On Memorial Day weekend in 1977, Bruce Springsteen finally settled his long-running legal dispute with Mike Appel that had prevented him from recording a follow up to his 1975 album Born to Run.
Road-weary (the band had been on the road for almost two solid years) and with a solid stash of new material, it only took four days for Bruce to return to the studio and begin recording Darkness on the Edge of Town.
The Darkness recording sessions started at Atlantic Studios in New York City, but Bruce wasn’t happy with the studio’s acoustics. By the end of the summer, the band had moved operations back to The Record Plant, where Born to Run was recorded.
Bruce and the band recorded at The Record Plant throughout the autumn and winter of 1977, but they weren’t the studio’s only clients at that time: Lou Reed was also in the building, one floor above Bruce, recording his landmark album Street Hassle.
The centerpiece of Street Hassle was its eleven-minute title track, a dark, gritty and brutal musical monologue of a street painting. The song is composed of three vignettes, and each sounds for all the world like an alternative character’s take on a Bruce Springsteen song.
Chapter 1, “Waltzing Matilda” (the first three minutes or so) is sung from the point of view of a woman picking up a male prostitute that could easily be Spanish Johnny; Chapter 2, “Street Hassle,” features a drug dealer disposing of the body of a woman who drank some seriously unholy blood.
And then there’s Chapter Three, “Slip Away,” which begins at the 9-minute mark with a forty-second spoken-word guest monologue about love and pain and death that ends with the words:
“Tramps like us, we were born to pay.”
And that guest-star? He’s uncredited, but listen below (or skip ahead to the nine-minute mark if you must), and you’ll surely recognize him.
That’s right: Bruce’s first post-lawsuit appearance on vinyl wasn’t Darkness on the Edge of Town, but rather his uncredited spoken-word performance on Lou Reed’s “Street Hassle,” released four months earlier.
Bruce’s guest appearance wasn’t by design but rather by serendipity. Lou had already written the lyrics, including the “tramps like us” monologue, but he was apprehensive about delivering it himself. When he discovered that Bruce was recording below him, he introduced himself, discovered they were mutual fans, and asked Bruce if he’d be interested in recording the part.
Bruce read the lyrics, agreed, and recorded his contribution in two takes. The rest is uncredited rock and roll history.
Street Hassle
Recorded: Autumn 1977
Released: Street Hassle (1978)
Never performed (by Bruce)
