Jeff Healy Dies at Age 41

From the Toronto Star

Canadian rock and jazz musician Jeff Healey died Sunday in a Toronto hospital after a battle with cancer, his publicist said.He was 41.

Healey’s battle with cancer began at age one when he lost his sight due to Retinoblastoma, a rare form of retinal cancer.

Due to his blindness, Healey taught himself to play guitar by laying the instrument across his lap.

His unique playing style, combined with his blues-oriented vocals, earned him a reputation as a teenage musical prodigy. He shared stages with George Harrison, B.B. King and Stevie Ray Vaughan.

I guess God needed a blind guitar guru from Canada who starred in a film with Patrick Swayze.

Jeff was a great guitarist who definitely had an influence on me in my formative years. I never realised he had to endure cancer his whole life. Any interview I read `back in the day’ he just described that he lost his eyesight at birth and that was that.

This is the time, dear reader, where you take stock of your life, appreciate his challenges and triumphs, and eventually forget about them. Before you and I forget, here is an anecdote of my childhood fandom of Jeff Healy:

My musical relationship with Jeff Healy started with blood and ended with insults.

The first time I ever heard of Jeff Healy I was in Houston Texas. I was visiting the Galleria Mall which was an astonishing feat of consumer excess at that time.

They had an ice skating rink in the middle of the mall. The Canadian in me HAD to get on that rink. I donned on these awful dull purple skates and started cruising the perimeter. In the middle of this rink was a fellow trying to ice skate. My nationalism confirmed that Americans, especially Texans, have no damned right to be near ice.

While I was going clockwise (I was at 10:00) and this blond haired Elvis Stoyko attempted a triple axle. He completed the axle in my knee. After much blood loss and a tetanus shot, my folks and I hobbled over to a CD store (RIP)

I asked the retailer what guitar player/band was really hot right now? He said `DOOOOD! IT’S JEFF HEALY! CHECK HIM OUT! HE’S OUT OF SIGHT!’

I was impressionable, so I got the Jeff Healy `See The Light’ CD. Up to this part of my life, I never quite heard a guitar/guitarist wail like the sound on that album. It was ferocious sounding. I was very partial to the cover `Blue Jean Blues’ `Hideaway’ and `See The Light.’

While in Montreal a year or 2 later, I went to the International Jazz Festival to see Jeff. Keep in mind that I’m this swarthy, short, pudgy sculpture of sewage devoid of communication skills. Not so different from the present, save for the height. I managed to score back row tickets; sandwiched between pot smoking screamers who air drummed. I was no way cool enough to hang with them. Their leary Quebecois eyes shooting ice pellets at my suckitude.

Jeff was in a bad bad mood. Stevie Ray Vaughan passed away only a few months previous and crowd members were screaming out SRV’s name throughout the show. Jeff was keeping his cool and he kept on playing. He was excellent. As the set was drawing to a close, and I without any sence of theatre show etiquette or sensing tension, thought it best to yell out a song request. It was a fair request I think. It was a song he recorded. I certainly wasn’t going to yell out STEVIE RAY!!!!!!! like the other douchebags. So I yell out `PLAY BLUE JEAN BLUES’ while Jeff was talking.

Without allowing a single millisecond of silence in his banter he belts out `GO FUCK YOURSELF’ and the crowd erupted in glorious cheer. Jeff went on to describe that I was a big asshole bringing the whole show down. Great, insult the kid with the weight problem, not like you could see that right, Jeff?

The 2 Quebecker potheads jeered at me and I felt like an infection. After a few minutes, I left the concert. While I was leaving, Jeff started playing `The Thrill Is Gone’ by BB King. It was incendiary, appropriate, but I cared not.

The following day I read a review of the show reported by the Montreal Gazette. I made the paper! I was called `moron.’ Oh, the chills that ran through my pre-puby haired body.

Well, to put things in perspective, I received more press then than I do now.

I immediately took the 2 CD’s of his and gave them to a friend across the street. To this day the friend still doesn’t know why I gave the Jeff CD’s to him. And I totally regret getting rid of that `See the Light’ CD. I have some great memories tied to those songs. 

~ by ikonowerk on March 3, 2008.