POP MUSIC REVIEW : Page and Plant Ramble On, Unledded

The question remains the same today for Jimmy Page and Robert Plant as it was in their Led Zeppelin days. In fact, Plant spoke it aloud at the end of the much-augmented duo’s show Saturday at the San Diego Sports Arena.

“Could you feel it?”

For good and bad, Led Zeppelin was about making people “feel it,” about milking rock music for all it could yield in pure sensation. From 1969 to 1980, that approach enabled the English band to play a leading role in transforming rock into a gargantuan arena and stadium happening.

Among enduring rock acts, Led Zeppelin was the least concerned with holding up a mirror to life as most of us live it. The songs might be populated by the occasional Viking or Hobbit, and many by an epic quester rambling on into some mythical, mystical mist or other. The well-drawn characters of rock on a human scale--the work of Bob Dylan, the Who, Bruce Springsteen and Neil Young--just didn’t figure in the inarticulate Zep equation.

That’s the bad in Led Zeppelin. The good is the wide aural and stylistic scope and brilliant structural conception of a great deal of its music, which ranges through traditional folk, country music and Arabic sources, as well as blues borrowings that grew less hot-aired and more palatable after the band’s first two albums. Zep’s records sound better and better as the years pass and less-inspired imitators (Soundgarden and Stone Temple Pilots, among the current crop) reap success yet remain overshadowed and cornered by their imposing mentors.

Returning for their first tour together since 1980, minus drummer John Bonham (deceased, 1980) and bassist/keyboardist John Paul Jones (uninvited, 1995), singer Plant, 46, and guitarist Page, 51, faced the challenge of making their fans feel the sheer power of Led Zeppelin once more. At the same time, for their own dignity, they had to make themselves feel they weren’t engaging in rote repetition of the past.

Intermittently, at least, their two-hour concert came up with impressive answers while avoiding a too-obvious hits-only approach (no one in the enraptured house seemed to mind the absence of “Stairway to Heaven,” “Whole Lotta Love” and “Rock and Roll”).

In a powerhouse opening, Page, Plant and a core rock band made up of Michael Lee and Charlie Jones, the young drummer and bassist from Plant’s own band, plus the Cure’s guitarist, Porl Thompson, revved up a couple of Zep numbers in thrilling fashion. Later, in a resounding ending, a locally-recruited 20-strong string section and the eight-man ensemble of Egyptian violinists and percussionists heard on the recent Page-Plant “No Quarter” album gave fresh twists and enhanced intensities to a few more catalogue nuggets.

The opening numbers, “Thank You” and a medley of “Bring It on Home” and “Ramble On,” found the pasty-looking Page driving the sold-out crowd immediately delirious with solos that were full of presence and vigor. Plant was strutting, shimmying, jumping, whirling, turning the microphone stand into a baton--the usual macho arena-rocker stuff that he helped invent--and singing confidently in a voice that held up well all night in a performance that added many a quavering muezzin-call Middle-Eastern tonality to his patented array of bluesy cries and moans.

Had this semi-Zep been able to smash through a full hour of similar stuff, then get to the renovated orchestral/Egyptian arrangements, it would have been a perfect comeback. But the show quickly subsided with some throwaway song choices (“Shake My Tree,” a crotch-rocker taken from Page’s 1993 album with Plant imitator Dave Coverdale, and “Lullaby,” a spooky Cure song), followed by a long acoustic-oriented segment that often lagged. One wondered whether Page, whose featured spots were sporadic, had the stamina to fire up an entire show; the long middle stretch gave him lots of strum-along breathers.

The Egyptian magic began to take hold with “Four Sticks,” as sinuous, then staccato violin passages augmented the hypnotic effect of the song’s churning beat. “In the Evening” closed the regular set with the Egyptians and strings boosting one of Page’s most regal riffs. The show-closing “Kashmir” was a 14-minute journey in which Page slashed out sustained chords with relish, while the Egyptians ratcheted up the tension with interludes of string and percussion work that both delayed and intensified the caravan song’s inexorable march.

Those enhancements didn’t radically reinvent the material, but they did meet the old partners’ goal of not letting the songs remain the same. The question now is whether Plant, who has had some rewarding moments in his solo career, and Page, who has foundered since Led Zeppelin ended, have enough spark left to write an album’s worth of new songs that could make fans “feel it” once again. The old ones obviously still can.

* Jimmy Page and Robert Plant play Tuesday and Wednesday at the Forum, 3900 W. Manchester Blvd., Inglewood, 8 p.m. Sold out. (310) 419-3100.