ROBERT PLANT - The Great Hall, Exeter University 8 October 2002

THOUGHTS ON PLANT'S EXETER SHOW, STEAMED OVER LANGUEDOC RED WINE AT 11 A.M.

My first thought, maybe the most important one, is this: someone on this list who caught Plant a month or so back in the states wrote something like, “he has more range than any time since the early 1970 shows.” I thought, “what bullshit.”

On the way home from the Great Hall, University of Exeter...incidentally I've been there before. My daughter sang in the hall with her school last year, it's a really cool old place-giant balcony with a capacity of maybe 800 then a floor to hold maybe another 1500 or so, not a bad vantage point in the house. Cool art on the walls.

Anyway, I caught myself, on the way home from Plant, going “man, he hasn't lost ANYTHING, I mean I haven't heard that kind of range out of him since...since those very earliest tapes....[at this point I realize that I've read this somewhere and I know where]...and the thing is too, at this point he has absolute pinpoint control, I mean his voice didn't go anywhere except for exactly where he wanted it to go...he has way more control than in those early Zeppelin days when he was like a teenager with a Ferrari...”

So I liked the show. I'm not sorry that I can't provide a setlist, it doesn't really fit in with the way I do concerts for the most part. Frankly, I don't like to take notes. I didn't take notes in college and by the time I got to law school my slacking strategies were so pronounced that I was able to avoid wasting any of my student loans on textbooks. I don't take notes, don't like it.

I like to drink, generally speaking and especially in and around concerts. I've given up all of my other questionable chemical alliances; you know, it's strange but I don't think I smelled pot the entire night, which is too bad because I love the smell of it. My sense of smell isn't so great these days, my sense of smell mainly consists of perceiving thicknesses, but pot is one of the few things it can relate to; pot, patchouli, fresh cut grass and, for some reason, watermelon.

So I had a few beers going to pick up my two oldest daughters at their respective schools about two miles away from home, and back. Then we grabbed a cab to the Great Western Hotel. Somehow we've lived here for more than a year and never gone-every two years it wins the award from the Campaign For Real Ale, an award that can't be won in consecutive years. Opened with a couple pints of London Pride, then moved on to something else, a local bitter. Exeter Bitter or something like that.

I don't socialize much anymore but I've met a few serious beer enthusiasts who swear by London Pride, so I went back. I figured, correctly as it turned out, that it's one of those beers, like Double Diamond, where you don't get the fullness of the taste until you've laid down a base of two or three pints. Theresa'd spilt a pint all over the table before we left and the bases were established and expanded. It's a nice place, not that big but it has that warm British pub/hotel thing going....soft jazz rendiitons of pop standards playing softly, but fairly good ones actually, almost tasteful. A couple pints of London Pride and aesthetics can move back a little bit if you're not in your own place.

At least it wasn't Gareth Gates! My 6 year-old daughter was taunting my teenage daughter the other day, “Gareth Gates is already married! He married somebody else!” Not true, about the marriage, but I digress.

They were also serving beer in a room off the Great Hall, so we switched gears to Carlsberg for a few. Some kid, glimpsing my shirt yelled sadly, “Oh no! Please don't tell me that you actually SAW Guns ‘n Roses!!”

“Aw man, I saw ‘em a couple times, I lived in southern California for six years, I saw ‘em blow the Stones off the stage at L.A. Coliseum....” the joys of being an elder statesman for awful hoodlums everywhere. And there's no irony in that statement.

Peter Brown (? Arthur Brown?, I know his name isn't Dennis Brown) was opening and by the time we staggered in towards the stage he was already on. “Oh shit,” I said, “I hope we didn't miss ‘Fire.'” It turned out that he was in the middle of “Fire,” going on and on trying to do anything to goose the crowd, none of which was working. It was more funny than sad, but he probably thought it was his fault.

He was tall and had long stringy hair halfway down his back, past his armpits. Given the attendant realities he looked as good as you could have hoped. I cheered.

This makes 6 times I've seen Plant: Biloxi, Mississippi on the first US tour; Houston on the second; San Diego for Manic Nirvana; Portland with Page the first tour; and the Gorge for the second P/P. So I've seen him a few times without making so much as any indication of making out a setlist. Almost got arrested in Houston, but how could anyone not?

They came out very casually. Backdrop of the album cover, but no particular light show or anything. A couple guys entering stage left, one of them Robert Plant, the greatest rock and roll singer of all time. He's coming to your town, he'll bellow at some point if you're lucky.

