the first round

(2) rick dees and his cast of idiots, “disco duck”
swamped
(15) jeff healey band, “angel eyes”
138-54
and will play on in the second round

Read the essays, listen to the songs, and vote. Winner is the aggregate of the poll below and the @marchxness twitter poll. Polls closed @ 9am Arizona time on March 7.

janine annett on “Disco Duck”

Disco—was it bad, or was it good?
The answer, of course, is subjective. It depends who you ask, and when you ask them, and where, and how many drugs they’re on.
“Disco Sucks” was a popular saying—and t-shirt—by the late 70s, when disco had more than gone mainstream. The commodified version of disco was everywhere; it became disco-as-Muzak. Saturday Night Fever and its soundtrack dominated the cultural landscape. Disco had taken over; even non-disco acts were disco-fying their latest records. To the disco-haters, rock n’ roll (maybe punk) was “real music”. It was rebellion and heart. Disco was made partly by man, partly by machine—a pacemaker that kept a steady beat but lacked the authentic thump of a real, live beating heart.
Of course, another opinion is that disco was a precursor to house music and hip-hop, radical in its own way, an antidote to the stale 70s corporate rock that was everywhere at the time. Coming out of the 60s, where there was a lot of folk music that had melody but lacked rhythm, a burgeoning disco scene provided a counterbalance—and its own counterculture. Like so many musical movements, disco wasn’t just a sound—it was a way of dressing, of dancing, of looking and acting and even accessorizing, disco balls and glitter and platform shoes. Disco was born in urban nightclubs; it was said to be embraced in its early years by a diverse audience and was home to a thriving gay scene. The Village People, of course, would capture this ethos and bring it to a mainstream audience (I’m always baffled by how many people don’t realize “YMCA” is about promiscuous gay sex, and I find it especially strange that it always seems to be played at heterosexual weddings).
The song “Disco Duck” originally came out in 1976, the height of the disco movement, and made it to #1 on October 16, 1976. It managed to hold on to the spot for a week. Rick Dees was a radio DJ at the station WMPS in Memphis, TN. The story is that Rick heard a guy doing a Donald Duck impression at his gym and he wrote the song and hired his gym buddy to do the duck voice on the song.
According to Tom Breihan, who wrote about “Disco Duck” as part of a series on #1 hits for Stereogum, “’Disco Duck’ routinely shows up on worst-songs-of-all-time lists, and it truly is a bad song… If ‘Disco Duck’ belongs to a musical tradition, it isn’t disco. It’s the novelty song, the fading art form that was huge in the late ’50s and early ’60s but dying out by the mid-’70s. It’s possible that “Disco Duck” is the last true novelty to hit #1.” Rick tried to follow up with another disco-novelty track, “Dis-Gorilla (Part One)” in 1977, but it only went to #56 on the charts. I guess it’s hard to follow up a duck with a gorilla.
The lyrics to “Disco Duck” are incredibly simple. The chorus—really the only memorable part of the song—goes like this: “Disco, disco duck, try your luck, don’t be a cluck” (of course, chickens cluck; ducks quack). The “plot” of the song, as it were, is that Disco Duck is at a party, and he flaps his arms (not wings; the song says “arms”) on the dance floor. This man-duck-chicken just can’t stay off the dance floor and… loves disco, I guess?
The way I came to know “Disco Duck” is because someone thought it was a good idea to expand this Disco Duck character into “Irwin the Disco Duck” (which makes it sound like someone’s grandfather from Boca took up disco). Amazingly, Peter Pan Records—fine purveyors of albums for children; I also distinctly remember a recording of Peter and the Wolf put out by the company—released nine albums featuring Irwin the Disco Duck, ranging from Disco Duck Dance Party in 1976 to Big Hits Dance Party in 1980. Somehow, my parents acquired Irwin the Disco Duck in the Navy (released in 1979). The album featured disco songs with intros from a guy doing a duck voice. That’s it. Disco songs with a duck-voiced guy—a poor man’s Donald Duck, if you will—introducing them. But my sister and I thought it was hilarious. We would dance around to the disco songs, not at Studio 54 (speaking of the mainstreaming of disco, we also lived near a roller skating rink called “Studio 59” which was on a street called Route 59) but in a living room—admittedly, one with a sound system with comically large speakers (my mother still has them to this day. They still work perfectly, as do the turntable, CD player, and dual cassette decks. I guess they made things to last back then).
I just played “Disco Duck” for my son and his friend and asked them what they thought of it. “Make it stop,” my son said. “This is horrible.” He did, somehow, know how to do a “disco dance”—you know, the one you think of when you think of John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever with one arm up, finger pointing to the Disco gods. I didn’t teach him that. He somehow absorbed it from the cultural ether. It’s probably been lampooned in some cartoon he’s seen. Maybe Disco Stu on The Simpsons?
So I guess disco lives on. Is it good or is it bad? Who’s to say? It brought joy to millions of people, probably still does. And while “Disco Duck” is, by any measure, an objectively bad song, I have fond memories of dancing around to Disco Duck records with my family as a kid. That’s got to be worth something. Disco may or may not suck, but I’m okay with Irwin the Disco Duck.

