Stephen King’s imagination gets the better of him as he mistakes Jeff Healey’s scary guitar licks for slide

By Steve Newton

The other night as I was finishing off Stephen King’s new collection of stories, You Like it Darker, the first sentence of the book’s afterword caught my attention.

“One day while I was taking my morning walk,” writes King, “listening to the Jeff Healey Band playing ‘Highway 49’ and thinking of nothing but how cool that slide-guitar solo is, I saw two green plastic figures wearing red caps.”

King goes on to explain how what he saw on that stroll gave him the idea for one of the darker stories in the collection, “Rattlesnakes”, but I wasn’t so interested in that–I just wanted to check out that cool slide-guitar solo he was talking about.

Although I own a few Jeff Healey albums, I wasn’t familiar with “Highway 49”, a blues song written by Big Joe Williams that was included on the U.S. version of Healey’s 1995 Cover to Cover LP. It was easy to find on YouTube though:

Wow. Now I know why King was so impressed. Healey really kicks ass on that tune; I mean his guitar solos are scary good. But I don’t think that’s slide guitar; I’m pretty sure those are his talented fingers (and maybe some thumbs) doin’ the talking.

Maybe King was confusing the sound with the guitar stylings of George Thorogood, who definitely used a slide on that tune they used in the opening credits for the film adaptation of his novel Christine.

Either way, it’s cool that the horror master listens to Jeff Healey on his morning walks. His awareness of Canadian guitar-rock was established long ago when he took his pen name Richard Bachman from Bachman-Turner Overdrive.

Let it ride, Steve-O. Let it ride!