Robert Plant begins U.S. tour with Alison Krauss

Here is the first professional review I've seen from the tour by Robert Plant and Alison Krauss, reprinted from the Louisville Courier.

Palace concert was fit for royalty
By Jeffrey Lee Puckett
April 19, 2008

As their impeccable band swung into "Rich Woman" with an easy flourish, Robert Plant and Alison Krauss took the stage Saturday night at the Louisville Palace to the first of several standing ovations.

Plant, still the god king of rock 'n' roll, strolled out with a quietly confident swagger, his hair in that tangle of curls so familiar to Led Zeppelin fans. Krauss looked like she was headed to a prom in her pink dress, maybe one with "Stairway to Heaven" as its theme.

And when they began singing, it was clear they still felt the chemistry so evident on their "Raising Sand" album, his well-traveled yowl blending perfectly with her pristine voice. There were a few goose bumps, and not the last.

This was the first night of the "Raising Sand" tour but both the singers and the band sounded fully warmed up. Krauss didn't hit a bad note all night, almost flaunting her perfect pitch, and the band, led by T Bone Burnett, was nearly flawless. Plant was Plant, and that was plenty.

Krauss and Plant performed nearly all of "Raising Sand," a handful of Led Zeppelin classics and a couple of songs associated with Krauss' solo career. They also threw in a George Jones cover just because they could.

As expected, the Zeppelin songs drew a huge response -- one guy screamed "Led Zeppelin rules!" barely five minutes into the show -- but they weren't the highlights (although "Black Dog," with the world's spookiest banjo, was pretty amazing).

"Fortune Teller" was better, with drummer Jay Bellerose exploding the song from the inside out, and Krauss broke every heart in the place with "Through the Morning, Through the Night." "Killing the Blues" and "Trampled Rose" were also contenders.

But the most unexpected song might have also been the night's finest. Krauss, backed by Plant, Buddy Miller and Stuart Duncan, soared through an a capella version of "Down to the River to Pray," from "O Brother, Where Art Thou?," that was so beautiful it sucked the air out of the room.

Everyone who went back for Sunday's second sold-out show should be so lucky.

Touring partners Plant, Krauss awarded for music video

Musical partners Robert Plant and Alison Krauss earned a CMT Music Award last night for their first music video, "Gone, Gone, Gone (Done Moved On)." Both singers were on hand in Nashville to receive their award, given in the category named Wide Open Video.



Finding himself at a ceremony surrounding him with country music stars including Brad Paisley, Taylor Swift and Kellie Pickler, Plant remarked about "how peculiar it is to be here."

Still, he said he was enamored by the attention given to Raising Sand, his album with Krauss. "It's a great honor to have made a record in Nashville that sounds so good," Plant said. "We'd like to thank T Bone Burnett, our amazing producer ... and the people of Nashville who have been amazing to us."

Plant also thanked the classic songwriting team behind the tune. The Everly Brothers cracked the Top 40 singles chart with "Gone, Gone, Gone" in 1964, for the last time in their singing career. "I'd like to thank Don and Phil Everly for getting me through my teenage years," said Plant, "and I'd like to thank Alison for helping me get through my late 50s."

The video, which debuted on CMT in late November, stars Plant, Krauss and Burnett performing on stages surrounded by bubbles in one scene and balloons in another. The song earned Plant and Krauss a Grammy in February.

The video has now been followed up with a second one for the two singers, this one for the song "Please Read the Letter." The only tune on their album co-written by either Plant or Krauss, it is a 10-year-old song from Plant's back catalog with Jimmy Page.

The first touring dates for Plant and Krauss comes this weekend as they play both Saturday and Sunday at the Palace Theatre in Louisville, Ky. LedZeppelinNews.com picks up the tour in the next two cities, covering the April 22 show in Knoxville, Tenn., and the April 23 concert in Chattanooga, Tenn.