* Fun fact: if you start googling a bunch of disco songs and clubs, you will get served up ads for things like a “Sequined V-neck Jumpsuit” (on sale for $193.20, size XS) or a “Disco Fever Blush Pink Metallic Jumpsuit” (only $68, available in XS—XL but sold out in size S).

Janine Annett is a writer who lives in New York. She previously wrote about hair metal for March Shredness and goth music for March Vladness. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, McSweeney's Internet Tendency, the Rumpus, Real Simple, and many other places. Janine's website is www.janineannett.com.

steven church on “angel eyes” and bona fides

“Each of the four living creatures had six wings and was covered with eyes all around, even under his wings." —Revelation 4:8

Here are some things you should know right up front about the acclaimed blues guitarist, Jeff Healey: He’s dead. But before he died, he’d also established himself as a world-class jazz trumpeter. And before that he’d established himself as a beloved and influential radio DJ in Toronto, Canada. And before that, when he was seven months old and shortly after being adopted, Healey lost his eyesight completely after he contracted retinoblastoma, a rare form of eye cancer. Three years later, he would receive his first guitar as a gift for Christmas in 1969. In 1979 he would form his first band. And in the summer of 1989, he released the song, “Angel Eyes,” which peaked at #5 on the Billboard Hot 100. This was, at least in the American popular imagination, also the peak of his career. This was also the first I’d heard of Jeff Healey, but he’d been exceptional for a long time.
Just as Jeff was learning to walk and talk, just stepping out into the world, Healey’s eyes were surgically removed and replaced with ocular prosthetics—two carefully crafted fake eyes. At around the age when most children are still wearing diapers and eating their boogers, he started playing guitar. Healey laid the instrument across his lap, plucking and strumming the strings from above sort of like you’d play a lap steel guitar or a dulcimer. This is how he learned to adapt. And this, ultimately, is part of how he became famous and one part of why we’re even talking about him in this contest. If you’ve seen him play, you know. You understand that it was something special to see Healey play the guitar. You understand that nobody had ever played a guitar that way before, nor maybe ever would again. And you understand that this must have been part of the reason why this song, “Angel Eyes,” was ever ranked in the Billboard Top 5.

A Google image search for “Angel Eyes” initially pops up hundreds of photos of a particular kind of automobile headlight ringed by a bright halo of light. Originally introduced as a signature design feature by high-end automaker, BMW, the “halo” or “corona” headlight is now a common accent and upgrade. The angel eye headlight is largely a cosmetic design feature as it doesn’t necessarily perform any better at a headlight’s one job—helping you see in the dark.

