Jeff Healey Takes Band, Fans Under the Covers : Pop music: Despite the risks, the guitarist and songwriter thought it would be fun to do tunes ‘we used to do in clubs.’

In recent years, there’s been a proliferation of tribute albums to such popular musicians as Jimi Hendrix, Neil Young and the Grateful Dead. Their songs are sung by contemporary artists, usually with great respect but often with mixed results.

Guitar whiz Jeff Healey’s upcoming album takes a different approach. “Cover to Cover,” scheduled for a Nov. 8 release on Arista Records, will feature a dozen or so of Healey’s favorite tunes from such disparate sources as Hendrix, the Beatles, Robert Johnson, Bruce Springsteen, Cream, Howlin’ Wolf and Spirit.

Healey and his group recorded more than 20 selections over the last six months and, at press time, the songs to be included on the finished album had yet to be determined. But there’s a diverse batch of material from which to choose (see box). Healey hopes the results will please his longtime fans while adding new converts to his following.

Putting his personal stamp of guitar virtuosity on the tracks, Healey retains the essence of the originals.

The Jeff Healey Band--which includes bassist Joe Rockman and drummer Tom Stephen--will perform some of these guitar-driven covers, as well as material from the group’s past albums, when it appears tonight at the Coach House in San Juan Capistrano.

Where it was once fairly common for recording rock acts to wax a whole album of covers and standards--John Lennon, Bob Dylan, David Bowie, Harry Nilsson, Bob Seger and, more recently, Jeff Beck come to mind--this has become an unusual practice in the corporate-driven ‘80s and ‘90s. Healey, however, feels good about reviving the tradition.

“We decided that we wanted to do something different from the norm of the last three albums, which were predominantly new tunes,” he said recently from his Toronto home. “We thought that it would be fun to do a cover album and make it mostly tunes we used to do in clubs when we were just coming out. We came up with the idea about a year ago, and we just sort of slowly put it together.

“I’ve always tried to keep the band well-rounded, as I think we’ve shown on prior albums. We’ve done everything from blues to out-and-out rock tunes to slower tunes, like ‘Angel Eyes.’ We try to cover a wide range.”

The idea of an all-cover album is not without commercial and financial risk, however. Aside from the fact that Healey--a prolific songwriter--won’t garner any publishing royalties from the album is the possibility that the material will leave contemporary audiences scratching their heads. But Healey said the group and Arista’s A & R personnel gave a lot of thought to the project.

“You walk a fine line with this. Are they tunes that are too well-known by older people and musicologists, but aren’t known enough by young people? Are they tunes that aren’t known by anyone ? It’s a lot more complicated than it may seem. You can’t just pick 20 tunes, cut ‘em and say, ‘OK, let’s get out of here.’ ”

“Cover to Cover” will surely delight fans of Healey’s 1988 debut, the acclaimed guitar showcase “See the Light.” The album drew accolades from fans and peers alike. Guitar heroes such as B. B. King and Stevie Ray Vaughan hailed him as a revolutionary blues musician. Healey went on to win the prestigious Guitar Player magazine award as best blues guitarist in 1990.

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But Healey’s last album, 1992’s “Feel This,” was a slick, commercial effort that offered up expensive production values, hooky pop tunes and even a rapper at the expense of his once-fiery undiluted blues picking. While that album left some of Healey’s following cold, “Cover to Cover” features some of his most stunning guitar work to date.

The Canadian-born Healey, blind since he was 1, was a prodigy on the instrument. He began playing slide guitar in his lap at 6, accounting for the unique method he employs to this day when playing, although he gave up slide guitar when still a child. Healey still holds the guitar in his lap like a flat-neck Dobro, and frets with his hand atop the instrument’s neck, looking more like a piano player than a guitarist.

“A unique style or positioning is one thing, but what you do with it from there is another,” Healey is quick to point out. “I never gave any thought to my approach at age 7 or 8, when I gave up slide. I just did what felt natural to me.”

Healey is also an avid record collector who owns more than 18,000 78 r.p.m. discs, and thousands more albums on LP and CD. Early jazz is his specialty, Cab Calloway a particular favorite.

Healey also plays a number of brass instruments, as well as as keyboards and drums, leaving open the question of whether he might one day try to perform the music he collects.

“I’d love to do that, but I’ll take it as it comes,” he said. “I never even thought about doing this album until last year, so you never know. I’m only 28, and I’ve got a long bit of life ahead of me.”

* The Jeff Healey Band and 2,000 Lbs. of Blues perform tonight at the Coach House, 33157 Camino Capistrano, San Juan Capistrano. 8 p.m. $19.50. (714) 496-8930.

From Obscure Blues to Classic Rock

The Jeff Healy Band’s upcoming album, “Cover to Cover,” will feature a cross-section of material ranging from blues obscurities to classic-rock tunes. Healy recently discussed the songs he recorded, some of which may not appear on the album when it is released in November because the final song selections had not been made at press time.

* “Angel” (Jimi Hendrix): “ ‘Angel’ is a tune I’d done with several bands in the club days. . . . People forget that ‘The Cry of Love’ (the Hendrix album that included ‘Angel’) is essentially a collection of unfinished demos that Hendrix was working on at the time of his death, and in a lot of cases, you hear things that could have been done over had he lived long enough to complete it. So I took the (tender) elements that I figured were most important to the song, and worked it from there.”

* “Adam Raised a Cain” (Bruce Springsteen): “I’ve always been an admirer of Springsteen. I had done some of his tunes that other bar bands did--’Hungry Heart’ and all that sort of thing--when I was a teen-ager, but I didn’t want to do something here that had been done too much. Our co-producer, Thom Panunzio, was the engineer on ‘Darkness on the Edge of Town’ (the album that ‘Adam’ appeared on), and he suggested that this would be a good tune to try.”

* “Yer Blues” (The Beatles): “ ‘Yer Blues’ is a particular favorite of our drummer, Tom Stephen. I didn’t really know whether it would be a tune I could be comfortable with--I always liked it, but I associated it so much with (John) Lennon and what he felt and thought at that particular time, that I thought it was maybe a little too personal for anyone, let alone myself, to do. But we tried it, and it worked out well.”

* “Run Through the Jungle” (Creedence Clearwater Revival): “With CCR tunes, you go from things that are overdone to things that aren’t done for a good reason, and I’ll leave it at that. It seemed like not a lot of people had done this one; we thought we’d take a different approach to it--the vocal track is put through a little 1-watt Marshall amp that looks like a walkie talkie (for a distortion effect).

* “Shapes of Things” (The Yardbirds): “Everybody was crying for an instrumental. I wanted to do this a la the Yardbirds, and nobody seemed too wild about the idea. So we bashed it around and figured why don’t we do the (Jeff) Beck version, and dump the lyrics. That way, we’ve got an instrumental and everybody’s happy.”

* “Me and My Crazy Self” (Lonnie Johnson): “I was already familiar with Johnson’s stuff from the ‘20s and ‘30s. My bass player happened to pick up a compilation of Johnson’s tunes from the ‘50s that I’d never heard before, but which were quite good. That tune was on there, and I heard it and thought it would be fun to try, but more as a solo thing as Johnson would have recorded it in the ‘20s.”