Earlier this week, I attended a work-related recreational function where I made the mistake of enjoying a couple pints of Wasatch Evolution Ale on an empty stomach. Don’t worry, I didn’t make a fool of myself or anything. All my clothing stayed firmly fastened and in the proper locations, and no inappropriate advances were made. I didn’t even attempt to dance. But my tongue was considerably loosened by the beer — hey, I never claimed to be a world-class drinker! — and when a favorite old song popped up in the playlist, I couldn’t resist sharing the memory I tend to associate with it. Fortunately, my coworkers seemed more amused than horrified… so this week for Friday Evening Videos, I figured what the hell, I’ll share it with all of you too…

My junior year of high school, I was lucky enough to land a cushy job as a media aide during the class period just before lunch. What that means is, I got to hang out for an hour — unsupervised, no less! — in an isolated room just off the school library where we kept the VCRs, projectors, and assorted stage equipment. Once in a blue moon, I would have to check out some of this gear to a faculty member, or do a bit of cleaning and light maintenance when something was checked back in, but mostly I did homework from my other classes, read trashy paperbacks, and generally killed time before lunch while listening to the totally kick-ass stereo system that was set up in the back corner. (It had a graphic equalizer, the absolute pinnacle of audio technology at that time! At least I thought so… I just liked monkeying with all the sliders.)

The word soon got out that I was down there, and friends began dropping by for visits on one pretense or another. There was one friend in particular who was about to become… very memorable. She was an older woman, a senior to my junior, but — I have to be honest — I’d never given her much thought. Oh, I liked her well enough. We were definitely friends, and I enjoyed talking with her on the bus and such. But as far as romantic interest? Nada. I had my eyes too firmly fixed on the girls who were emulating Madonna’s “Like a Virgin”-era look, and this girl was the diametric opposite to that. She was a good church-going Mormon who carried her scriptures in her backpack and dressed very modestly and gave no indication that there were any ulterior motives whatsoever behind her visits to that equipment room. Until one afternoon when this song was playing on that way-cool, fully equalized stereo with the quadrophonic sound:

The Bangles’ “Manic Monday” debuted the week of January 25, 1986, and it stayed on the charts for months, eventually peaking at the number-two position in April. It was ubiquitous and inescapable, and it made The Bangles’ career. I loved it because it was cute and catchy and Susannah Hoffs’ breathy, little-girlish voice made me weak in the knees, and because it had that naughty line in the bridge about “making some noise.” And I loved it even more after it became the soundtrack for my very first lessons in French kissing.

Following that first afternoon, I had a brief and intense affair with this friend of mine, this good Mormon older woman who taught me such a valuable life skill, consisting mostly of her coming to the equipment room during my aide period and making out like crazy with me (often to the tune of “Manic Monday,” as it seemed to play sometime during that hour every day), then the two of us pretending nothing had changed during our bus ride at the end of the day. It lasted maybe a month, if that long. As I recall, we just sort of… stopped… as quickly and unexpectedly as we’d begun. And at the end of the year, she wrote in my yearbook, “Sorry you didn’t get everything you wanted.” (That was a fun one to explain to my mom, who of course loved reading everything her baby’s friends wrote in his yearbook.)

That makes it sound like this girl was a tease, or like I’d pressured her to go farther than first base. I don’t recall either of those scenarios being the case. In my mind, I was pretty satisfied with our arrangement. But who knows… I am seeing it through a hazy filter of 30-year-old nostalgia, after all. Maybe I was more of a boor than I remember. I hope not. I like to think I was just a little adventure for this conservative girl as her graduation and grown-up life loomed before her.

I have no idea whatever happened to her. I’ve looked for her on Facebook, and to the best of my Google abilities, and I haven’t found so much as an outdated phone number. Wherever she is, I hope her life turned out well… and that she gets as much of a warm glow from the opening riff of “Manic Monday” as I do…

Happy weekend, everyone…

Don Henley has long struck me as rather a horrible person, dour and self-important and (it would seem) a real pain in the butt to work with. A few years ago, I read a book about The Eagles, the band that delivered him to stardom, and he did not come off well at all in that volume. (Although, to be fair, his bandmate Glenn Frey didn’t either; he and Henley are polar opposites in many ways, but they apparently both orbit a common center of asshole-ishness.)

And yet in spite of his perceived shortcomings as a human being, I enjoy quite a lot of his work, both with The Eagles and his solo efforts. He’s got a knack for creating memorable phrases as well as an insightful eye for the ways that life beats you down. Yes, his music is often pretty melancholy, if not downright sad… but it also frequently feels just plain true.

This week’s Friday Evening Video is a song from his third solo album, The End of the Innocence, which came out in 1989… yes, the same landmark year when I got rained out of a Steve Miller concert and discovered Bonnie Raitt. What can I say? It was a memorable twelve months… for a lot of reasons.

“The Heart of the Matter” was the third single from The End of the Innocence. It came out in early 1990 and made it to number 21 on the Billboard chart, which means I heard it a lot during that winter and spring. And it broke my heart a little bit more every time I did, too. It’s possibly the best track on the album… and it’s the one I always used to skip, because I just couldn’t take hearing it. It cut a little too close to the bone, you see, and after several middle-of-the-night spins of that album when I ended up sitting in the dark with a metaphorical knife sticking out of my chest, I decided it was better for me to simply avoid that one. Quite honestly, I didn’t think about this tune for years.

Just lately, though, it’s been on my mind again. I’ve realized it’s finally time to let go of some things I’ve been carrying around for far too long. I finally can let go of them, and I think it’s possible I already have without even realizing it. Now when I hear “The Heart of the Matter,” it still resonates for me… but the frequency has changed. The verses that I used to not want to hear are now the ones that make the most sense to me.  Make of that what you will; it’s probably doesn’t mean anything to anyone but myself.

So let’s play the damn song, shall we? As far as I can determine, there isn’t a music video for it per se, but I did find this lovely performance of it from Farm Aid IV, a benefit concert held on April 7, 1990… probably just about the time I was deciding I never wanted to hear this song again. Well, tonight I not only want to hear it, I think maybe I kind of need to…

Hope you all enjoy it, and have a good weekend.

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.