IF THERE'S A BLUES GUITAR HEAVEN . . .

Recently I came upon a blog entry that riffs sardonically on the notion behind that 1974 chart-buster by The Righteous Brothers, “Rock and Roll Heaven.” Equal parts catchy and corny, the song’s refrain—“If there’s a rock and roll heaven, well you know they’ve got a hell of a band”—prompted this hermeneutical musing:

For years, the notion of heaven as a sort of celestial amphitheater has captivated generations of slack-witted rock fanatics. One need only ponder the logistics for more than a second to realize this notion, however rosy, is deeply flawed and most assuredly false. In fact, if there is a “Rock And Roll Heaven”, one can rest reasonably assured that they’ve got a terrible, disorganized and awful sounding band.

Fair enough. But the death last March of Canadian blues-rocker Jeff Healey makes me wonder if Blues Guitar Heaven might be a bit more harmonious. I still remember the first time I heard—or even heard of—Jeff Healey. I was driving to work on the Southeast Expressway when his version of “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” came on the radio: I almost rolled my soccer-mom minivan over the railing and onto Neponset Circle. I remember thinking, “Take that . . . George Harrison”: although none other than Eric Clapton plays the guitar solo on the original Beatles version of “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” on The White Album, for my money Healey’s recording was instantly the definitive one. For my money, indeed: that very afternoon I went out and bought the Jeff Healey Band’s LP Hell to Pay—which also became one of my first CD purchases when I made that conversion not long afterwards. Imagine my surprise, though, when I discovered via the liner notes that George Harrison actually plays acoustic rhythm guitar behind Healey on “While My Guitar Gently Weeps.” Fair enough.

I’ve added lots of Healey to my CD library since then, including his posthumous release, Mess of Blues, which features a number of live cuts that testify to how, even as he was battling the sarcoma that would finally kill him at age 42, Healey remained a literal “guitar hero,” a vital musical force who could hold his own with the best of them. Blown away from the start by his technique and his attack, I didn’t realize until the first time I saw him perform—in a Tiresias-like cameo in Patrick Swayze’s knock-em-down-drag-em-out film Road House—that Healey, blind from infancy, played guitar in an unorthodox fashion, seated and with the instrument lying flat across his lap: that contributes to his distinctive phrasing and note-bending. On Mess of Blues, Healey delivers the goods one final time—as if from beyond the grave.

But Healey’s premature death reminded me of another guitar hero who died young—the matchless Stevie Ray Vaughan. In December of 1984, on the eve of undertaking a 12-hour solo drive, I bought a cassette of his album Texas Flood . . . and was enthralled from the moment I heard those opening double-stopped notes of “Love Struck Baby.” Twenty-five years and hundreds of thousands of miles later, I am still enthralled: SRV was a guitar player who had something to say on guitar and the talent to say it. When he died in a post-concert helicopter crash in 1990, the blues world lost a transcendent figure.

Which brings me to the question of whether “Blues Guitar Heaven” would suffer the same plague of prima donna-driven dysfunction that the aforementioned blogger projects for “Rock and Roll Heaven.” Not by the evidence of this priceless YouTube video featuring none other than SRV and a young Jeff Healey jamming on “Look at Little Sister.” If there’s a blues guitar heaven, who better to front the house band than Jeff Healey and Stevie Ray Vaughan?