(Credits: Far Out / Arista Records / Mick Rock)
Sun 23 November 2025 22:00, UK
Was anyone ever looking to someone like Lou Reed expecting to hear the next catchy radio-rock tune?
As much as he could make stunning works of musical art every single time he played, there was no sense in him trying to become one of the biggest legends in pop music if he was more interested in making more challenging records all the time. The Velvet Underground may have been one of the most interesting indie bands of all time, but Reed did think that a few of his songs weren’t given the time of day like they should have.
But anyone that was working with Reed after the Velvets knew that they were going to have to tread lightly on anything he released. When someone’s first record is all about looking to score some heroin, it’s not like he was suddenly going to play nice and release songs that were about young love or something. For a brief period, though, it felt like Reed’s flirtation with the pop charts was actually working.
‘Perfect Day’ and ‘Walk on the Wild Side’ are both fantastic pop tunes from the 1970s, but listening to records like Metal Machine Music, it was clear that Reed had no interest in keeping that going. He wanted to make abrasive music that was almost anticommercial in many respects, but that didn’t make him any less of an artist than someone like Bob Dylan around the same time.
After all, if Dylan could get away with making songs that are over ten minutes long and tell sweeping stories, who’s to say that Reed couldn’t do that as well? He was already making tunes that could be abrasive from a musical standpoint, but if he managed to make his lyrics a little bit darker, he could start tapping into that kind of gothic style that he had heard out of some of his favourite poets.
Then again, it’s not like anyone who jumped on during the Transformer was going to be in love with ‘Street Hassle’. This was about as close to the streetlife as Reed had ever gone since his days working with The Velvets, but even when pushing the envelope, he thought he would have been given the time of day a bit more than what he ended up.
Clive Davis may have been a brilliant A&R man for his time, but Reed was gutted when the song was practically put out to slaughter from the minute he handed it in, saying, “I remember playing it to Clive and it starts out ‘Hey, that c***’s not breathing, I think she’s had too much’, and Clive said, ‘There you go, that’s just like you. No airplay for this.’ And there wasn’t any. A 12-minute song – just finished, dead in the water. This wasn’t the days when something could go underground. That didn’t happen, it just got killed.”
Even if the rest of his label didn’t understand what he was trying to do, Reed wasn’t about to let anyone get in the way of his music. Compromise was the one word that he could never deal with, and when looking through a lot of his works after the fact, he was going to make sure that he got his point across in the way he wanted, whether that was reciting Edgar Allen Poe’s poetry on The Raven or working with Metallica on Lulu.
So while ‘Street Hassle’ is far from the most approachable rock and roll song in the world, you have to respect the sheer audacity of someone making a tune that dark. No one was trying to push the boundaries like Reed was, and while that did get a rise out of one too many people sometimes, it was better to get any kind of reaction than watch a bunch of long faces in the crowd.
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