The first story of the series – “In Chattanooga, Main St. Is A Prostitution Strip” – aired today on NPR’s Weekend Edition Saturday.

On the surface, Main Street in Chattanooga, Tenn., looks nice. There’s a newly developed arts district with galleries, upscale restaurants, a packed breakfast joint called the Bluegrass Grill, even houses that have been certified as environmentally friendly. But if you stray from these newly renovated blocks, there’s a different side to Chattanooga’s Main Street.

“In Chattanooga, we have this underbelly,” Brother Ron Fender says. “You can walk down Main Street, and you don’t know that just over there, there’s prostitutes — or just over there is a camp where people sleep in the woods at night.”

Listen on NPR’s site, watch the video above or click on the Chattnooga feature in the gallery to see it within the Tennessee route.

Kara and I had collaborated with composer Jason Cady on the sound installation “Chorus of Refuge” where he pitch shifted and combined the voices of six refuges into one choral work (for six radios).  We loved it and wanted to work with him again.  We found out his father lived off of a Main Street near his hometown of Flint, Michigan.  His father worked on the assembly lines at General Motors.

Below, Cady describes how he took the three-hour oral history of his father and transformed it into ‘Generative Monologue.”

Generative Monologue

I composed Generative Monologue for spoken voice, synthesizer, and field recordings.

1. The Voice:

My father, Dennis Cady, is a retired autoworker.  He was born and raised in Flint, Michigan. He now lives on a street that turns into Main Street.

My father was born during World War II and his father died fighting in the Normandy invasion. His mother worked evenings and he was left alone to raise himself.  Even before reaching adolescence he had already taken up smoking, drinking, shoplifting and hitchhiking.

His older sister was expelled from all the high schools in the area and eventually dropped out. My father, however, graduated from high school and attended Mott Community College while working at a gas station. His mother pressured him to withdraw from college so that he could work full time at one of the General Motors factories. So he applied for a job at Buick and was hired to work at a complex of factories called Buick City.

My father met my mother at Buick City where they worked along side each other on the assembly line. After they married she encouraged him to quit drinking, which he did. Years later he used subliminal tapes to quit smoking.

For the last ten years before my father retired he worked eighty hours a week. He won accolades and an award from Buick for the hard work and the long duration and consistency of his overtime.

After retiring he was diagnosed with cancer. He believes that it may have been caused by some of the chemicals that he was exposed to at his job. It has been four years since his last surgery and he is still recovering from the chemotherapy.

My father’s recollections and reflections on his life are the content of Generative Monologue. I chose to create this piece with his voice, not only because he is an engaging storyteller, but also because of the timbre, melody, and expressiveness of his bass voice.

2. The Music:

Generative Monologue begins in D minor, modulates to A minor and ends in D minor with the same basic material occurring in both the tonic and then transposed to the dominant. The harmonic progression that repeats and forms the core of the piece is:

D-  Bb   D-

A  Bb dim  A

A dim  C7  A dim

B-7  G-  A

This chord progression supports a mostly two-note melody of the pitches A and Bb, while the other notes of the harmonies descend chromatically by parallel minor thirds. I composed this melody and chord progression to fit the basic character of the story.

I performed the melody and chords on synthesizer. The voice “solos” on top of the synthesizer part with continuously changing material. I used pitch correction software to tune and quantize the voice. After tuning the voice to the chromatic scale I then adjusted the notes to fit with the harmonies. I always tried to manipulate the voice as little as possible to avoid digital artifacts from the software; usually I would just move the notes up or down a half step. In spite of that, the voice still came out sounding strange at various moments, though the oddness does, of course, contribute to the overall character of the piece.

I used pitch correction software on speaking voice previously for a sound installation — Chorus of Refuge — that I composed in collaboration with Ann Heppermann and Kara Oehler. In Chorus of Refuge there were six a cappella voices transmitted through radios simultaneously. For Generative Monologue I worked with the same process while focusing on only one voice, with instrumental and other sounds, for a homophonic texture instead of the polyphony of Chorus of Refuge.

3. The Background:

Along with the foreground voice and synthesizer I also included backing vocals and ambient tracks. The backing vocals are comprised of additional tape from interviews with my father. The ambient tracks are field recordings of the Flint River that were recorded behind my father’s house, which runs through Flint and along Main Street. I put all the background tracks through a vocoder using the same chords as the synthesizer tracks. This background layer enriches the texture by providing some more irregular sounds in contrast to the repetition and synthetic perfection of the foreground.

Recorded and mixed by Clay Holley, interviews and field recordings by Ann Heppermann

We asked Calvin Johnson of K to create a Main Street song about a town the northwest. Calvin traveled to Bucoda, Washington and walked around the Main Street.  There, he met Mayor Pro Tem of Bucoda, Alan Carr. “A Kiss on Main Street” was based on their conversation and recorded with Calvin’s latest band, the Hive Dwellers.

