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Jeff Healey
For Canadian guitarist Jeff Healey, the blues is a happening thing, always open to new influences and transforming itself into fantastic, innovative shapes.
By PHILIP BOOTH
© St. Petersburg Times, published March 29, 2001
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Blue weekend
Forget blue Monday; the Tampa Bay Blues Festival will be around for the entire weekend. It's bigger and better than ever -- and it's right here at home.
Blues in the night . . .
When Marcia Ball's piano gets in the mood indigo, an audience should still expect to shake a leg.
The Tampa Bay Blues Festival: Preview
The Tampa Bay Blues Festival, Friday through Sunday at Vinoy Park, on the waterfront in downtown St. Petersburg. Tickets at the gate are $20 for Friday, $25 for Saturday, $20 for Sunday.
Los Lobos
For Los Lobos, finding the band's voice involved going back to its heritage, then expanding the sound with more recent influences.
Who's who at the festival
Jonny Lang |
Something funny happened on the way to the big time for Jeff Healey.
The Canadian blues-rock guitarist, a former teenage sensation endorsed by the likes of B.B. King and Stevie Ray Vaughan, made his commercial breakthrough with 1988's See the Light. The disc, with its hit single Angel Eyes, went platinum.
Healey was seen on-screen and heard on the soundtrack of 1989's Road House, starring Patrick Swayze. In 1990, he released Hell to Pay, featuring a star-studded cast of guests, including Mark Knopfler, Paul Shaffer and George Harrison. That disc went gold in the United States and sold 2-million copies worldwide.
The blind virtuoso became an international star, blitzing the globe with bassist Joe Rockman and drummer Tom Stephen. Back at home, though, a backlash was developing.
"We do tend to like to eat our young up here," Healey, 35, says from his native Toronto. "It's hip to say, 'This person is so good, it's a damn shame they're not internationally acclaimed.' But the day I was internationally acclaimed, there was a certain amount of the community that says, 'Well, there they go.' "
Healey's third and fourth albums, 1992's Feel This and 1995's Grammy-nominated Cover to Cover, although as appealing as the earlier discs, weren't nearly as successful.
The band downshifted, leaving Arista Records and flirting with Atlantic, and recording 30 or 40 tunes at its own 24-track studio, released on its own Forte Records, distributed by Universal Canada. The process took five years, and the result, last year's Get Me Some, has yet to gain U.S. distribution.
The disc downplays the blues in favor of pop, rock and folk elements. Which One blasts open with a surge of metal-edged guitar, but the band goes for a swampy feel on Hey Hey and House Is Burning Down and offers unplugged balladry on Macon Georgia Blue and the closing Rachel's Song, a sentimental piece written for Healey's 6-year-old daughter. The group even recorded I Tried, by pop-rock hitmaker Diane Penn Warren.
"We tend to confuse the hell out of people at blues festivals, because I like doing what on the surface would appear to be a wide variety of things, anything from country-based to out-and-out fingers-in-your-ears rock 'n' roll," Healey says. "Good music is good music. I think we should take away some of the labels that are applied to it."
Healey also has had time lately for pet projects, including operating Forte and the jazz-oriented label Sensation, sitting in on trumpet with Dixieland group the Hot Five Jazzmakers, and hosting a jazz show on Canadian radio. The guitarist owns 25,000 78 rpm recordings of jazz and blues from the '20s to the '40s.
"I'm never going to stop loving to play and to be involved in music. I do have to admit that it's not important to me to be in the spotlight. My ego doesn't require constant pats on the back. I'm happy sitting on a stage or in a room with a bunch of people and playing rhythm guitar, if there's some good music going on. That is the one factor that has remained the same since I was a child."
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