Thinking about influences, speaking as a musician, is a funny thing. When asked, I'm likely to name four or five musicians/bands (Jimi Hendrix, Led Zeppelin, Prince, Nels Cline, Jeff Beck, etc) in a neat, concise summary. The questioner then usually nods his/her head, as if that list has somehow told them something about me. Surely it has told them something, and that something will have to do because the whole story could really never be told. Influences are ever present, and every song and/or record I've ever heard has influenced me in some way - right down to those thoughts that are as simple as "Well, that record is horrible!"
The point is that it's hard to summarize something like one's influences. Looking at my own little list it's clear that I've combined my early inspirations (Jimi Hendrix, Led Zeppelin, Prince) with a few guitar cats whom I currently try to emulate (Nels Cline, Jeff Beck). There's a lot of stuff that came in between then and now, however. There are lots of cracks, and lots of things that have fallen in between those cracks, pushing and expanding over time, etc etc. Forgotten influences, so to speak. Then time will come along and remind you of a particular influence and the reminder can be striking.
The recent death of Jeff Healey served as a particular reminder for me. Jeff's debut record See The Light was released in 1988, when the old Spider was a mere lad of the age 14. Guitar players working a variation of the old minor pentatonic had my attention at the time, and blues/blues-based rock 'n' roll was my lifeblood. I couldn't yet process the higher mechanics of jazz players, but I could already dissect just who was doing what with the ol' minor pentatonic. And boy was Jeff Healey doing something with it!
Jeff's playing was aggressive and inventive. He had speed without speed being the point, and he was able to find that one hot note to grab and squeeze squeals of mercy from. I think his approach to rhythm playing was particularly enlightening for me, as he would fret only fragments of chords at times rather than the entire chord. This is something that I do right up to the present, and that may be a bit of Jeff's influence shining through.
Another artist I was discovering about that time was John Hiatt, so discovering a few of Hiatt's tunes on See The Light was an additional thrill. My band learned Jeff's arrangement of Hiatt's "Confidence Man" and began playing it in our sets during the summer of 1989. Shortly afterwards we added two more tunes from See The Light to our set, "Blue Jean Blues" and "Don't Let Your Chance Go By." I had only heard ZZ Top's original version of "Blue Jean Blues" a few times on classic rock radio at that point. "Don't Let Your Chance Go By" was a Jeff Healey original, and was probably my favorite to play.
Jeff's next two albums were attempts at re-capturing the magic of See The Light but they missed the mark. The production was too glossy, the covers obvious reaches for another "Angel Eyes" type of hit, and the "rawness" was missing. When the fourth album was a straight up all-covers album I took a pass. By this time it was 1995 and I was listening to fewer players from the minor pentatonic playing field. I had heard Nels Cline and Tom Verlaine by that point, and when it did come to blues influenced rock I leaned closer to the Black Crowes and that year's Amorica release, which featured original material with raw production values. Every now and then I would be in a record store and I would pick up Jeff's cover album and think I should buy it, but somehow it never happened.
After that I sort of stopped paying attention to Jeff. I heard at some point he had a radio show where he played his famous collection of 78s, and I heard at another point about him playing in a jazz band. But I never heard of his recent battles with cancer, and his death this year took me quite by surprise. It got me to thinking about how influential he had been on me at one stage in life, and how now, nearly twenty years later(!), he was barely on my field of vision.
So, here's to you Jeff. Thanks for the influence and the great music. I might've forgotten your name on the verbal list through the years, but I guarantee you it's been there in my fingers the entire time.
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