The full itinerary for the concert tour is as follows:

NORTH AMERICAN TOUR -- FIRST LEG

• Saturday, April 19 – Louisville, Ky. – The Palace Theatre
• Sunday, April 20 – Louisville, Ky. - The Palace Theatre
• Tuesday, April 22 – Knoxville, Tenn. – Knoxville Civic Coliseum
• Wednesday, April 23 – Chattanooga, Tenn. – Memorial Auditorium
• Friday, April 25 – New Orleans, La. – Jazz & Heritage Festival
• Saturday, April 26 – Birmingham, Ala. – BJCC Arena

EUROPEAN TOUR

• Monday, May 5 – Birmingham, England – NIA Academy
• Wednesday, May 7 – Manchester, England – Apollo
• Thursday, May 8 – Cardiff, Wales – Cardiff International Arena
• Saturday, May 10 – Dusseldorf, Germany – Philipshalle
• Sunday, May 11 – Brussels, Belgium – Forest National
• Tuesday, May 13 – Paris, France – Le Grand Rex
• Wednesday, May 14 – Amsterdam, Netherlands – Heineken Music Hall
• Friday, May 16 – Stockholm, Sweden – Hovet
• Sunday, May 18 – Oslo, Norway – Spektrum
• Monday, May 19 – Bergen, Norway – Bergenshalle
• Thursday, May 22 – London, England – Wembley Arena

NORTH AMERICAN TOUR -- SECOND LEG

• Monday, June 2 – Roanoke, Va. – Roanoke Civic Center
• Wednesday, June 4 – Uncasville, Conn. – Mohegan Sun
• Thursday, June 5 – Boston, Mass. – Bank Of America Pavilion
• Saturday, June 7 – Canandaigua, N.Y. – Constellation Brands Marvin Sands Performing Arts Center (CMAC)
• Sunday, June 8 – Atlantic City, N.J. – Borgata
• Tuesday, June 10 – New York, N.Y. – Madison Square Garden Theatre
• Wednesday, June 11 – New York, N.Y. – Madison Square Garden Theatre RECENTLY ADDED
• Friday, June 13 – Columbia, Md. – Merriweather Pavilion
• Saturday, June 14 – Asheville, N.C. – Asheville Civic Center
• Sunday, June 15 – Manchester, Tenn. – Bonnaroo Music Festival
• Tuesday, June 17 – Detroit, Mich. – Fox Theatre
• Wednesday, June 18 – Highland Park, Ill. – Ravinia Festival Pavilion RECENTLY ADDED
• Thursday, June 19 – St. Louis, Mo. – Fox Theatre
• Saturday, June 21 – Denver, Colo. – Red Rocks Amphitheatre
• Monday, June 23 – Los Angeles, Calif. – Greek Theatre
• Tuesday, June 24 – Los Angeles, Calif. – Greek Theatre
• Wednesday, June 25 – Santa Barbara, Calif. – Santa Barbara Bowl
• Friday, June 27 – Berkeley, Calif. – Greek Theatre
• Saturday, June 28 – Stateline, Nev. – Harvey's
• Monday, June 30 – San Diego, Calif. – Humphrey's
• Tuesday, July 1 – Phoenix, Ariz. – Dodge Theatre
• Monday, July 7 – Grand Prarie, Texas – Nokia Theatre RECENTLY ADDED
• Thursday, July 10 – Atlanta, Ga. – Chastain Park Amphitheatre RECENTLY ADDED
• Friday, July 11 – Raleigh, N.C. – RBC Center RECENTLY ADDED
• Saturday, July 12 – Philadelphia, Pa. – Mann Center for Performing Arts RECENTLY ADDED
• Monday, July 14 – Toronto, Ontario, Canada – Molson Amphitheatre RECENTLY ADDED
• Thursday, July 17 – Cleveland, Ohio – Time Warner Cable Amphitheater at Tower City RECENTLY ADDED
• Friday, July 18 – Lexington, Ky. – Rupp Arena RECENTLY ADDED
• Saturday, July 19 – Nashville, Tenn. – Sommet Center RECENTLY ADDED
• Sunday, Sept. 28 – Austin, Texas – Austin City Limits Music Festival at Zilker Park NEWLY ANNOUNCED

Jimmy Page says new music to emerge in documentary

The most pressing revelation in the May 2008 issue of Uncut magazine, which contains interviews with the three surviving original members of Led Zeppelin, is Jimmy Page's claim that new music of his would appear in a film documentary.

