There were a couple of deaths last week that I feel I need to mention.
The first, a week ago yesterday, was a very talented guitarist named Jeff Healey, who passed away at the age of 41 following a lifelong battle with cancer. There’s a complete obituary here.
Healey had a hit single called “Angel Eyes” back in 1989 with the eponymous Jeff Healey Band, but most of the people reading this will probably know him more from his appearance in the film Road House, possibly the greatest of the late-80s/early-90s B-grade action flicks. (Have you noticed how they don’t really make this kind of movie anymore, solid yet unspectacular entertainments with modest ambitions and no illusions that they are destined to be great classics? I miss these “guilty pleasure” flicks…)
Blinded at an early age by the same disease that eventually took his life, Healey developed a unique method of playing his instrument: he played sitting down, with the guitar laying flat on his lap and his left hand held above the neck instead of wrapped around it, something like the way a steel-pedal guitar is played.
I first encountered his music right around the time when I was discovering the blues, or at least figuring out that much of the rock I really enjoy has its roots in the blues. I lost track of him in later years — the obit I linked above says that he eventually abandoned rock and went back to his first love, jazz, which unfortunately I have never been able to develop much interest in — but the early music of The Jeff Healey Band will always remind me of a moment when my horizons were expanding at a breathtaking rate. It’s a chapter of my life that continues to resonate and haunt me. And he had a most excellent mullet back in the day, too. I’m sorry to hear that he’s gone.
(In a related note, I also learned last week that Patrick Swayze, the star of Road House as well as one of my favorite movies, Dirty Dancing, is also suffering from cancer. Depending on which account you choose to believe, he may not have long before he reunites with Healey at the Double Deuce in the sky. I found this bizarre one-two punch, coming in the middle of a already-stressful week, deeply depressing.)
I was a bit less upset by the passing of Gary Gygax, the co-creator of the immensely popular role-playing game Dungeons and Dragons, last Tuesday at the age of 69. As I’ve noted before, I never got into D&D much; it always seemed like too much effort for too little fun, but then I’ve never been much for games of any kind. However, the game was a major background element of that decade I love so well, the 1980s, and even though I was a non-player, I have fond memories of the flavoring that D&D added to the stew of the time. I remember very clearly how much the game seemed to be in the air when I was in middle school, how comic books of the period featured full-page ads for the game and how Mormon parents fretted it was a gateway luring their children to devil worship (devil worship was a huge concern around about ’83 or so; supposedly, Salt Lake’s Memory Grove Park was ground zero for all manner of arcane and ungodly rituals). Elliot and his friends played D&D in E.T. and Tom Hanks had one of his first starring roles in a thinly veiled piece of anti-D&D propaganda called Mazes and Monsters (the ending of which — Tom Hanks’ character going insane and “becoming” his game-character — gave me a serious case of the willies. I can still picture the final scene in which “the cleric” tells his friends how peaceful it is at the inn where he lives — his own parents’ house — and how the “magic coin” he leaves on his nightstand each night as payment for board returns to him every morning).
Gygax’s creation was undeniably a huge influence on our current-day culture — one blog I’ve read calls it “a forerunner of the modern mashup-and-share approach to pop culture,” while an op-ed in The New York Times posits that:
We live in Gary Gygax’s world. The most popular books on earth are fantasy novels about wizards and magic swords. The most popular movies are about characters from superhero comic books. The most popular TV shows look like elaborate role-playing games: intricate, hidden-clue-laden science fiction stories connected to impossibly mathematical games that live both online and in the real world.
The best item I’ve read on Gygax’s passing, however, is Wil Wheaton’s remembrance of his relationship to D&D and role-playing games in general down through the stages of his life. It’s a far-more heartfelt tribute than I’m capable of, and even if you don’t care much about RPGs or Gary Gygax, it’s a nice example of the memoirist’s craft.
