Musician Jeff Healey Dead at 41.

Canadian rocker Jeff Healey, perhaps best known for his hit "Angel Eyes," has lost his life-long battle with cancer.

Via Wiki:

Healey was never particularly enamored with the world of rock music,
however, and soon left it for music he preferred, vintage jazz. Jeff had been
sitting in with traditional jazz bands around Toronto since the beginning of his
music career.

In his later years, he released three CDs from his true passion,
traditional American jazz from the 1920s and 1930s. He was an avid record collector and
amassed a collection of well over 25,000 78 rpm records. For many years
Healey ran his music-based club Healey's on Bathurst Street in Toronto,
where he played with a rock band on Thursday nights, and with his jazz group,
Jeff Healey's Jazz Wizards, on Saturday afternoons. Healey had moved his club to
a bigger location at 56 Blue Jays Way and named it Jeff Healey's
Roadhouse.

I remember seeing Jeff Healey in concert when I was in high school. He was the opening act for Bon Jovi, and put on a heck of a show. It was interesting because they completely shut off the arena lights when he came on and left the stage, so that the audience wouldn't see him being led to his guitar stand. I enjoyed his act almost as much as the Bon Jovi performance.

I never knew until now that the cause of Healey's blindness was cancer. Music lost a good one today, and he'll be missed.

Link to image source.

Coolest Vid of the Day.

Actually, I found this yesterday, but oh well. This kid has the weirdest technique I've ever seen, but awesome trumps weird every time.

Long Live the Rock Ballad.

Check my profile and you'll see that I like all kinds of music. One particular type has a special place in my heart, however: the Rock Ballad.

I still can sit and listen for hours to songs such as Stairway to Heaven, Bohemian Rhapsody, November Rain, Every Rose Has its Thorn. These songs and others by some of the great hard rock groups and "hair-bands" strike a deep nostalgic chord within me. It makes no sense; most of these songs are about old girlfriends, one-night stands, and poisonous habits, things I have little experience with. There's nothing in them that I can personally relate to.

Yet I had many friends (in my younger days) who did have some experience with these things, and songs like these gave me some insight into feelings they had which they rarely shared openly. I could understand them and why they did what they did. Music like this kept me from rejecting some very good friends just because I disapproved of their behavior; instead I stayed with them, trying to offer guidance when I could, and setting a good example. But it never would have worked if we didn't also have common ground.

In all of these songs, the Narrator (for lack of a better term) is an outcast, a misfit, someone who is not successful and not popular. I think my friends and I identified with that most of all, since we were the band geeks, the gamer geeks, or just plain geeks. We were not 'in,' and our beauty was often apparent only to ourselves. The ballads of my youth helped us get through those days when we waited for a change, even if we didn't know what it was. Maybe the maturity level of everyone else had to catch up with our own; maybe we had to really grow up ourselves. We did; we moved on to college or the workforce, where everyone is equally idealistic and forgiving or equally miserable. I've grown older now, and I have a wonderful wife and family to be my emotional crutch.

But I still like the ballads, and easily fall for new ones, like Lips of an Angel. They inspire a nostalgia in me for a time that I don't necessarily want to return to, but nevertheless had its joys and its sorrows. They remind me that things don't really change; they remain anthems for lonely groups of kids waiting for something, even if they don't yet know what it is.