Healey’s Hideaway: A Decade in the Rearview

The Celebration of a Club That Refused to Be Forgotten

Bill King Photography

The Redwood Theatre March 6, 2025

It’s been ten years since Healey’s Hideaway first hit the screen, immortalizing the smoky, sweat-drenched nights where Jeff Healey and a parade of blues and rock royalty set up shop in a no-frills joint that pulsed with raw, uncut music. For those who lived it, the club wasn’t just a venue—it was a spiritual home, a last bastion of the kind of unpretentious, gutbucket musicianship that Toronto always claimed to love but too often failed to preserve.

Tonight, at The Redwood Theatre, the ghosts of those golden nights were summoned again, as a lineup of top-flight players convened to mark the documentary’s tenth anniversary. Among them, Toney Springer, Eric Schenkman, Alec Fraser Jr., Quisha Wint, Virgil Scott, and Suzie Vinnick—voices and hands that know the language of the blues like second nature. Backed by The Celebration Band, helmed by Dave Murphy (musical director, vocals, and keys), with Dan Noordermeer (guitar), Stan Miczek (bass), and Tom Bona (drums)—a rhythm section built to groove, sweat, and burn.

It’s a night to remember a club that welcomed the legends and the unknowns alike. From the A-list surprise drop-ins—Stevie Ray’s rhythm section, The Rolling Stones’ sidemen—to the faithful who packed in nightly, knowing that, on any given night, they’d witness something close to magic. Healey’s Hideaway was Toronto’s answer to the blues rooms of Chicago, a space where the music was neither polished nor pretentious, just honest.

The Celebration Band took the stage of the Redwood Theatre and shook the dust off the kind of blues-fired energy that made Healey’s Hideaway a legend in the first place.

Jeff Healey, blind from childhood but seeing further than most, built something irreplaceable. The club may be gone, but as long as nights like this still happen, its spirit refuses to die.