Rick James - Street Songs

October 4, 2025

It is fifty percent off the two-dollar bin at Vinyl Vogue, and you never know who you’ll find lurking down in the gutters of retail. Lou found a copy of Rick James’ Street Songs from April 1981,on the Gordy label there recently. The record had seen better days but there were no lines, er scratches, on it. Cocaine is a hell of a drug but despite all the hard living this particular album seems to have experienced Rick James sounded great. Surface noise to be sure but smoking crack distorts the voice.

This is the album of James’ that you know as it has “Super Freak” on it as well as “Give It to Me Baby” and “Fire and Desire”. By 1983, the album had already sold four million copies and made James a global phenomenon. Sure, his songs are great and, yes, Street Songs is a great album, not just in funk or R&B, but in any genre, but it was his lifestyle that made him an icon as time when on.

So, Lou comes not to praise Rick James the singer or Street Songs the album, bitch. Lou bought the record because it made him think of the single most decadent episode of Saturday Night Live in that long-running show’s entire history. On November 7, 1981, Lauren Hutton was the guest star. In that year, Hutton starred in Zorro, the Gay Blade and Paternity, but for the sex, drugs and rock and roll angle, it is her modeling career, her role in American Gigolo, and her being Studio 54’s very own Wife of Bath that matters here. She clearly provides the sex.

Fun fact about Gigolo with a SNL tie-in. Richard Gere was director Paul Schrader’s first choice to star as escort Julian Kay in Gigolo, but he was not the producer’s first choice. Barry Diller tried to get John Travolta and Christopher Reeve in the lead role. They even wanted Chevy Chase, of SNL fame, before Gere. I cannot think of a worse fit than Chevy Chase in Gigolo. He would have been shockingly miscast. Schrader was right, Gere was the man for the role.

On the November 7 episode of SNL, Rick James was the musical guest promoting Street Songs. He performed “Give It to Me Baby” and closed with “Super Freak”. He provided the rock and roll and no doubt lots of drugs, but even Rick James, bitch, was outclassed in the drugs and decadence department by the show’s other special guest and his SNL cronies.

Near the end of the show, Lauren Hutton introduced William Burroughs as America’s greatest living author (Sidebar: He was not. Thomas Pynchon may have been AWOL, but he was still alive and is still alive to this day. In fact, Pynchon has a new novel coming out this fall and if this publishing mega-event does not get him the Nobel Prize for Literature there is something wrong with the selection process. Pynchon has been the world’s greatest novelist for decades.) and Burroughs proceeded to read “Dr. Benway Operates” for a full six minutes.

Rick James partied hard for sure, but Burroughs is the most infamous drug addict of the entire 20th Century, if not all-time. He did more drugs than Rick James dreamed of and the early 1980s were a particularly druggy period for Burroughs. By November 1981, he was in the process of moving to Lawrence, Kansas, to get him away from New York City drug influencesand to basically save his life.

Despite Eddie Murphy, SNL in this period was in a bad place. It is considered a low point in the history of the show. But for sex, drugs and rock and roll, early 80s era SNL was hard to beat, and Lauren Hutton, William Burroughs, and Rick James epitomized all three. But it doesn’t stop there. Terry Southern and Nelson Lyon were writers on SNL in 1981 and were no doubt instrumental in getting Burroughs on air. Southern was a legendary writer, new journalist, and screenwriter, who had a hand in Candy, Dr. Strangelove, and Easy Rider. His new journalism was some of the earliest and best and his fiction, especially his short stories are classics. He was also a legendary doper and stoner, a proto-druggie before the sixties blew the lid on smoking lids. Southern and Burroughs’ drug buddydom goes back to Paris in the 1950s and they spent large advances of Hollywood money on drugs instead of writing screenplays for Naked Lunch and Junkie throughout the early 1970s. Nelson Lyon is most famous for being the wingman on John Belushi’s three-day drug binge that eventually killed Belushi as well as having a killer William Burroughs book collection.

So, when I saw Rick James’ Street Songs in the two-dollar bin I thought what I always think Veof when I think of Rick James. What the fuck was going on in the green room of SNL on November 7, 1981? Probably just about anything goes, right up the nose. Or in the arm. In any case the cuts off Street Songsare the perfect soundtrack for the raging party that was early 80s SNL, the two-dollar bin of that show’s illustrious run.