Plant Life

When I was in my mid-teens, I, and all my friends, took advantage of the Columbia Record Club based out of Terre Haute, Indiana, which I just recently learned how to pronounce correctly with a hard T in the Haute part. We had no idea about their geography, but we understood their introductory deal in spades. 12 FREE albums (well, for only $1) with an agreement to buy just 6 more over the following 2 years.

I still remember all the selections in the dozen I picked out. They included Free’s Fire and Water with All Right Now – it was the first time I’d ever heard it. Okay. Like wow – what was that? It was the first time I’d heard all of Crosby, Stills & Nash and the CSNY album Deja Vu. It was the first time I heard Elton John’s Tumbleweed Connection. My initial dozen included Burt Bacharach’s soundtrack to Butch Cassidy & the Sundance Kid that had 2 versions of Raindrops Keep Fallin’ On My Head – I loved that record – still do. There wasn’t one bad selection in that package that thudded on my doorstep one afternoon courtesy of the US Mail.

One of the most striking albums I got was Led Zeppelin 2. I knew about Whole Lotta Love, but that was it. On side 2 of that sizzling vinyl was a song called Ramble On. Acoustically driven with knock-out drum accents. And that Robert Plant voice which is like no other. That was the song on that album for me. I wore that track out.

After receiving your generous intro package, the record company sent you a card every month recommending a new release. You could send the card back saying you didn’t want that particular record, but if you didn’t send the card back in time, CRC sent you the selection automatically.

That’s when the trouble begins. You get a record you may or may not want and they gouged you with shipping and handling fees. You ended up paying twice the cost of buying the record in a store. That’s how they could afford to offer up free stuff at the beginning as the hook. But as a kid, my mind was unaware how corporations were sometimes selfishly geared to extort minors.

Why would a company want to take advantage of teenagers? Money, greed. Certainly not because it’s good for the children.

Flash forward to a couple of weeks ago.

Judy and I have been under the radar for a couple of years. We’re just emerging from the fog of debilitation, 2 surgeries in 11 months, and seemingly endless rehab that I’m still going through for my hip replacement I had in August. So unless we heard about a Charlottesville event by chance, we remained ignorant in our isolated swirl of unawareness.

A month or so ago, Judy came home one day mentioning she’d heard something on the radio.

“Doug, did you know Robert Plant is coming to the Paramount?”

No. I didn’t. Plus it was probably already sold out.

For grins, I went online. Holy smokes.

Like 4 seats left – 2 in the front VIP section and 2 in the very back row center. The “cheap” seats cost us $800+ with all the ticketing fees. I about choked when I saw the prices in the VIP section. $6,700+. That’s not for 2 – that’s for one seat. I assume the more expensive VIP ticket holder got a meet and greet before the show. Okay. Maybe a selfie. And frankly, if I was Robert Plant in my sunset years, I’d be happy to do the selfie and take your money.

Okay. At least we’d be in the room. Even though it was the most money I’ve ever spent on concert tickets, I didn’t freak out about the cost. With maybe 1 or 2 exceptions, we haven’t been to a concert in years. So it’s not a leap we would take every day. Judy and I never got to see any of the Zeppelin crowd live. I’m sure it would’ve been great fun back in the day, but at least we’d finally get a small taste at the Paramount.

The Paramount is a gorgeous theater – one of those old-time movie palaces that was restored to perfection a few years back. Gold, red velvet, all that stuff. The Virginia Film Festival premiered our movie Faux Paws there a little over a decade ago.

The good part about sitting in the back row is you get to see the entire house in front of you. There’s only about a thousand seats between the balcony and the floor. So when I say we were in the “cheap” seats, I have to caveat with there truly isn’t a bad seat in the house. It’s intimate wherever you sit. And the acoustics? Stellar. The band doesn’t have to crush your eardrums and they still sound full.

