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"It's
as obvious as Main Street. It's only just a matter of
time"
Steaming
up from the sweating streets of urban decline and welling
in that wild-eyed stare of nowhere to go, nothing to
do -- that's where you find Main Street.
There, at the corner of inspiration and desperation,
in every American City: just north of the gutter, just
south of the sky. Main Street is everywhere.
Conceived
by revered Atlanta songwriter, Clay Harper, Main Street,
the album, is ambitious concept, indeed. Weaving the
storied difficulties of broken people in a broken time
into a complex musical soundscape, Harper literally
covers your eyes and shows you a movie. And with all
that's happening around you – caustic confrontations,
whooping horns, shuffling drums, and hardhearted monologues
of apathetic surrender – you can't help but see
it clearly. And hear it even more.
"It's
kind of a double edged sword," says Harper. "These
days they make a soundtrack that has absolutely nothing
to do with the movie. I grew up listening to West Side
Story, where the songs actually played and integral
part in the storytelling.
"Harper's
choice of the storytelling medium follows naturally
from his recent forays into children's music. He recorded
two albums enlisting support Cindy Wilson, Mo Tucker,
Ian Dury, and Susan Cowsill. Prior to that, Harper made
a name for himself frontingAtlanta scenesters, The Coolies
("Everybody wanted to sign us," he says, "but
we never showed up anywhere."), and performing
with Ottoman Empire and rap act, Def Mute.
On
Main Street, Harper tells his own semi-fictitious (each
of the characters is based on an actual person, he says)
story of one man's grappling with appearances and realities
as he grows out of himself and into the burning ether
of America's broken promise. It's a heavy tale, but
like most difficult journeys, Main Street is rich with
beautiful realizations.
"These
people get manufactured through college, then come out
and are set to drift, really," explains Harper.
"At least a significant portion of them drift to
seediness and corruption, and that's what this is about."
While
the lead character is actually based on a close friend
of Harper's ("He's a lawyer, and he just doesn't
fit in the world that he lives in – a downward
spiral in a life that's just not coming back."),
Kevn Kinney of Drivin' n Cryin' fills the unnamed protagonists
shoes throughout the album.
"He's
an old, old, old friend," explains Harper. "Drivin'
n Cryin' opened up for the Coolies, and I'm a huge fan
of his. I love his singing. I even write songs pretending
I'm him, sometimes."
"Clay
is one of my favorite singers," counters Kinney.
"So I felt a little guilty that he wasn't singing
the songs himself. My main reason to do it was to play
with music that I didn't write."
Regardless
of flatteries, the combination of Harper's cynical insight
and Kinney's burnt soul infuses Main Street with a near-classic
transcendence. Like Lou Reed before him, Harper knows
how to sense the sounds of the street, spanning the
spectrum into the unlikely territories of Jazz, Latin,
Rock, and Rhythm and Blues. And while the message presses
hard into the psyche, the music seems to smooth it over
in some surrendered celebration. It comes off like Kerouac's
"On The Road," but with just one road –
and nobody's leaving it.
"I
grew up in Milwaukee," says an empathetic Kinney.
"And there was a two block section that was my
hood. The whole world went on in that hood -- there
was a church there, there was a liquor store there.
It was Sesame Street with bars.
"Which
is a fair approximation of Main Street's hurt moralism,
really. For all of its pain, there's a conscious sense
of finding one's self in the mess, and seeing some beauty
in the sad characters hiding in the corners. Remarkably,
it ends with a touch of self-determination, of coming
through it all, as sung by Kinney on the title cut:
"There's
no such place as Main Street," he sings, "where
the sun shines all the time, and the birds sing like
only birds can sing when they're singing in your mind."
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