Eight months after “Oh, Didn’t They Ramble” appeared in bookstores, I still can’t quite believe that Robert Plant’s name really is on the cover of my book (and under mine, to boot). Plant writing the foreword was such an unlikely and wonderful fluke that it still doesn’t seem real.
So Plant and I are technically co-writers of this book even though we had no contact as it came together; the only conversations I’ve ever had with him were a few interviews over the years during my newspaper days. The foreword came about through one of the Rounder founders, Marian Leighton Levy, serving as intermediary.
I signed a copy that UNC Press sent to Plant last fall, but I still wanted to meet the man in-person. I actually got the chance to do that Sunday night when Willie Nelson’s Outlaw Music Festival rolled into my town of Raleigh (sans the ailing 91-year-old headliner, who is taking a few dates off on the advice of doctors). As a bonus, I got to see a concert with Robert Plant/Alison Krauss, Lukas Nelson substituting for his dad, and Bob Dylan.
Six decades in, Dylan’s remains as confounding an in-person experience as ever. He long ago gave up on even the slightest nods to show-business convention, with a live act that treats songs like tone poems to be bent beyond recognition. I was batting around .500 with identifying songs on the hour-long set list, which covered the likes of Chuck Berry, The Fleetwoods, Grateful Dead and Dave Dudley while ignoring most of Dylan’s own best-known songs. All the same I dug it, “Ballad of a Thin Man” especially, which rang as cutting as it did in Dylan’s 1965 new electric heyday. And in a nice bonus, well-traveled legend Jim Keltner was on drums.
Speaking of great drummers, Jay Bellerose anchored Plant and Krauss’ live band along with guitarist J.D. McPherson, Nashville Bluegrass Band fiddler Stuart Duncan and Alison’s brother Viktor Krauss as multi-instrumentalist. As usual with this crew, the 75-minute set’s most intriguing moments came when they dusted off and radically rearranged songs from Plant’s Led Zeppelin days.
“When the Levee Breaks” sounded like it was transposed from the Mississippi River in the American South to some exotic far-off landscape, with a world-beat treatment in which fiddles and guitar joined together in an ominous drone. Also amazing was “Rock and Roll,” done up as a honky-tonk shuffle that turned into something like heavy-metal fiddle music by the end. Throughout, Plant added his voice to the fiddles in harmonies that conjured up black-magic sounds and vibes.
Meanwhile, behind the curtain, I did manage to score a brief pre-show audience with Plant and Krauss. The backstage quarters were cramped, and I was too awestruck to manage much in the way of conversation. But I tried. Attempting to make small talk, I asked Plant if he’d ever considered writing a book himself.
“Never,” he said. “Because if you try to set it all down, what’s the point? Musicians writing about themselves, trying to remember things that happened going back to ’68 or even earlier, no thanks.”
Well, I said, would you ever let someone else write it?
“Never,” he said. “I’d fight them first.” And then he laughed, but he seemed to mean it.
Before leaving, I asked both of them to sign a copy of the book for me. As he picked up the Sharpie, Plant quipped that I was probably going to sell his signature.
Nope. Not a chance.
Losering Books 