His “new” band is called Saving Grace featuring Suzi Dian singing prominently with Robert. I say the band is new, but they’ve been playing since Covid. Tight musicians, tight vocals. They knew what they were doing and obviously truly enjoyed playing together. They played a bunch of songs that were unfamiliar to me, but Mr. Plant was kind enough to include 4 Zeppelin numbers. And while you might wonder how any band could cover Zeppelin like they sounded back in the 70s, Saving Grace pulled it off with killer chops. They made you enjoy even the stuff you didn’t know.

Robert Plant is 77 as I write this. Is his voice the same? Mostly. But the ravages of time rob singers of range. I should know. I’m 70 as I type this and I can’t get nearly as high on notes I could hit just 10 years ago. So he sang in a lower register. Still sounded terrific. But then on about 3 occasions during their 90-minute set, he would go for it and for a few seconds that old Robert Plant stinger came out unexpectedly and zapped us.

The crowd reaction went to 11 each time he did this. Sort of like when we saw Fleetwood Mac years ago. It didn’t matter that Stevie Nicks was much older, heavier. The moment you heard her voice and she started twirling, every old-timer in that audience swooned and was young again. And in our eyes, she was still that young woman we discovered back in the 70s.

Transported. Jettisoned to a more innocent time.

And so it was with Mr. Plant.

When we went, we didn’t know the band was covering Zeppelin stuff. So you can imagine my heart skipping when 3 songs in, we heard the opening to – wait for it – Ramble On. And they smoked it. Crowd went bat-shit. And after waiting for 55 years, Judy and I both got to sing along.

With the audience madly cheering, Plant smiled and quipped, “Oh, well, that still works, doesn’t it?”

They closed with a wonderfully hard-edged Four Sticks from Zeppelin’s 4th album. If you don’t know, the song’s title derives from John Bonham’s original drumming on the track where his large hands simultaneously played with 2 sticks in each mitt.

If you find yourself in a music store that carries drumsticks, they sometimes feature signature sticks that certain drummers use. I was naturally curious about Ringo’s preference. Definitely not the smallest ones. No. Pretty significant. But Bonham’s sticks? They’re like small telephone poles.

Bonham was incredibly powerful anyway, but imagine the thunder he created with four sticks. As soon as they kicked off, I felt sorry for the drummer. How are you ever going to pull this off? So here’s another lesson for Dougie Downer in the shut the fuck up department. The drummer had no problem. It was raucous, pounding. And with Suzi’s high vocals intertwined with Plant’s voice, they sounded like Led Zeppelin.

So the concert itself was expert. But as I sat looking around at the audience, I was reminded why I walked out of a Beck concert years ago in the middle of his encore Devil’s Haircut (my favorite Beck song). I quietly snapped. I was done with people. It’s not the act that pisses me off, it’s the people who come to see them.

Seriously. WTF happened to civility and respect for other human beings?

Before the show kicked off, there were multiple advisories from the Paramount that phones and photography were not permitted. The moment the lights went down – spoiler alert – the phones and cameras came out. LOTS of them.

There’s a reason why artists like Jack White don’t allow phones at their concerts. The contention of many live artists is that you want to see them live and not filtered through a small screen. Just sit back and watch the show! Be with the room.

And frankly, I get why you’re trying to preserve for posterity something you may never look at again. Over the last few decades, I’ve filmed scores of fireworks displays and guess what? I’ve never gone back and looked at a one of them. Not one.

Eventually I got to the Jack White stage. I didn’t have to record everything. I just had to enjoy being in the moment.

But some audience members make that tough.

Besides your eyes constantly being distracted by the light emanating from a sea of phones, people are having open conversations and getting drunk. Stumbling slowly, rubbing against patrons’ knees as they make their way randomly in and out with drinks a sloshin’, sometimes pausing to stop and talk with a friend while blocking the view.

A guy with a square blockhead in front of me read a book on his phone the entire time. Never looked up. I was curious if he’d actually paid for a seat or someone just dragged him along.

Hey. The concert itself was terrific. And we got to see Robert Plant who still can command attention with his incredibly unique voice and mane of Zeppelin hair.

