Raven, much less liked it?

i've been tempted to listen to the raven again - there is some good stuff lurking in there.

nearly put broadway song on my ballot

didn't put street hassle on iirc

I did not know this:

Binaural recording

The recording of Street Hassle was notable in that Reed and his co-producer chose to employ an experimental microphone placement technique called binaural recording.[1] In binaural recording, two microphones are placed in the studio in an attempt to mimic the stereo sound of actually being in the room with the performers/instruments. In the case of the recording sessions and concerts that composed Street Hassle, engineers used a mannequin head with a microphone implanted in each ear. Binaural recordings are generally only effective when the user listens to the album through headphones, and do not generally translate correctly through stereo speakers.
Dummy head being used for binaural recording, similar to the setup used for Street Hassle

Reed's particular binaural recording system was developed by Manfred Schunke of the German company Delta Acoustics; Schunke is credited as an engineer on Street Hassle. Lou Reed would continue to use the binaural recording style on two more releases: the 1978 concert album Live: Take No Prisoners and the 1979 studio album The Bells.

Same system was used on a few Krautrock albums. But it helps to explain why it's such an odd sounding record through speakers.

I for one am grateful that the binaural system was used in the recording of Take No Prisoners for it allowed me to hear the carping about John Rockwell in the one ear whilst listening to the kvetching about Xgau in the other.

Same system was used on a few Krautrock albums.

I think it's used on Can's "Flow Motion", which is a lot easier on the old earholes than "Street Hassle"

(xp) Yah!

*ear splitting feedback*

Lou: "Isn't that annoying"

*more ear splitting feedback*

Yes, even more annoying, Lou, thanks to the binaural recording system developed by Manfred Schunke of the German company Delta Acoustics

Don't know if it's necessarily the binaural process, but Take No Prisoners is a really good sounding live record.

i've said it before, but c'mon they should be putting out an expanded box set of those shows, like miles' live at the plugged nickel or something.

Do we know if Bruce wrote his spiel or if Lou did or it was something they worked out together? I seem to recall reading something that the recording of it was a kind of a spur of the moment thing...

lou wrote it and said he was having trouble delivering it -- I guess bruce just happened to be in the studio at the time? in that WPIX broadcast lou claims some reviewer thought it was just lou doing a terrible bruce impression.

(which seems crazy, but i guess broooce isn't credited in the liners)

IIRC, Lou was working down the hall from where Springsteen was finishing up DOTEOT, and asked him if he'd do the lines, which already included the wink to "Born To Run".

So the "tramps like us" line was in there before Bruce agreed to record it? I assumed that line was written just for him!

I really like this album, but like Bowie's "Heroes", when there's one song that's clearly the centerpiece of the album, it comes across as "Street Hassle" and "songs that aren't Street Hassle and are less important than Street Hassle" and the rest of the album suffers as a result.