The Lou Reed song that features Bruce Springsteen
At first glance, Lou Reed and Bruce Springsteen seem like an unlikely pairing. Reed was a sarcastic and self-destructive outsider from New York, making nihilistic music with little commercial success. Springsteen was a working-class spokesman from New Jersey who gained popularity for his charismatic live performance and radio-friendly rock.
Fans who are familiar with Reed’s bitter disposition might assume that he’d subject Springsteen to the same mockery and contempt he threw at many of his peers. But Reed actually admired Springsteen, so much so that he asked him to contribute to the title track on his eighth album Street Hassle, released in 1978.
The track is a ten-minute long epic divided into three sections, each telling a different story, titled ‘Waltzing Matilda’, ‘Street Hassle’ and ‘Slipaway’, with Reed narrating the first two parts. ‘Waltzing Matilda’ follows a woman soliciting sex from a male prostitute, while ‘Street Hassle’ sees Reed take on the persona of a drug dealer witnessing death.
The third part, ‘Slipaway’, is where Bruce Springsteen comes in. Over velvety guitars, Springsteen delivers a spoken word section, declaring, “Life’s full of sad songs”. The section closes with the line, “Joe, tramps like us, we were born to play”, a callback to one of Springsteen’s most famous songs, ‘Born to Run’.
Reed once explained how the collaboration came about in Nick Johnstone’s Lou Reed ‘Talking‘. He shared, “Bruce Springsteen was mixing in the studio below us, and I thought, ‘How fortuitous’. People expect me to badmouth him because he’s from New Jersey, but I think he’s really fabulous.”
He continued to praise his contribution to ‘Street Hassle’: “He did the part so well that I had to bury him in the mix. I knew Bruce would take that recitation seriously because he really is of the street, you know.”
Springsteen has also spoken positively about the collaboration. In an interview with Dave DiMartino, he recalled how Reed called him up in the studio: “It was funny. We were at Record Plant; I hadn’t really met him, and I liked his stuff, I always really liked it. He called me up and said, ‘I’ve got this part’, and it was related to ‘Born to Run’, I guess, in some way, and said, ‘Come on upstairs.'”
Springsteen did as Reed asked and recorded his contribution to the track just twice before Reed picked his favourite of the takes. Springsteen added that he was “really happy”. However, he did ask not to be credited on the track, leading many to think it was just Reed imitating The Boss.
Despite their seemingly contrasting sounds and personalities, Reed and Springsteen have more in common than you might think and ‘Street Hassle’ was only elevated by Springsteen’s elegant verse. It enhanced Reed’s literary vision for the track – he once said he wanted to write a “great monologue set to rock” written in the style of William Burroughs or Tennessee Williams. With ‘Street Hassle’, a three-part poetic storytelling epic, he certainly succeeded.
