music review
Robert Plant and the Sensational Space Shifters
At the Orpheum Theatre, Friday night
As he approaches 70, Robert Plant has been making music on his own for much longer than the tenure of the band that turned him into a rock star. And while there were plenty of fans in the audience Friday night for whom, one suspects, his Led Zeppelin days are what matters most, the music that Plant has made since has unapologetically ranged far from what he did with that iconic group. What has concerned him most is “contemporizing his gift,’’ as he put it in an interview a few years ago: “Can I knock myself out, or am I just going through the motions?’’
His performance Friday night at the Orpheum Theatre gave an emphatic reply to that question. Plant has become an inveterate explorer and transformer of roots music, from various American forms to Malian desert blues, and the sampling he offered with his aptly named Sensational Space Shifters, which included three selections from his latest album, “Carry Fire,’’ ranged across his solo work. Nowhere were those proclivities more evident than on what Plant and company did to “Little Maggie,’’ a song that, the singer noted, goes back to 1929 (“I bought it the day it came out,’’ he impishly added). In their hands, the old-time standard was shot through with a druggy, West African infusion and turned into something still rooted, yet entirely different. So, too, the treatment of Bukka White’s blues, “Fixin’ to Die;’’ it was no careful homage, but rather a blues-rock explosion that featured Space Shifter Justin Adams playing not just the strings but the hollow body of his guitar in a way that simultaneously paid fealty to a classic sound and turned it inside out.
Plant’s contemporizing also extended to his own past. He slaked the thirst of the Zep fans in the house with several selections, but in every case, they were far from recapitulation. “Misty Mountain Hop,’’ accompanied by video clips of scenes of ’60s love and protest, was turned into an ebullient country rocker. “Babe, I’m Gonna Leave You’’ followed its Led Zeppelin template until it reached a gorgeous, extended display of fingerpicking from guitarist Skin Tyson, who used a flamenco flourish to bring the song back to a closing burst. And when, for the encore’s closer, Plant asked the audience if they were “ready to rock,’’ he gave them capital-R rock via one of the most recognizable songs in the genre’s history, “Whole Lotta Love.’’ But he changed it up to marvelous effect, too, tacking on a sledgehammer sampling of “Bring It On Home’’ as a preface and interpolating the sea shanty “Santianna,’’ carried by the furious bowing of viola player Seth Lakeman, midway. Wherever Robert Plant’s explorations lead him, it seems, the songs do not remain the same.
Robert Plant and the Sensational Space Shifters
At the Orpheum Theatre, Friday night
Stuart Munro can be reached at sj.munro@verizon.net.
