See the Light

Zoo Freaks, that was the title cut. The Jeff Healey Band, “See the Light,” off the debut album of the same name.

Healey wrote it himself. The band first jammed it out on stage at the Bamboo Club in Toronto in early 1986, then cut it as one side of an indie single, “Adrianna / See the Light,” on a label they set up called Forte. The video of that version is what sold the suits. Arista heard the demos. Once they saw him play, the deal was done. In 1988 they re-cut it at The Complex in Los Angeles, Jimmy Iovine and Greg Ladanyi producing, and made it the closer and the name of the record. Arista put the album out September 13, 1988. It went platinum in the States, triple platinum in Canada, and peaked at 22 on the Billboard 200.

The man never played a guitar the way the rest of us do. Blind since he was a baby, he laid a Strat flat across his lap and fretted from above, left hand hammering the neck like a percussion instrument. First guitar he ever got, he put it in his lap. Guitar players tried to copy it and quit. The line “Can you see the light of love shinin’ from my heart?” is his own nod to that. He was barely twenty when he wrote it. Live, the same song might run five minutes or unwind into a fifteen- or twenty-minute jam, depending on the room.

Power trio behind him: Joe Rockman on bass, Tom Stephen on drums. A couple of years before the album, Stevie Ray Vaughan pulled a nineteen-year-old Healey up on a Toronto stage. A year after the record, Hollywood put him in Road House as Cody, house band at the Double Deuce. He died in 2008. The light on this one never went out.

Zoo Crew keeps the needle down. Stay with it, Freaks.