The magazine says Page "has recently been filming a documentary with Jack White and The Edge." It quotes the Led Zeppelin guitarist as saying the film features "three generations of guitar players."

If Page has indeed written original material, it would be the first to be issued in 10 years. Addressing that point in an interview for Uncut conducted March 10 with David Cavanagh in London, the guitarist says, "That doesn't matter! No! What does that matter?"

After suffering a back injury in the middle of an aborted U.S. tour with the Black Crowes in the summer of 2000, Page's onstage appearances were rare. While the past 10 years have seen Page overseeing releases of a long-awaited DVD set of live Led Zeppelin and a newly remade version of the 1976 film The Song Remains the Same, Page's scant, one-off in-studio collaborations of the same period have all been of cover tunes.

Only during a live performance for the massive charity event Net Aid in 1999 could Page be seen debuting unreleased material in a live setting. An instrumental, titled "Domino," was introduced to a listening public in a set broadcast globally on television and via satellite.

Cavanagh reflects in the interview on 1998, the last time Page worked with Led Zeppelin singer Robert Plant on any permanent basis. That year, they released an album of all-new material and went on tour in North America and Europe, playing mainly tunes from the first five albums of Led Zeppelin's catalog with a few of the newer numbers thrown in for good measure. Scheduled tour dates for Pacific nations and South America were suddenly canceled at the end of that year.

In subsequent interviews, Plant has held that he had been longing to do something different. Page, on the other hand, rarely fields questions on why his four-year collaboration with Plant came to an end. Probed by Cavanagh in this interview, Page admits "there could have been a follow-up" disc. "I had some new material written for another album," he details. "I had about a dozen numbers, and some of them were really good, but Robert heard them and he wanted to go in another direction. He wanted to do another solo album. Fair enough."

Plant, interviewed Jan. 18 by Allan Jones for Uncut, also addresses the work he and Page did with each other between 1994 and 1998, before he played anonymously in a band called Priory of Brion and thereafter returned to his solo career backed by a new lineup called the Strange Sensation, which backed him on the 2002 solo album, Dreamland. In this interview, Plant speaks at great length about his long relationship with Page. "He was my buddy, he will always be my buddy," says Plant, who was 19 years old when they first met in 1968.

Plant addresses how he felt about Page right from that very first encounter, in which Page submitted an idea that the young singer from the British Midlands might make a good fit in the band being assembled with John Paul Jones and a drummer yet to be named. "I felt immediately this was a different kind of guy to anybody I'd met before," Plant tells Allan Jones. "So I was welcomed into Jimmy's home, and immediately I realized that his interests and the whole landscape of his music and his life was very broad and pretty esoteric."

Plant speaks eloquently of his time together with Page in studios and in the quaint, somber settings where they worked together to write some of Led Zeppelin's most beautiful acoustic songs. "As a couple of guys, we really, we sat by the fire at night, and I've still cassettes somewhere of the old grandfather clock ticking," he says. "There was no electricity, outside toilets, the smell of woodsmoke and alcohol."

But it was at a certain point, Plant reveals, that Led Zeppelin became unworkable for him. This he attributes partly to family obligations; he says he found it less possible to do justice to being a globetrotter as well as a homebody. "I wasn't upset with Jimmy," Plant says. "I didn't become remote. He didn't become remote. We'd both just moved to another place."

He also recognizes Page's suffering health played a factor: "Later, when Jimmy's health wasn't too good, it wasn't the same ... it was a different time." The interviewer asks Plant whether Page's heroin use was having an effect on Led Zeppelin. "I think that with most users," Plant replies, "the denial is part of the condition, and because most everybody around was in one way or another denying something, there was no central point of solidarity. ... I still think that by that time Jimmy and I had become quite adept politically at keeping it going, even though I felt very compromised. I also felt for him, you know."

Asked about that time they played together between 1994 and 1998, Plant implied Page may not have been in the best of health at that time either. He was comparing Page's health in 1994 with his impeccable health at the time of the one-off Led Zeppelin concert on Dec. 10, 2007. "If Jimmy had was as healthy then -- and when we came to do Walking into Clarksdale -- if he'd been as open and as healthy, and he'd had the resolve then that he has now, we'd probably have gone somewhere else again."

