Lou Reed's Street Hassle

this was a lie, hoorah! wonderful what a half-decent turntable will do.

I love this alb - there's something abt this sound of this rec, the vocals and shit, that's unique in Lou's discog - pisses all over any of his 80s albs (blue mask, r. quine solos and all, is SERIOUSLY overrated, esp. the stuff abt him getting outing his ouija board to contact delmore schwartz, now that's what i call bad luck)

Unfortunately H2-H4, my own turntable has broken as of a few days ago. Suddenly wouldn't pick up the needle off the record. I can still play records, but if I forget to pick it up off the record before the end, I risk scratching the entire record and ruining my needle. Oh joy.

Thank goodness I have Street Hassle on CD.

1) For the record I believe I was the first person to go by Suzy Creamcheese on this board, though I did spell it entirely differently than whoever posted above.

2) The Bruce Springsteen part of SH totally rules and I hate Springsteen with a passion.

2) Bruce's part still sucks, and I'm totally indifferent to BRUUUUUCE

I <3 this album.

esp. the title track

yeh, this record is beautiful. i have no further insight at the moment, regrettably.

Oh my god I could talk about this song all day.

listening to this for the first time today... the opening track is funny but pretty much a mess production-wise (Lou's layered vocals sound terrible! multi-tracking that croaking voice attempting to hold a vibrato produces sad results). The title track is fantastic, I don't have anything to add about that apart from it being so weird for me to come to it so late - I feel I already knew it from Spacemen 3/Spiritualized ripping it, and having it prick up my ears in the Squid and the Whale

I have been on a real VU/Lou Reed kick lately... eventually I will get around to testing Alfred's early 80s trilogy theory (haven't heard the blue Mask since at least '92...?)

Always thought the weird version of "Real Good Time Together" on here was Lou's attempt at a kind of Suicide thing

hmm, never thought of suicide with that track, but now that you mention it. is that song the last instance of Lou dipping into his old unreleased VU songs for a solo album?
anyway, i always had a soft spot for this album, though it is certainly, er, spotty. obviously the title track is one of his career highlights, but the trashier stuff is fun too.

Also recently gave a listen to his first s/t debut - an album that apparently no one ever listens to or references or reviews (and that has been out of print for decades now...?) Really weird album - comprised mostly of shitty versions of leftover VU material, over-played way to straight (choice of Rick Wakeman as a sideman = wtf, for obvious reasons). It has its moments - the end of Ride Into the Sun, Wild Child (did Wild Child get re-cut on a later album?) The version of Berlin is virtually unrecognizable from its later re-interpretation but is still not very good, and overall the sound of the album is really thin and boring. Have no idea if Lou Reed even plays guitar on it at all... I do find it odd though, for a guy whose later career missteps are habitually pored over and re-evaluated that this album is basically never discussed, by ANYBODY. Its like it never even happened. Even though less than a year after its release, Reed would be killing it with Transformer.

It's been reissued tons of time AND talked about! Agree about the thin sound, and sometimes inapt accompaniment but some of it's great!

i like it a lot (or i did prior to the VU release that more or less made it irrelevant). then again, i don't think much of Transformer.

xp

yeah, i kinda like "Ocean" on the s/t album ... haven't listened to it in forever. Oh, "Lisa Says" is nice too. Neither of those songs are a patch on the VU versions, but I like their slickness. that album does make it painfully clear that Lou had no idea what direction to take his career in at that point.

Those are my two least favourite tracks on the album!

had no idea about the reissues - I've never seen one, and cruising blogs looking for a post of the album took a while.

agreed that the version of Ocean is at least interesting - its chugging as opposed to dreamy

x-post

haha, well there you go.
xpost

it IS crazy how somebody convinced Lou (or Lou convinced himself) that he shouldn't be playing guitar on his own records. that's really a big thing that's missing from most of his 70s records.

Amazing how shitty those hotshot British session men were are playing rock 'n' roll, esp. the drummer!

Makes you realise how great Sterling Morrison was for one thing!

doesn't steve howe play on the first one too?

i used to have this bizarro reissue of the s/t album that shuffled the tracklisting and added tracks from Lou Reed Live! weirdness. are the more recent reissues better sounding? i remember reading that it was mastered all wrong originally. something to do with dobly recording. :)

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.

Love how the absolutely dead mic on Lou’s vocals gives the feeling of him in some shitty dimly lit studio at 3am trying to get it together. Such a nighttime album.