The Jeff Healey Band Artistfacts

1985-2008
Jeff HealeyVocals, guitar, harmonica
Joe RockmanBass
Tom StephenDrums
Jeff Healey was blind. He had a rare form of eye cancer called retinoblastoma that caused him to lose his sight about a year after he was born.
Healy played guitar seated with the instrument on his lap. This was his natural style - when he was 3 years old he got his first guitar (an acoustic) and immediately started playing it that way. "I've never tried to analyze the style," he told Musician magazine. "It's just something that gave me the kind of sound I wanted, without really knowing how it happened."
Healy's unique style allowed him to do the fretting with his left hand from above, which gave him unusual versatility. Other guitarists were fascinated by the technique but quickly found it untenable. It worked for Healy because he started playing that way and stuck with it.
The band formed in Toronto, where the three musicians knew each other from the local scene; Joe Rockman was a popular session player. Healey was always the focus, which the other two members were fine with. "When Jeff started playing, we knew something special was happening," Tom Stephen said.
Jeff Healey built his legend in 1985 when the guitarist Albert Collins played a show in Toronto at the serendipitously named Albert's Hall, and let Healey sit in for a song. Transfixed, Collins kept the 19-year-old Healey on stage for an hour and had him come back three nights later to sit in with his buddy, Stevie Ray Vaughan, who gushed about Healey after the show. Word quickly spread in the Toronto scene and in the guitar community.
When he played live, Healey didn't always stay seated. In fact, he was quite a showman, sometimes performing Hendrix maneuvers like playing with his teeth or behind his head, and even rushing into the audience at times.
The band released some singles independently before landing a deal with Arista, run at the time by Clive Davis. Their first album, See The Light, was released in 1988 and includes their biggest hit: "Angel Eyes." That was their only song to get much airplay in America, but in Canada they had a lot of songs on the radio, thanks in part to regulations compelling stations to play music by Canadian artists.
In the 1989 movie Road House, starring Patrick Swayze as a bouncer, they play the house band at the Double Deuce bar, where most of the action takes place. They got the gig because Jimmy Iovine, who produced a track on their debut album, See The Light, worked on the soundtrack for the movie.

The story fed to the press was that the film's screenwriter saw Healey perform and used him as the basis for the character that leads the bar band. That was probably a fabrication, but the movie did get the band a lot of attention and helped boost sales of their album.
Having eye cancer when he was young put Healey at risk for developing cancer later in life, and sadly, he did. In 2006 he was diagnosed with lung cancer, which led to his death in 2008 at 41. His album Mess Of Blues was released posthumously a month later.

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