Plant, who has been readying for a tour with Alison Krauss that will begin in two weeks, appeared glad to spend much of his Jan. 18 interview for Uncut discussing Page. Many of the questions Cavanagh hurled at John Paul Jones in their session 10 days later also focused on Page.

Says Jones, in an interview that took up only one page compared to the three devoted to either of his counterparts', "I know it sounds obvious, but [Jimmy] was always one of my favorite guitarists, and as soon as we started rehearsing [in May 2007 for a planned reunion concert], I was amazed to hear go he'd actually improved. He seemed to have grown since I saw him last."

The last time Jones and Page were known to have played music together was also with Plant, during a jam session following Led Zeppelin's induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, in January 1995. At the time, Page and Plant were off on a Zeppelin-heavy tour that famously did not involve Jones. "Thank you, my friends, for finally remembering my phone number," was the overlooked bass player's short jab at his former bandmates during a brief acceptance speech, given just before the three awkwardly strapped on instruments together for the first time in about five years. An abridged set, also involving Neil Young and Aerosmith's Joe Perry and Steven Tyler, followed.

At that time, Jones was upset at not having been asked to take part in the Page-Plant reunion and, worse, not being informed of it in advance. "I wasn't particularly glad for anybody at that point," he tells Cavanagh in the Uncut interview, dismissing those feelings as a thing of the past. "It was quite a hard time for me. But we're past it, if you know what I mean."

Now, Jones is uncertain whether Plant would be available to work with him or Page once again. "I'm not sure. I'm not too certain about anything, right at the moment," he says. "I've got no idea what's going to happen. But I'd certainly like to play with Jimmy again."

Jones says he was happy to perform the two-hour set with Page, Plant and Jason Bonham in London this December. "That we did a full Zeppelin show ... albeit a short one, at two hours ... [Jimmy] was very happy. [He] probably [felt] similar to what it meant to all of us, which is: It's nice to be able to do it, to prove to yourself that you can do it."

He again addresses the concert: "It was great to do the show. [Jimmy and I] spoke afterwards, and we both thought the same -- it felt like the first night of a tour. You think, 'Oh, I could do that a bit better, or change something in that song.' And we didn't get a chance to do any more."

Jones, in the Jan. 28 interview, seems unable to comment definitively about the future; asked if he believed the reunion was over, he said, "It's possible. It is possible." Page, grilled on March 10, was unwiling to speculate on whether or not Plant would be willing and able to continue the Led Zeppelin reunion. Evidently annoyed by repeated questioning, Page interrupts Cavanagh to say, "That's as fair an answer as I can give you."

Page was interviewed one week after a report in the Sunday Mirror on March 2 said Plant had turned down a lucrative offer for a Led Zeppelin tour. When Cavanagh brings this up and asks about the chances for any further reunion activity, Page deflects the question, saying the band members never intended to do more than just that one-off concert, which was a tribute to their late mentor and friend, Ahmet Ertegün of the Atlantic Records label. "The focus," Page says, "was the O2 show. That's what I had my focus on. As for Robert, he had a parallel project [with Alison Krauss], and it's been successful, which I suppose means he doesn't have time for Zeppelin at this point. What I do know -- what I do know -- is that the rehearsals, and the O2 gig, were really inspiring. OK? That's all I'll say."

Upon further questioning, Page adds, "Everybody had such a great commitment to it. Now, if you're talking about a tour -- other dates, maybe recording together -- there's only one thing that's going to be the common denominator with that. And that's commitment. That's how we did the O2."

Getting back to the future that is more certain, Page says he is ready to unleash some of his new material on a public that hasn't heard any original songs of his in the new millennium. "I know what is really challenging, and that is the sort of direction that I personally -- personally -- intend to go," he says. Of the music he has been writing, he says, "They're the sort of vehicles and frameworks that could be applied [or] used in various situations. I might have one thing that could be just as easily recorded with an ethnic drum orchestra as with a rock 'n' roll band. Do you see what I mean? Or you could play it acoustic. It's the application of it. But I'm ready. I'm ready, now, to present the stuff that I've got."