Street Hassle
| Street Hassle | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
 |
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| Studio album by Lou Reed | ||||
| Released | February 1978 | |||
| Recorded | The Record Plant, New York City and live in Munich, Wiesbaden, Ludwigshafen, Germany | |||
| Genre | Rock, punk rock | |||
| Length | 36:15 | |||
| Label | Arista | |||
| Producer | Lou Reed, Richard Robinson | |||
| Lou Reed chronology | ||||
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| Professional ratings | |
|---|---|
| Review scores | |
| Source | Rating |
| Allmusic |   |
| Chicago Tribune | |
| Robert Christgau | B+ |
| Rolling Stone | (positive) |
| The Rolling Stone Record Guide | |
Street Hassle is a 1978 album by Lou Reed, originally released by Arista Records. The album is the first commercially released pop album to employ binaural recording technology.Street Hassle combines live concert tapes (with overdubs) and studio recordings.
All of the songs on Street Hassle were written by Reed, including "Real Good Time Together", a track that dates back to his days as a member of The Velvet Underground.
The album was met with mostly positive reviews, with AllMusic's Mark Deming writing, "Raw, wounded, and unapologetically difficult, Street Hassle isn't the masterpiece Reed was shooting for, but it's still among the most powerful and compelling albums he released during the 1970s, and too personal and affecting to ignore."
The studio tracks on Street Hassle were recorded in New York City, while the live recordings were made in Munich and Ludwigshafen, West Germany. Unlike most live albums, the audience is completely muted from the mix during the concert recordings.
Bruce Springsteen contributed spoken vocals during the "Slipaway" section of "Street Hassle", alluding to his own Born to Run album in the final line. At the time, the singer was enduring a three-year forced hiatus from releasing any of his own work due to legal disputes with his former manager, although he was in the process of writing and recording music for his forthcoming album Darkness on the Edge of Town, to be released in June 1978. Springsteen was not credited for his performance in the liner notes to Street Hassle, possibly due to his ongoing legal battles.
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. 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.
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