Jeff Healey was not a great blind guitarist. He was a great guitarist, respected worldwide for his talent. He would end up sharing the stage—and at times, upstaging—some of the most acclaimed blues musicians who ever lived. BB King called him a “brother,” and Stevie Ray Vaughan said he was the only other guitarist who ever really challenged him.
Known largely for his legendary live performances, Healey’s biggest radio and Billboard hit was “Angel Eyes.” It is not a good song. It is, as its membership in this contest suggests, a rather bad song. But it is not bad in that nostalgic wedding playlist sort of way. It’s not bad in that, “so bad it’s good” way. It’s bad in a way that makes it almost entirely forgettable. It’s bad in a have-to-look-it-up-on-YouTube-to-confirm it way. And sure, it is interesting—but not ironic—that a blind blues guitarist’s biggest commercial hit just happens to be a sappy pop song, written originally by John Hiatt, about a woman’s unexpected “eyes” for the singer. And it is also interesting—but not ironic—that the song is on an album titled, “See the Light.” And by “interesting” I mean that the whole confluence of intentional coincidences seems like something dreamed up by a bunch of ableist interns in a marketing department who wanted to turn Jeff Healey, the blues guitar virtuoso, into Jeff Healey the pop novelty and inspirational story.
As a boy, one of my favorite comic book superheroes was The Daredevil, the attorney-by-day, crime-fighter-by-night vigilante hero of Hell’s Kitchen. Blinded as a child, he developed super-human hearing and cat-quick reflexes. He was, basically, a blind ninja and I loved him—if I’m being honest—because of his disability, because of his blindness. And I loved Jeff Healey—at least in part—because of his blindness, because of his difference. I never wanted to be Superman or Spiderman, Batman, or Iron Man. But I definitely wanted to be The Daredevil and Jeff Healey. I wanted to be a blind ninja blues guitarist.
Only a truly privileged child could want to be blind, could desire that difference, and not understand that this desire was based on an ableist understanding of blindness; and I’m still trying to reconcile my love for heroes like Jeff Healey and The Daredevil, still coming to terms with a very real childhood desire to be differently abled and differently exceptional. The Daredevil was a superhero, but he was not the kind who’d been blessed with mutant superpowers or millions in disposable income. He was simply more human, more in-touch and in-tune with abilities we all possess and take for granted. Jeff Healey simply played the guitar better than most sighted people. He wasn’t a superhero. He was just a man. And there were so many things he couldn’t do, so many struggles we didn’t see as well as so many successes and achievements that didn’t fit into the narrative of the inspirational blind guitarist. But his music could change you. It could re-order your reality.

Healey was a proud Canadian, widely recognized by his home country for his musical and philanthropic efforts, He donated money to numerous charities and hosted fundraisers to fight childhood cancer. He was affable, charming, and funny and, by all accounts, a fundamentally decent person. In other words, he was Canadian. Before the hip-hop artist Drake became the musical darling of Toronto, that role was held by native son, Healey. (Frankly, I wish it still was.) There’s still a blues club in Toronto with his name on it, Healey’s Road House, though he never actually owned or managed the club. After releasing his blues guitar albums Healey changed his path and recorded several jazz albums; and he is considered by many critics and fans to be equally (if not more) accomplished as a trumpeter.
This is yet another example of the rare kind of virtuosic talent that Healey possessed, yet another thing that makes him different, that sets him apart and makes him special. And he is special. I knew it the first time I saw him play, perhaps on the David Letterman show for his network TV debut, a performance that featured him, at one point, standing up and playing the guitar with his teeth. Admittedly that was a little weird and kind of forced, in part because when he holds up the guitar, you can’t see his face or his teeth. But in general, there’s just something about the way Healey embodies his music that’s so genuine and pure; and in the summer of 1989, just before I started my Senior year of High School, there were so few things in life that seemed genuine and pure. I’d been in a bad relationship for a few months at that point, one that would only get worse. At 17-years-old I’d also apparently reached the peak of my physical abilities. At one point that summer while playing basketball nearly every day, I could take one step, jump, and dunk a basketball two-handed. Then my body started to break down. The right knee went first as bouts of tendinitis sapped my leaping ability; and a shoulder injury that fall would be the beginning of a nagging injury that still bothers me today. But it’s only been in the last ten years that my eyes have started to fail as I’ve moved from 1.0 to 2.0 magnification reading glasses these days and I need them to read anything on my phone. Our phones, of course, are one of our primary ways of interacting with the world and some days I realize that without my reading glasses, my phone is just a blurry screen with bright colors. I can’t see anything. I can’t read texts from my children or see their faces. And because my hands, already too big for tiny phones, are also plagued with bouts of arthritis, I struggle to keep up with the most basic communication interface today. My children make fun of me as I squint and stab at my phone’s keyboard with my index fingers, hunting and pecking because I can’t see well enough to communicate.

