Mondo is about to make the night come falling from the sky with a new vinyl set of rare and unreleased songs from The Jeff Healey Band recorded for the 1989 cult classic Road House, which celebrates its 35th anniversary this year.This unforgettable action film starred Patrick Swayze as a James Dalton, an unusually renowned bouncer (with a degree in philosophy from New York University!) who travels from the Big Apple to Jasper, Missouri to keep a rowdy club called the Double Deuce under control. While there, he runs afoul of an unscrupulous businessman (Ben Gazzara) with a stranglehold on the town's honest workers. An eclectic cast is rounded out by Kelly Lynch as the town's doctor, Sam Elliott as Swayze's impossibly virile mentor and even small turns from Keith David, pro wrestler Terry Funk and John Doe of the L.A. punk outfit X. An enduring film in the late Swayze's filmography, a Road House remake starring Jake Gyllenhaal was released on Prime Video earlier this year.
Healey, a blind blues guitarist from Toronto, Ontario, Canada, had burst onto the scene a year before Road House hit theaters with his eponymous Jeff Healey Band. See the Light, featuring bassist Joe Rockman and drummer Tom Stephen (plus a small array of guest stars including keyboardist Benmont Tench of Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers), was a smash on both sides of the U.S.-Canada border, and the tender ballad "Angel Eyes" became a Top 5 hit in America. But that tune was an anomaly: Healey and his band could rip, and did so as the de facto house band in the Double Deuce. (Healey also had a few scenes with Swayze when not playing.)
The original Road House soundtrack album was a various artists affair featuring four new recordings from Healey, two from Swayze (who'd scored a smash with "She's Like the Wind" off the soundtrack to his star turn in Dirty Dancing (1987)) and some catalog cuts from Little Feat, Otis Redding and others. Healey and his band played mostly covers throughout the film, from John Hiatt's "Confidence Man" (which opened See the Light) and Little Richard's "Long Tall Sally" to Cream's "White Room," Eddie Floyd's "Knock on Wood" and even a scintillating read on Bob Dylan's Empire Burlesque cut "When the Night Comes Falling from the Sky" which played over the closing credits.
Now, all those recordings for the film (and more!) will be released on Road House: The Lost Soundtrack. Produced in cooperation with Healey's estate (he died of cancer in 2008, at the too-young age of 41), this double vinyl set not only features a dozen tracks from the film, but another seven covers not featured in the film! Roger Costa, an archivist and co-administrator of Healey's estate, helped restore the audio and crafted an oral history/liner notes on the guitarist's work on the film in the accompanying eight-page liner notes, which also feature photos by Peter Sorel and additional unseen images. Mo Shafeek, Mondo's former creative director (who's since gone on to co-found the vinyl reissue label Mutant), designed the package and layout.