Burnett, no fan of touring, is not on board as band leader and guitarist this time neither is Buddy Miller, the featured soloist in the concerts of the late 2000s. The touring unit is not quite the same this time around, though, at least in its leadership, which might’ve made a scattered few fans who pay attention to these sort of things wonder if they were going to be getting something like the Broadway-road-show version of what they got a decade and a half ago. And both seem to be taking place deep in the holler, somewhere near a swampland and in outer space all at once.
Both albums are all-covers collections (except for a single Burnett/Plant co-write on the latest one, “High and Lonesome”). But the magic hadn’t worn off for fans of the pairing, who loved that the follow-up had T Bone Burnett back producing, was recorded with mostly the same players under the same spontaneous conditions, guys who 14 years earlier had seemed to be inventing their own new musical language, using ancient grains. The newer album has not been in any danger of achieving those same pop-culture-phenomenon heights, and no one expected it to, given how wonderfully weird it was that a record as rich, subtle and peculiar as the first took off the way it did, to became the coffee-table CD of its day. Their sophomore album as a duo, last fall’s “Raise the Roof,” felt very much like the belated sequel it was to 2007’s “Raising Sand,” the collection that won them six Grammys, including the two highest honors, album and record of the year. Robert Plant (R) and Alison Krauss perform at the Greek Theatre on Augin Los Angeles, California Michael Buckner for Variety Thursday’s show felt like home, and like Halley’s comet. These two feel born to be together … occasionally. This time next summer, say, would be fine.) But sometimes it’s the anomalousness of a coming-together that helps make the magic. It would be nice if everyone could set their alarms for the next occasion for much sooner than than 2036. And here like Brigadoon they are, too, destined to pop up every 14 years or so, as they did Thursday at the Greek in L.A., appearing there for the first time since they were Grammy royals back in 2008. Yet here, like kismet, are Plant and Krauss, the exception to the rule.
Apparently there’s an eternal shortage of superstars willing to put themselves in an ongoing creative situation that could result at any moment in that scariest of scenarios for an alpha creative: a tie. The long-lost fad of CSNY-style supergroups is one thing, but superduos never really became a thing at all, at least in that same joining-of-the-titans sense. In the annals of popular music, has there ever been a more successful confluence of two existing solo brands than Robert Plant and Alison Krauss? Pretty much as a rule, duos start out in that configuration, then crash in clashes of egos they’re not things that begin 20, 30, 40 years into respective careers.
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