When Jeff Healey plays his guitar on his lap, it looks a little strange. I can’t think of anyone else who plays this way. It’s not your stereotypical rock star style of playing. Then again, I can’t think of any other blind guitarists; and my admittedly cursory search turns up very little in this area. Ry Cooder is blind in one eye and wears an ocular prosthetic. And in another strange coincidence, Leo Fender, founder of Fender Musical Instruments and inventor of one of the most iconic blues guitars ever made, the Fender Stratocaster, was also blind in one eye and wore an ocular prosthetic. But totally blind guitarists? There just aren’t a lot of them.
Like many people who lose their sight, Healey adapted and adjusted, worked hard and practiced, turning what some think of as a disability into a unique ability. Playing with his guitar on his lap not only allows Healey to sit down on stage, something else that sets him apart from other lead guitar players, many of whom have made the cross-stage strut as much a part of their playing as anything else. It also allows Healey to strum and pluck the strings almost like he’s playing a piano or a lap steel guitar. His right-hand strums as his left hand’s fingers bounce and dance across the fret board, his head bobbing and swaying in rhythm. His style is wholly his own and impossible to imitate. Sometimes he looks up and smiles as he plays his guitar, this lovely little unrehearsed gesture of joy, and when, as an awkward seventeen-year-old in 1989, I watched him play on television, I’d often found myself smiling, too. Happiness, studies have shown, can be contagious. It can spread, even through a TV screen somewhere in a basement in Kansas and it can hover over you like a circle of light that never leaves. I remember his smile. It still makes me smile.

One of the first ocular prosthetics was found on the excavated body of Persian queen and dated around 2800-2900 B.C. Hand crafted of clay and painted with a golden iris and sun-rays stretching out from the center, the prosthetic eye was sewn into her eye-socket with golden thread.  

Here are some things you should know about me right up front: I grew in the 70’s and early 80’s in a midwestern college town with a thriving music scene—though I’d never know it until much later. My parents weren’t really musically inclined or interested, definitely not down with rock, rap, metal, or the blues. They didn’t attend live shows or try to “turn me on to music.” We rarely listened to music in the house. That experience was confined almost entirely to cars. My father loved musicals, John Denver and that one song, “Money for Nothing,” by Dire Straits. My mom had an Abba tape in her car.
That was pretty much it.
So, when I got older and started discovering music on my own, I felt like a blank slate or like an alien visiting another planet. Everything was new and exciting and kind of scary at times. I once bought Motley Crue’s LP, Shout at the Devil, because I liked “Looks that Kill” and the MTV video. But when I brought the album home, put it on my turntable, and started listening, I just couldn’t handle all the violence and misogyny (though I didn’t know that word at the time). I read their lyrics and was shocked by them, unprepared for the gritty reality of rock music. I preferred, apparently, the old school violence and misogyny of the blues, so I traded in Crue for the palatable, melodious and conservative sounds of BB King singing to a woman about how he “gave her seven children and now she wants to give them back.”
Also, for whatever reason, there were few things besides wailing blues guitar solo that gave me that tingling feeling all up and down my spine. I still get it when I Iisten to a great guitarist. I loved the pioneers like BB and Muddy Waters and Buddy Guy, but the late 80’s was also a time of popular resurgence of the blues guitarist to the top of the charts or at least the forefront of the American consciousness. And it was contemporary artists like Jeff Healey, Robert Cray, and Stevie Ray Vaughan who led the charge along with bands like ZZ Top, The Fabulous Thunderbirds and others. Cray’s album, Strong Persuader, competed along with Healey for my attention; but it wasn’t that tough of a competition in part because the music video for “Angel Eyes,” is irredeemably bad. You shouldn’t watch it and I’m sorry if you already have.  

Though often called “glass eyes,” ocular prosthetics are today rarely made of actual glass but instead of high-tech plastic polymers. Glass eyes were crafted and used in Victorian era England, but production shifted eventually to Paris and then Germany due to the superior quality and craftsmanship in their glassblowing. World War II effectively ended American reliance on German-made glass prosthetics and, along with so many other products, the plastics industry stepped in to fill the void.

