The Led Zeppelin singer continues his terrific explorations of roots music in a terrific night at the United Theater on Broadway in downtown Los Angeles on Saturday, Nov. 22.
A small moment can mean a lot.
As Robert Plant and his band Saving Grace performed in Los Angeles on Saturday, Nov. 22, one of the sweetest unspoken messages came when the Led Zeppelin singer was mostly silent on stage.
It was when singer Suzi Dian, who shared vocal duties with Plant throughout the night, stepped into the spotlight for a cover of the Gillian Welch song “Orphan Girl”: The most famous man in the United Theater on Broadway perched on a stool in the shadows upstage, adding harmonies on the choruses and nothing more.
The point, made time and again throughout the show, is that Plant considers himself just another player in the band, no more or less important than Dian or the other four musicians in Saving Grace. The recent self-titled album, which consists of mostly acoustic traditional folk and blues and a little bit of rock, led to the current Roar in Fall tour.
Even when the occasional Led Zeppelin song brought the sold-out crowd to their feet, Plant stepped to the side of the stage as guitarist Tony Kelsey or banjoist Matt Worley soloed.
At 77, if Plant wanted to reunite with Led Zeppelin’s Jimmy Page and John Paul Jones, he could back a Brinks truck up to the stage door every night for all the money a Zeppelin tour would earn.
That he doesn’t – the absence of the late drummer John Bonham is his longstanding reason – and instead chooses to play smaller venues in a band with musicians who are terrific players yet so little-known that none of them have Wikipedia pages, speaks volumes.
The night opened with “The Cuckoo,” a traditional English folk song with roots at least as far back as the 18th century. Plant and Dian sang close harmonies as Worley and Kelsey played banjo and mandolin, cellist Barney Morse-Brown plucked a sort of bassline, and drummer Oli Jefferson kept time.
Dian took lead vocals on “Higher Rock,” a modern American folk song by Martha Scanlan of the Reeltime Travelers, with Plant adding harmonies and harmonica, acoustic guitars and cello strumming and plucking rhythmically behind them.
