Robert Plant and Saving Grace deliver Led Zeppelin tunes and more in LA

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.

Then came “Ramble On,” the first of five Led Zeppelin songs in a 14-song set that ran 90 minutes. If the crowd had been thrilled to see and hear Plant on stage for the first two songs, well, this kicked things to an even higher level of love and adoration.

“Ramble on,” Plant wailed, and everyone was on their feet. “Sing my song,” he continued, and the cheers grew even louder. By the line, “Ooh, I can’t find my bluebird,” the show had fully launched. [Side note: No one but no one wails an “Ooh, yeah” like Plant.]

Worley took lead vocals on “Soul of a Man,” a gospel blues recorded in 1930 by Blind Willie Johnson, and one of five tracks from Saving Grace’s self-titled release. Again, Plant made space for everyone to shine.

A few songs later, another Zeppelin song, “Four Sticks” arrived with Plant’s classic keening vocal style paired with Dian’s harmony and the accordion she played on several songs during the night.

Smiling broadly between songs, Plant paused here for a longer-than-normal introduction for “It’s a Beautiful Day Today,” a Moby Grape cover also on Saving Grace’s album.

“When I was a kid, I was driven by a lot of the music that came from the West Coast of the United States,” Plant said. “Our music in the UK was based primarily on shadowing the great music of Chicago and Mississippi and soul movements from Memphis.

“But over here on the West Coast, up and down this coast, you had musicians who had a voice and they were writing beautiful songs, and they were discussing the condition of society, and it was remarkable,” he continued. “These guys were changing the world, and we were all starting to look at things and questioning governments and what the hell.

“So I was driven by these guys and it really gave me a pathway through life, gave me a door to open and go through,” Plant said. “And one of my favorite groups that did this to me every time I played them and listened and dreamt about what they must be like, they were called Moby Grape.”

That was lovely, as was the traditional song “As I Roved Out,” which opened delicately with gorgeous harmonies by Plant and Dian, before the rest of the band entered with a woosh and a clamor for a huge sonic finish.

Highlights of the latter half of the main set included a cover of Low’s “Everybody’s Song,” perhaps my favorite “Saving Grace” track, which live featured shifting time signatures propelled by Jefferson’s drums.

A non-album cover of Neil Young’s “For the Turnstiles” continued the kind of emotional feel of the previous song, and led to the main set-closing Led Zeppelin tune “Friends,” for which Plant delivered repeated long runs of that classic Zeppelin croon.

The band returned to the stage, Plant with a glass of red wine in hand, opening the encore with Zeppelin’s “The Rain Song.” Where the earlier Zeppelin songs got big reactions, the response to this beloved ballad off 1973’s “Houses of the Holy” was bigger still.

Zeppelin’s version of the traditional English folk song “Gallows Pole” closed out the night, Plant and Dian singing lead vocals together, Dian adding accordion to the martial beat of the acoustic instruments behind them.

Fans clapped along as Plant and the band stretched out their arrangement of “Gallows Pole” to slip in snippets of other famous Zeppelin songs.

“Keep it coolin’ baby,” he sang, quoting “Whole Lotta Love” at several points, and the crowd – well, by now you can guess how they responded.

“Hey, hey, mama, said the way you move / Gon’ make you sweat, gon’ make you groove,” Plant continued, now slipping the entire first verse of “Black Dog” into “Gallows Pole,” trading off lines with the crowd for the final few.

As the musicians left their seats to step forward for bows with Plant and Dian, Plant thanked the crowd for coming out to see them one last time.

“We’re Saving Grace,” he told them before taking leave with his bandmates. “That’s what we do.”