It’s hard to talk about Jeff Healey without talking about one of the greatest bad movies of all time, Road House. Healey was, by some accounts, a co-star (or at the very least a strong supporting character) in the 1989 movie starring Patrick Swayze.
Healey and his band recorded the album, See the Light, and “Angel Eyes,” while filming the movie. Healey plays Cody, the blind blues guitarist and lead singer for the house band at a comically violent dive bar called The Double Deuce. Road House, though designed to highlight Swayze’s multi-faceted talents (dancing AND fighting), also became a vehicle for Jeff Healey and a launching pad into that brief but bright moment of fame in the late 80’s. If not for the confluence of forces during those years that brought Healey and Swayze together, I doubt we would’ve ever heard Healey’s “Angel Eyes.”
Jeff has numerous lines in the film, repeated interactions with Swayze’s character, Dalton, some of which were central to the plot of the film, some of which are the sort of exposition through dialogue that is often the hallmark of bad writing—and there is a LOT of bad writing in this movie. Healey and his band are featured heavily in the early fight scenes at The Double Deuce, where they play behind a screen of chicken-wire and are regularly pelted with shards of broken beer bottles. The Double Deuce, before Dalton’s arrival, had fallen on tough times and he’d been hired to usher the place into a new light, a different sort of future where it is one of the hottest live music venues outside of Kansas City. In his recruitment pitch to Dalton, the bar’s owner says of the Double Deuce, “It used to be a sweet deal. Now it’s the kind of place where you sweep up the eyeballs after closing.” 

As a song “Angel Eyes,” is the stuff of grocery store Muzak stations, and definitely not the best showcase for Healey’s guitar playing talents. Don’t get me wrong. He has a good voice, but it’s not the reason you listen to Jeff Healey. You listen to him for what he can do with a guitar. “Angel Eyes” may, in fact, be the worst song on the whole album. And the video is just kind of sappy and weird, a pastiche of scenes shot while the band appears to be recording the album. The video is so boring there’s just not much to say about it. The song’s lyrics are essentially a direct address from a man to woman, a confession of his confusion over why she loves him when all these other men want her, why when given so many other options, she would “turn her angel eyes my way.”
Boring.
I mean, in your worst, sappiest moment, you wouldn’t comment on your lover’s “angel eyes.”
Would you?
If so, you probably also use the world “cerulean” to describe said eyes. 
The gist of the song is, “Gosh, you’re swell. Thanks for liking me.”
It’s the Eddie Haskell of rock songs.
It’s elevator-friendly dentist-office rock.
This is a song for slow dancing at a Junior High Party in the 80’s.
This is a song for brunch.
For watching paint dry.
Or shopping at Whole Foods. 

The idiomatic phrase, “to have an eye for” something means you have expertise in that area or are exceptionally skilled at something. It means to have exceptional capabilities. In writing, though, one is often told that they have an “eye for detail,” which doesn’t mean they are an expert at deploying “details” but that they understand which details are meaningful and which are not. “Eye” is associated with intelligence and artistic acumen. They understand which details work to characterize an individual, reveal inner thoughts, amplify tension, and move the plot forward. These details are often called “telling” details, which has always seemed odd to me since the cliché command to “show don’t tell,” demands the use of “telling” details.

The idiomatic title phrase of Healey’s album, “See the Light,” means to understand the truth of something, to finally recognize what you’ve denied or ignored and is often used to refer to “finding Jesus,” participating in the age-old enlightenment trope of moving from darkness into light. Healey, of course, lived almost his entire life in absolute darkness, the utter and complete absence of light. Despite the name of his album, Healey probably held few memories of light. Perhaps it was only the suggestion of a memory, a fragment of a dream, a bright shard in his mind. And thus, we realize again how ableist some of our most trusted narrative tropes can be. One does not need to literally “see the light,” to experience enlightenment. You can get there by simply watching Jeff Healey play the guitar.

