in the summer of 1989, which seems a lot nearer in my mind than it really ought to, I took my then-girlfriend to see the Steve Miller Band at a place called ParkWest. She didn’t care much for the classic-rock stuff I’ve always loved, but Steve Miller was a particular favorite of mine at the time — like a lot of dorky young guys with delusions of coolness, I’d adopted “The Joker” as my personal theme song — and she indulged me.

ParkWest was located in the mountains above Salt Lake, only a couple miles outside Park City. Its main function was as a ski resort, but for years it hosted outdoor concerts during the summer months. It was a beautiful setting for live music, if a little on the rustic side. As I recall, there was no permanent seating, only grass that rose up a steep hillside with the stage positioned at the bottom. All shows were general admission, and if you wanted to be at all close to the stage, you had to show up early in the day and wait until the gates opened. Most people brought picnic lunches and a party attitude to pass the time. The worst aspect of the place was the parking — there really wasn’t much, at least nothing formal, just empty fields accessible by a two-lane road that led back to the main highway. If you did arrive early for the show, you’d find yourself waiting around again after the show for the traffic jam down below to clear out, a process that sometimes took hours. And of course, being outdoors, the venue was susceptible to the weather… something my girl and I learned in a pretty spectacular fashion the night of the Steve Miller show.

Miller had only been on a stage a short time — it seems like he’d only played three or four songs — when heavy, slate-colored clouds started boiling up over the mountainside behind us. When the wind started gusting high enough to set the hanging light rigs swaying, Steve announced that he and the band were going to go backstage for a few minutes and wait for things to blow over. Except they didn’t blow over. A few minutes later, a roadie rushed up to the microphone and said something along the lines of, “Ladies and gentlemen, we’re very sorry but the Weather Service has just announced a major lightning storm is about to hit. The show is cancelled. Be safe going home.” And just to emphasize the point, a tremendous crack of thunder split the air as he finished speaking.

My girl and I hadn’t even made it out of the fenced-in seating area when the first drops of rain started to pelt down. And then it was like someone opened a sluice gate. We were soaked to the skin by the time we reached my car, a VW Rabbit with a sunroof that served as my commuter special. Between the blinding rain and the parking lots rapidly transforming into muddy bogs, the traffic jam was worse than usual, and it soon became obvious we weren’t going anywhere for some time. So we passed the time as passionate teenagers have from time immemorial, steaming up the windows to the crackling music of a distant radio station and the drumming of rain on the car’s roof, shivering from both the cold and our own raging hormones, the outside world occasionally glaring white as lightning stitched across the sky…

The Steve Miller portion of the evening may have been something of a bust, but I certainly got a fond memory out of the evening. And I also discovered a new musical artist that I would soon become obsessed with. The opening act that night was a woman named Bonnie Raitt.

I was dimly aware of Bonnie before that night — I’d heard the name at least — but I really didn’t know much about her, and neither, I’d dare say, did many other people. She’d been around a long time at that point, chasing after the brass ring but never quite catching it, never quite breaking through to mainstream popularity. What I saw in her hour-long set prior to Miller’s, though, told me I wanted to know more. Her music seemed curiously timeless to me, as if it had just always been there waiting for me, and I liked how it resisted categorization. Rock, certainly, but heavily infused with blues and country… it was a sort of music I found myself gravitating more and more toward in my college years, music that was stripped down, authentic and human. It was music that suggested smoky juke-joints and long-neck beers, a mileau that was at once familiar and comfortable even though I’d never really experienced anything like that, like the sprung and duct-taped seat-back of a booth in a roadside diner. I found Bonnie Raitt’s music and the atmosphere it conjured deeply seductive… and Bonnie herself was incredibly sexy, a mature woman who knew her way around the world, leaning way back and smiling a playful smile as the bottle on her fingers slid across the strings of her guitar… all of which is nicely captured in tonight’s video selection. Which, for the record, I had not seen yet when Bonnie’s music filled my head with all those images:

“Thing Called Love” was first written and recorded by John Hiatt two years earlier, in 1987. Bonnie’s version appeared on her tenth album, Nick of Time — the album that would finally bring her the attention and acclaim she’d worked so long to find, as well as three Grammy Awards. A couple days ago, I saw on the Ultimate Classic Rock blog that Nick of Time was released this month 25 years ago. Twenty-five years. Incredible. As I said, ’89 doesn’t seem so far away to me.

In case you’re wondering, yes, that is the actor Dennis Quaid giving Bonnie the eye in the video. If I remember my trivia, they were an item for a while.

As for that girl I took to the concert, our relationship was over by the time Bonnie accepted her Grammys in April of 1990. ParkWest underwent a number of ownership and name changes — it was called Wolf Mountain for a time, and is currently known (rather unimaginatively, in my opinion) as The Canyons. I can’t remember when they stopped hosting concerts up there, but it’s been a very long time… decades, I believe. I can’t recall the last show I saw up there… but man, I still remember the Bonnie Raitt/Steve Miller show, the night of that huge rainstorm.