For fashion consultants, and chicks (babes if you prefer, as a real liberal I don't move much for political correctness), he looks great. Marvelous. I mean, the man is in his later 50s or something, and has lived a little, but you could easily cast him in his early 40s. I don't doubt that he drinks every day, as someone claims to have seen in an interview, but usually moderately enough if so, and followed by enormous quantities of wheat grass and detoxicants when he has to chase the London Pride over the hills and far towards morning.

He looked to be in damn good shape. No fleshy face, no belly. Wearing an understated blue and white, not Hawaiian-shirt but that kind of shirt, and levis. His hair was a little darker than we're used to seeing and super curly, almost jeri-curl in places. My reading on this, incidentally, is not perm, but instead a particularly liberal application of Aveda Elixir or something similar and probably more expensive.

I, you see, in all modesty, have hair very much like that of Robert Plant. So I think I can read his hair better than the uninitiated. In fact so many people believe that I resemble Robert Plant (or Peter Frampton, especially among black people) that oftentimes people walk up to me and yell, “Jimmy Page!”

A mystery, truely.

Anyway the band was functional, but Robert Plant didn't appear to be having a very good time during the first song or two. I was dumbfounded, he sounded good. Why not have fun?

Maybe the crowd. I can say in all honesty that my wife Theresa is without any question the greatest dancer on the planet. Not like a ballerina, or a Brittney Spears pop idol choreographed; more like Isadora Duncan with Grateful Dead overtones, dancing from the soul out through the limbs and on into space. Grace incarnate, the outer extent of possible movement without gravitational ripple, the locomotive equivalent of the laughter of absolution. She requires some room at concerts, and once people see what she's up to we've never not got it.

We were maybe four rows back (festival standing; assigned seats are more evil than anything Jimmy ever encountered), got plenty of room. I require a little room too, as I flounce about like a stick figure salmon trying to get off a rock. But we were the only people moving in the entire hall.

It was really weird. I've been to other shows in the UK, in Exeter; a Zeppelin tribute band in Exeter even, without this problem. We were the only people moving in the entire hall. Unbelievable.

It would be wrong to say that it was a bad crowd though. No it wouldn't. It was one of the two worst crowds I've ever been in at a rock concert. The worst was at The Gorge, for Neil Young in ‘96. I was so disgusted with the crowd for ignoring and talking through Patti Smith that I didn't even stay for Neil. I didn't want anything to do with it. Of course all hell broke out of the sky during “Like a Hurricane” during that show, as immortalized in the Jim Jarmusch film, but I don't care, I'm glad I wasn't there. Maybe I purified the place in reverse by leaving.

So at least the Exeter audience was attentive. They weren't talking, and they definitely weren't rude, they just didn't so much as nod their head during songs, and weren't terribly expressive between.

So Plant looked bored. Something had to be done. I don't know precisely what kind of balancing act went on between my fermented synapses but I settled on yelling “You're Robert Plant!”

It didn't have any apparent effect, and those around me didn't bother to notice. Theresa looked at me to make sure I wasn't about to lose the script entirely, then smiled.

It was a reasonable enough thing to yell, really. I mean, it wasn't “Come on do better!,” because that wasn't the point; more like “You're royalty, get on ya horse and prance!”

Within five minutes things had changed in the sense that he looked more relaxed (“at least I'm not as drunk as THAT guy” maybe), and the audience was getting louder between songs. They never got to the point of actually moving during them, except for me and Theresa, but things got downright vocal in between what with some guys in the back, narco-leftists no doubt, demanding a commentary on Iraq.

I wanted to hear one too, to tell the truth. I can't imagine a more comprehensive gift to Al-qaeda recruiting officers than a US invasion of Iraq. Well, other than letting the Sharon government murder innocent Palestinians at will or stated remorse in their own country and we've already done that. It's a situation without a side of good guys or bad guys (Palestine/Israel, I agree that Al-qaeda is bad guys but if I was the parent of one of the 500,000 Iraqi children that the UN says have died due to US imposed sanctions, that's a ration of 170-1 as set up against World Trade Center victims for those who thinks math adds any measure, I would agree that the American government is bad guys too), my friends, and it's already been placed beyond hope for the foreseeable future.

Damn. Keep a stiff upper lip. We're gonna need it.

Which is why Plant was probably smart enough to have ignored the calls for commentary, though I would have voted to hear his thoughts; as a social diplomat, as a genius, as a concerned soul, as someone who's lived a long life and been in some interesting rooms.

