I'm not sure what everyone else was listening to in the summer of 1978, but Lou Reed's Street Hassle spent an awful lot of time on my turntable. It was the first of many albums I would go on to buy by Lou Reed, and this title track was one of the strangest, scariest, moodiest, darkest and most fascinating things I'd ever heard. Still is. This was Reed's comeback album, in a way, one of several, and it was I think kind of a response to the punk explosion which Reed and the Velvet Underground had done so much to foment. Rather than take the thrash-and-burn route, Reed delivers a starkly minimalist, cold-as-ice tale of drugs and murder, and at its core there's an enormous sense of sadness. What kind of person listens to such a song over and over? I guess I am. And in case you're wondering, yes, that voice you hear at the nine-minute mark is indeed none other than Bruce Springsteen.