At its best, a “guitar face” reveals the physicality of emotion, the ineffable bodily register of music through the guitarist’s face. It’s almost a non-verbal dialogue between human and machine, between artist and instrument. Sometimes it looks as if the guitarist is mimicking the notes with his mouth. Sometimes the guitarist is doing just that. Other times it’s the pained look of a weight-lifter as he cleans-and-jerks the bar over his head. Or it’s the look of a hernia happening in real time, or the look of intractable constipation. And sometimes it looks like the guitar just smells awful, is if it emits a foul odor with each plucked string. When this happens, the guitarist’s face will screw up tight and his lips will pucker from the stink. This is called, “stinky guitar face.”
Jeff Healey’s “guitar face,” is unlike any other guitarist’s, in part because he’s blind and in part because he’s sitting down, but also because he just seems to viscerally enjoy music in a way that most of us wish we could. Healey’s guitar face projects a refreshing and infectious unselfconsciousness, an unabashed happiness that, for me at least, offered an antidote to the overly self-conscious and self-aggrandizing era of 80’s hair metal of the time (which I also loved), where the lead guitarist’s “guitar face” was often a rehearsed pandering performance involving lots of make-up, puckered kissy-face lips, and exaggerated finger pointing at the audience.
This was not Jeff Healey, who looks more like a kid from Vacation Bible School or the Boy Scouts than he does a rock star. Healey didn’t dress in costumes or draw attention to himself with anything other than his guitar playing and his voice.
Stevie Ray Vaughan, by contrast, regularly wore a flowing long Mexican-style shirt, a poncho or blousy shirt-thing, diaphanous scarves and a big black bolero-style hat. I loved him, too, but for different reasons. He dressed like a cowboy Pirate; and for a live performance with Jeff Healey on the Canadian Broadcasting Network of the song, “Look at Little Sister,” he’s wearing a purple suit and his signature bolero hat festooned with silver flare and a large white feather. If you saw him walking down the street, you’d think he was headed to a cos-play convention or something. And when he played his guitar, his face registered the music in ways that endeared him to me and many others. He was the KING of stinky guitar face. SRV’s lips would quiver as he strummed and when he’d launch into a solo, his whole face scrunched and puckered as if his guitar smelled awful, as if every pluck of a string released an odious stench. You’d watch his whole body—which had been loose and relaxed, strumming along—tense up as if he’s been electrocuted and all the energy and angst is transferred to the instrument as he bent and plucked at the stinky strings. His face contorted, twisted, and danced. His face told a story.
Healey, on the other hand, has his wholesome happy guitar face and is dressed like your Dad or your youth pastor. In the video, he might even be wearing acid-washed jeans. And if you saw him walking down the street, you’d think he was trying to sell you a Bible or Amway or something. It doesn’t matter, though, because it is not his clothes that catch your attention but instead his bouncing mop of blond hair and his radiant smile, his unabashedly joyful guitar face.

As Healey takes the solo handoff from SRV who says, “Tell ‘em about it, Jeff,” you can see the respect Stevie feels toward his fellow guitarist. He steps back and slides into the role of rhythm support. This is no charity handoff. This is two axe men, at the top of their game, jamming together. Healey rolls into the starting blocks, takes the baton, and then just lopes out of the gates with long strides. He starts slow, building momentum, and you can hear the energy churning as he rounds the first corner. His hands move over his guitar like a weaver’s hands move on a loom; but then there is this moment of surprise and pure improvisational beauty when, in the midst of the solo, Healey stands up from his chair, somewhat clumsily, in a way that doesn’t seem rehearsed.
He holds the instrument awkwardly as he steps into the spotlight of center stage and bounces up and down like a kid at a concert. He can’t help himself. Clearly moved by the music, his mouth contorts into an SRV-worthy stinky guitar face that looks as if the strings are tied to his lips. He takes that nice little blues riff and proceeds to shred it into pieces, stretching out the notes into a sustained and stunning bluesy wail. Healey’s blond mop thrashes like wheat in a windstorm. He yanks the guitar up high above his hip as if he’s a jazz bass player, and seems consistently in danger of dropping the instrument. For a second you’re worried he might. But he doesn’t. He keeps the guitar right. He pulls the body up and down, slapping the instrument against his leg, his left hand hitting the frets from above instead of from below. It’s awkward for sure. But it doesn’t matter. The guitar sings. It screams; and at one point the camera, heretofore mesmerized by Healey’s solo, turns quickly to capture the look on Stevie Ray’s face, a look that says, “Holy shit, man!” And then the moment passes and Healey sits back down, handing the baton back to Stevie again.
I tell you all of this, in part, to establish Jeff Healey’s bona fides. I tell you this because it’s important backstory and because, in order to talk about the “badness” of “Angel Eyes,” we have to explore the goodness around the song and the artist as well. I tell you this to round out the character of Healey and of the song because there is no gut-ripping guitar solo in “Angel Eyes,” no moment of transcendence, no stinky guitar face, no reach for something bigger that rattles you to your bones—because this song is a bad song, a boring song, a song to which you should not dedicate much time, certainly not as much time as it has taken you to read this essay. I tell you all these things so you will recognize my honest appreciation for Jeff Healey outside the context of the song and, I suppose, the context of this contest. I tell you these things because all I have left is an eye for such details.

Steven Church is the author of the collection of essays, I’m Just Getting to the Disturbing Part: On Work, Fear, and Fatherhood, and five other books. He also edited the essay anthology, The Spirit of Disruption, and is a founding editor of The Normal School. He coordinates the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Fresno State.