The new material worked well, the band turned out to be more towards brilliant than functional. For me they're more of a band than anything Robert's seen since 1980. This album isn't my favorite Plant solo album (Manic Nirvana), but it has more a feel of a band doing certain things and not doing other things, it has a unified feel instead of being a collection of songs with wildly diverging production values and aesthetics. These guys are a real band, they work together like a band, and they all play their instruments well, even Charlie.

Incidentally Porl wasn't in the band, I was initially disapointed but got over it once I saw how well things were going along.

If Plant keeps ‘em together, which I don't know if I'd recommend or not...I mean, if it was up to me, I'd put him, Page, and JPJ together with...maybe Fishman on drums....and start out by doing a live tour of improvised Thin Lizzy, GNR, MC5 and Rage Against the Machine standards and take it from there...but you've got to have your heart in that kind of thing, and that's obviously not where Robert's heart's at. He's into melody and gentleness, and beauty...not rampaging and ass-kicking as much. Not Iraq, on either side of the issue. And there are only two sides until someone moves.

Still, when they played “Babe I'm Gonna Leave You,” they blew the fucking roof off the place. Any four second interval was worth fifty times the price of admission. It was the most unbelievable vocal by any singer that I've ever witnessed in my life, and my dad used to be a church choir director and there once was this singer named Mrs. Impola, a Korean lady who could sing in Exeter and be heard in Calais without amplification. Ok, to be truthfully accurate...we lived in Heilbronn, Germany, and they could hear her in Svalbard.

Robert was like that, but way better, and better material, and amped out the skylights with guitar driving twin turbines thrusting an arc between the bowels of the plumbing and the stratospheric satellites trying to maintain control of things from an orbit secularized at 750,000 feet.

How do you say? He was loud. He was on it. He was perfect. The band didn't blow it, they even added to the extent that they were noticed.

The other highlight was, against anything I would have guessed on the way in, “Song of the Siren.” It wasn't even one of the songs off Dreamland that I was most looking forward to. It has no right to work live: too soft, too much feel, doesn't even move much for a ballad. Robert understands this and God knows how much more, he made a brief speech requesting patience before going into it. Not sure what he was worried about, it may not have been the friendliest crowd but there wasn't anything menacing about it.

Nothing had anything to do with it when he started. It couldn't be more clear how much he loves this song. Yea, like my Theresa loves “Tangerine,” and with the passion I reserved for “Whole Lotta Love” in the bourbon and cocaine days.

I think he's probably touring just so that he can sing this song. I mean think about it. You don't have to love the new material, I don't though I like it a lot, BUT...the big difference is....unlike the Who, Robert is not touring exclusively on material from 20-40 years ago....unlike the Stones, Robert is not touring on material from 20-40 years ago with a few crappy recent imitations mixed in....Robert is, as I would hope we would all do, whether we have the kind of financial stability he undoubtedly enjoys....Robert is doing whatever he fucking feels like doing.

And what he most feels like doing, it appears to me, is singing “Song of the Siren.” And he's enough of a legend, enough of a showman, enough of a singer, enough of a man....to get that across to the audience.

And I can't explain it any better than that.

Incidentally I'll researching my third novel in Munich in two weeks or so, and I'm thinking about a collateral subplot involving the recording of Presence. If anyone knows anything about those days, and Page's behavior in particular with the “weird German hippies” beyond what was (no doubt inaccurately, though without any detail) related in the pulp versions of Hammer and Stairway, please let me know.

I was just thinking on it, I mean I haven't had as much luck with my novels. The first one opens with the quote of the little old lady who hits Plant in the face at Paignton Station on his way to meet Page and form Led Zeppelin. That one was picked up by a Canadian publisher who promptly went out of business (last year) prior to publication. In my second novel one of the protagonists, one of the Carranza brothers known as The Judge, claims that Led Zeppelin is the first musician since Beethoven. Now I've figured out how to work them into the third.

How long until I cut the chord.

And who could want to?

Oh yeah, I got a t-shirt. Theresa convinced me that the mustard colored big deal one wouldn't look good with my colouring, I've learned that she's always right in these matters....so I got one with....I think of it as an old Zep era, it's a grey shirt, with a Zep era picture that I associate with Kezar Stadium, maybe wrongly-maybe because I printed it as the cover for my Kezar tape I....with a dove on one arm, and a bier and a smoke in the other.

Peace,

Clayton

This review adopted from a post to Digital Graffiti

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