As the band took it’s final bow, we made a quick exit to beat the rush out of the theater. Some slurring-drunk older white guys walked and weaved behind us. It was comical listening to them recount songs the band didn’t even play. These people were wasted.

And guess what? They’re all about to get behind the wheel to go home.

When we entered the parking garage a big older guy was Spider-manning his way against the wall of the entrance – plastered with his back and palms against the wall for stability, trying to make sideways steps without face-planting.

Despite enjoying the show, I was glad we were leaving. I needed to leave anyway. I had my hip replaced in August and the physical therapy peeps tell me the surrounding muscle tissue won’t be really “normal” until the 6-month mark. I’m 3 months out of surgery so it’s important I continue to exercise daily and not do tons of sitting.

But I’d done a ton of sitting that evening. Driving 45 minutes down into Charlottesville. Dinner before the show. Getting into the theater. Half-hour opening act. Half-hour stage reset. 90 minutes of Saving Grace. 45 minutes home. I was feeling the lameness that set in. But overall, despite some people’s rudeness, I was still glad we went.

For me, it was checking off a box. Satisfactorily completing some arc in my head connected to listening to Led Zeppelin 2 for the first time.

The next day, I played music in the house including Led Zeppelin. I was reminded by myself and someone else that I used to play music all the time and haven’t been.

I checked to see if I still had my original vinyl of that album with Ramble On. I don’t think so. I sold 200 albums to a vinyl store owner years ago – he might have taken that one. I still have almost 1,000 albums, but I didn’t feel like doing a deep dive. Doesn’t matter anyway – I have it on CD.

I can live in the moment.

My divorce from the Columbia Record Club came about in 1972.

They’d auto-shipped me a selection of the month – The Allman Brothers’ double-album Eat a Peach. Some would say I’d been gifted with owning a great record. I don’t know, man. It just wasn’t for me. Judy likes Southern rock, but for some reason, it’s not my speed.

Other kids in my class loved music. The high school even allowed one of our students to take over the French lab during activity period on Fridays where records were spun and we listened on individual headsets normally reserved for responses to questions asked in French class.

We were wrapping up an activity period after hearing David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust and I was lamenting being stuck with Eat a Peach. Another student’s eyes lit up.

“Really? You don’t want it?”

“I really need to pay the record club bill, so how much will you give me for it?”

“Oh, I don’t have any money. But we could trade if you want.”

“Trade for what?”

“I have this album I hate. Carly Simon’s No Secrets.”

“The record with You’re So Vain on it?”

“Yeah, I can’t stand it.”

We decided to trade. We both walked away thinking we’d scored and the other one was an idiot.

No Secrets. C’mon, man. To a teenaged boy, just the cover alone was worth the price of admission.

Although I’d palmed off The Allman Brothers, I still had to pay the record club and I didn’t have a dime to my name.

So I ignored the Columbia Record Club’s reminders of nonpayment. For a couple of months. With each new admonition, the wording and the color of the reminder bills escalated. They went from “Perhaps we’ve crossed in the mail?” on yellow paper to legal action threats on red paper.

As a goofy teenager who had bungled himself into a corner, I was scared. They were threatening to turn me over to a collection agency.

I went to my business teacher who was also a drama couch for me. He listened to my story and my plea for advice. That guy saved my ass.

“Okay, I hate this when they take advantage of young people. Here’s what you’re going to do. You write them a letter stating your age and this is what you tell them: ‘It is illegal to make a contract with a minor and it is also illegal to make a contract through the mail.'”

I wrote that letter and I never heard another peep from the Columbia Record Club.

Despite my victory, a small part of me still felt guilty about stiffing the Club. But I read years later after CRC was dissolved that they’d been suspected of hoodwinking their artists and not paying royalties.

So while I have misgivings about cheating Mr. Plant out of a miniscule CRC royalty he may or may not have received, I feel like I paid him back in spades by buying those two tickets.

No harm, no foul.

Thanks, Robert, for giving us that small taste at the Paramount.

Sometimes you have to wait a long time for greatness.