Pull Posts From a Category With A Specific Tag

I am trying to create an instance of the loop that pulls all posts from one category that have a specific tag which happens to be the title of the larger post that this smaller instance of the loop is on. here is the code im using:

<?php rewind_posts(); ?>
			<?php $tag = the_slug(); ?>
			<?php $recent = new WP_Query("cat=755&tag=$tag&showposts=5"); while($recent->have_posts()) : $recent->the_post();?>
			<br />
			<?php the_content(); ?>
			<?php endwhile; ?>

i know the problem is my WP_Query doesn’t seem to want to take both the cat variable and the tag variable. Thanks for taking a look.