Calvin wrote about his experience for Mapping Main Street:

Bucoda is located in the woods of southwestern Washington. Founded as a “company town” centered on coal mining and lumber, it was also the site of the first territorial prison. Originally it was known as Seatco until three local lumber Barons petitioned the Washington State Legislature to change the name to a new word comprised of the first two letters of their last names: Buckley, Coulter and Davis. When the lumber mills were operating at full bore, Bucoda was known as the “little town with the million dollar payroll”. The most visible historic structure on Main Street is the Odd Fellows Hall, built in the early ‘20s during the civic heyday. It is currently owned by the city, who have plans to renovate it to its former glory; donations toward this end are currently being accepted.

Seatco Prison closed when all its inmates were moved to the new state prison built in Walla Walla. The lumber mills have all burned or closed. The school district shut down in the ‘70s, students now travel to Tenino for their schooling. The local hotels, movie theaters, Ford dealership, all that, gone. Old highway 99 runs parallel to Main Street on the other side of the railroad tracks. With the advent of Interstate 5, it is no longer the main thoroughfare between Seattle, Wash. and Portland, Ore. The railroad tracks host Amtrak, but no passenger train has stopped in Bucoda for over 40 years. There are only 665 residents left in the town, and two businesses on Main Street, Joe’s Place, a restaurant and tavern, and Liberty Market, a general store.

Bucoda is not to be dismissed as another grim reminder of the death of Small Town America. A recent visit there revealed Bucoda to be lively, full of character. Lots of folks were out on the street, quick to extend a friendly greeting to an obvious stranger. Though development is limited until Bucoda’s septic and storm water systems are upgraded to current state standards, other utilities surpass many Washington communities several times its size: local telephone service provided by the Tenino Telephone Company features the most up-to-date communications technology available, making this the “small town with the million dollar high-speed connection”.

The annual school reunion the last weekend of July is being expanded next year to a centennial celebration, as 1910 was the year Bucoda officially incorporated. There will be a parade down Main Street, and placards around town identifying the locations of various businesses and historic residences. Plan your summer vacation around attending this event. It will be a party.

We asked Mary Pearson and Rob Barber of High Places to write a few words about how they came to write a Main Street song about Los Angeles. Here’s what they had to say:
Mary: Rob and I recently relocated from New York City to Los Angeles,
and consequently I felt a bit under-qualified at first for the role of
Los Angeles Main Street Representative. However, as I began to think
more about the task, it dawned on me that a newcomer can often see
aspects of her surroundings that are so commonplace as to go unnoticed
by longtime locals. Few born-and-raised Angelenos would treat wild
succulents and late night taco trucks with quite the degree of
reverence and gratitude Rob and I bestow upon such things. And it also
struck me that Los Angeles is largely defined by its Promise-Land-like
ability to lure in outsiders. In fact, this trait can be attributed to
the entire state of California.

Rob: As far as how we approached writing the song, this was the
perfect project for High Places. Ordinarily, when we write for
ourselves, we make a lot of off-the-cuff recordings and then arrange
all the parts into a sort of hyper-organized mega-mix.
With “Main Street”, we first went out on a couple different occasions
to gather field recordings. Both times were very different from one
another. The first night we went down to a more deserted stretch near
the L.A. River, and recorded the more ambient aspects of the song. The
whoosh of distant cars driving over manholes, crickets and night bugs,
and the all-too-familiar (as well as surprisingly percussive) L.A.P.D.
helicopters equipped with spooky spotlights. These sounds were cut up
and used largely in the construction of the rhythm. A few days later
we attended a Saturday afternoon street fair, where we gathered much of
the rest of the sounds used: children playing, food frying, random
snippets of conversations, empanada street vendors shouting “How many
dozens?”, and of course a bunch of musicians whom we carefully worked
off of with our own instrumental parts to fill out the composition. It
was important to us to recreate a feeling of the multi-directional
overlap and interplay of sounds present in a busy street environment.

High Places tours a lot. We see a lot of Main Streets. Main Street Los Angeles is, as with most Main Streets, totally unique and of itself. Although parts are rather deserted and empty, such as the region near the L.A. River, other parts just a few blocks away, still give the feeling of being historically one of L.A.’s predominant thoroughfares. Unlike many other Main Streets, which have become forgotten and obsolete with the development and commercialization of a town’s outlying areas, L.A. Main Street is still mostly a viable and important center of the city.

Like the spirit of California, it means different things for different people. For example, It contains the the oldest part of town, as well as the home of L.A.’s underground music scene, the Smell.

Mary: Joni Mitchell’s “California” is such a fitting love song to the elusive, golden state. The song is often what I sing at High Places sound checks, and I felt I just had to pay tribute to it in this composition by borrowing the lyrics from the chorus, “California, oh California, I’m comin’ home…” Hopefully our composition was successful in creating a similar mood of nostalgia and promise.

E.T. in Dayton, WA

One of my favorite Main Street moments. I catch a glimpse of awesome E.T. sculpture on the porch right next to an intimidating sign advertising a strict shooting of visitors policy. After a few quick snaps, I see the blinds jostle. And then the door opens. I’m freaked.

Out comes a tall, lanky man. In a casual, friendly voice he says, “You like E.T.?” I reply, “Yeah. He’s great.” I tell him about the project and he says, “Wow. That is so cool. When can I hear everything on NPR?”