What’s beyond the headlines

The world lost another soul-music legend when Don Covay passed away last month at age 78. Although Covay had only modest success as a recording artist, his influence as a songwriter and singer was substantial. That influence is strikingly apparent in the vocal inflections of an early admirer from England named Mick Jagger.

Soul blogger Red Kelly wrote an excellent appreciation of Covay on his website, The “B” Side (redkelley.blogspot.com), in which he notes that after Covay suffered a stroke in 1992, Jagger and his bandmates “bought him his own rolling rehab facility.” It’s more than appropriate that they did so, since without Covay, we’d never know the Stones.

Don Covay.

Don Covay.

I recently picked up a great collection of some of Covay’s work from the early ’70s, “Super Bad.” It contains a cut called “What’s in the Headlines” that I’d previously heard years ago on a different compilation, but which has been floating around my head this week.

Accompanied by acoustic guitar and kazoo (as befits a song about poverty), with a couple female background singers as his foil, Covay conveys the weariness and wariness with which we open the daily paper to see the latest bad news. “Good mornin’, mean ol’ world / What do you have in store for me today?” it begins. “Good mornin’, mean ol’ world / How much dues will I pay? / Will I borrow, will I steal? / Will I make enough money to get a hot meal? / Now tell me, what’s in the headlines today? / Will it be the bread line today?”

“Does anybody know I’m here?” Covay sings during the bridge. “Does anybody really care? / ’Cause no one ever reads the small print / If they do, they discover me on an accident.”

That lyric resonates for me in light of this week’s “news” that some people staying in Portland’s homeless shelters have a significant amount of money in the bank. “State audit finds people with more than $20,000 in savings stayed at Portland shelter,” reads the headline of a Feb. 24 story by Forecaster reporter David Harry, posted on the BDN’s website. A similar headline topped the Feb. 23 report in the Portland Press Herald.

We all know why newspaper editors rush to post stories like this as soon as possible: sensationalism sells, and there’s the ever-present fear of getting scooped. But neither of those initial stories even attempted to answer the crucial question they raised: why would people with the means to afford a home choose to be homeless?

On the evening of Feb. 24, the Press Herald posted a follow-up story that finally acknowledged this question, but once again the headline was more accusatory than explanatory: “City knew some shelter users had thousands in the bank, state says.”

In the “small print” we read what any rational person would conclude all along: mental illness and substance abuse, the root causes of chronic homelessness, are the same factors at play here.

“No one is staying in the shelters or languishing in the streets for years at a time to save money,” Preble Street executive director Mark Swann reportedly said during a news conference on Tuesday, after the “news” first broke. “Shelters are not places people want to stay at if they have choices.”

The real story here is that access to affordable and effective mental-health and substance-abuse services is so inadequate in Maine that our homeless shelters and jails are housing (warehousing, really) those suffering from cognitive disorders and addiction. The LePage administration’s record on these issues is dreadful and getting worse (see its recent efforts to replace methadone treatment with Suboxone). The state’s response to the fact that some homeless people are too ill to access their own money is to threaten to withhold money to the city that shelters them.

This week’s headlines do nothing to enlighten readers to the real story. Worse, they provide more fodder for LePage’s campaign to demonize and marginalize the poor in the name of “welfare reform.”

At the end of “What’s in the Headlines,” a second group of women start laughing hysterically behind Covay and the ladies singing back-up. I can’t say I really know why Covay added this — whether it’s meant to lighten an unstintingly dark song, or as a comment on the general public’s indifference to poverty and war. But when I picture Gov. LePage reading this week’s headlines, knowing he’s played the media like a fiddle again, I can almost hear the belly laughs echoing through the Blaine House.

Chris Busby

About Chris Busby

Chris Busby is editor and publisher of The Bollard, a monthly magazine about Portland. He writes a weekly column for the BDN.