David Eisner, thank you for a spectacular night. I’ll add it to my “most amazing shows of my Life” list. I’m not sure if it goes on my “world-changing” list, but it might.
Going to see Robert Plant!!! 
Tonight David (the owner of House of Musical Traditions) took his wife and Kristen and I to see Band of Joy. I went to see Robert Plant. I went to see the old singer of Led Zeppelin and I was prepared to see exactly that. You know. The old singer for Led Zeppelin.
I Loved Led Zeppelin in the way that most people Love Led Zeppelin. In high school. In older generations it might have been college… but for my high school friends we discovered classic rock right around our teen years and quickly divided into camps. The heavier drug users all Loved their Pink Floyd. The kids that in more recent years probably would’ve been called Goths had divide their Love for the Cure with the Doors – and us rockers had to make room next to Metallica and Megadeth for their progenitors, Led Zeppelin.
I’d be a fool to say it was that cut and dried, but it’s how I remember a lot of it. I had a lot of crossover. We all HAD to see The Wall…. But I also HAD to see The Song Remains The Same…. And it was in the Live videos and the bootleg recordings that I fell in Love with the intensity, the loose-limbed jam, the blues-based pre-heavy metal that was Led Zeppelin. I had it all on vinyl and again on the collector’s edition cassette boxed set, and every Live show I could get my hands on. My parents knew they could get me Led Zeppelin books for Christmas when I’d finally run out of music to get….
Glen Echo. It’s important to go wander our local urban ruins every once in a while. After lunch with my brother’s family (still weird to say) we dropped in at Glen Echo because Kristen had never been there before. It’s beautiful to see how these places evolve.
Information was slower to disseminate back then. Before I was truly passionate about them I slowly grew to learn that I’d never ever SEE the band. In an age where I was slowly collecting personal viewings of my idols – Primus, Rage Against the Machine, Van Halen, Fugazi, Cypress Hill, the Indigo Girls – I was really saddened to hear that Led Zeppelin was no longer together. Beyond that, John Bonham was dead! Beyond THAT Robert PLANT had died! THE VOICE OF LED ZEPPELIN!!! (I was pretty broken up over this and spent much of first period crying… it wasn’t until lunch someone said something to the effect of “no man… the TENNIS PLAYER”)
Robert Plant turned out solo material. I might be able to see him play some day, but I never really Loved his psychedelic pop tunes. Page and Plant gave me a renewed hope that I could someday see that greatness that I’d missed out on… but No Quarter came and went and toured and went and I didn’t really have that much interest. Plant’s voice was gone and the rehashed Zeppelin tunes truly had little soul compared to the original recordings. By then my interests were pretty well elsewhere turned in any case. My tastes had changed a lot over the years, and though I still Loved some of the Live jams, the power of some tunes and the passion of others, I just didn’t get the same thrill from the music any more.
I think you needed that context. I saw the old singer for Led Zeppelin. And he had aged. And he was different. And he’s found comfort in his NEW voice and the musicians that he has surrounded himself with are spectacular. And they are fun. And they are tight. And Patti Griffin was his “backup” singer. They opened with a Zeppelin tune, which absolutely shocked me – but reimagined into a swampy, dirty rock tune full of verb and sex and bassy baritone instruments. Toms thundered through Constitution Hall and me and Kristen looked at one another and GRINNED.
Well. He played a Zeppelin tune. It’s not like he’ll play any of the others.
ilyAIMY performing a full band show at Teavolve in Baltimore, MD.
I was so wrong. He visited a lot of different periods of his Life in the hour + that the band played. There were a number of Robert Plant pop tunes from the 80s, including one that I’d only ever heard because someone put it on a mix tape years ago. There were a number of Zeppelin tunes that combined the emotional content of finally hearing the material Live along with the aesthetic JOY of hearing these things re-created into something that truly matched my musical taste as it stands now. There were a number of new-to-me tunes, a lot of stuff off the new album (“Monkey” stands high above the rest in my mind) that crept a strange line between the swamp rock roots of the Band of Joy and gospel songs from god-knows-WHEN prehistory. I hadn’t had high hopes, I must admit. The weather and my recent illness had me pretty down. The sound was pretty rough (I hear it’s an atrocious venue to mix) and the opening act was mediocre at best (their high point was a washboard through a wah pedal) – but it was an absolutely delicious night.
