Robert Plant could’ve trotted out a greatest hits set Saturday at the Auditorium Theatre and no one likely would’ve complained. Just even a hint of that old Led Zeppelin mojo, and he’d be basking in standing ovations.

Instead, the 62-year-old singer gave easy nostalgia the brushoff at the sold-out concert and went for something far more elusive. He’s chased the muse of American music from his European home for several decades, and now he’s got an American band to help him explore the roots of blues, country and folk. But again, the angle he took on these traditions was not always obvious, shadow-boxing with tradition and putting greater stock in rolling rhythm than rock bombast.

Plant glided through the concert like a lean, ringlet-haired ghost rather than a chest-thumping golden god; his voice evinced suppleness and nuance, his hands twirled shapes in the air, and he frequently deferred to his band and drifted into the shadows. At one point he played a harmonica in the darkness as if holding a private séance with the spirit of Sonny Boy Williamson.

Even Zeppelin perennials such as “Black Dog” and “Ramble On” didn’t sound quite like themselves. Plant and his Band of Joy didn’t try to replicate them in the least, instead aiming for a loose ebb and flow that suggested cosmic folk more than the proto-metal of the originals. Plant knew it would’ve been pointless to try to replicate the thunderous Jimmy Page riff at the heart of Zep’s “Houses of the Holy,” so he didn’t bother with it at all. Instead the song was refashioned around Darrell Scott’s pedal-steel moan into a country lament,  then shifted into a gospel-tinged affirmation.

Besides Plant, the band boasted three excellent lead vocalists in guitarist Buddy Miller, multi-instrumentalist Scott and Patty Griffin, and the arrangements exploited the power of their instruments, notably on a cappella passages in the old Porter Wagoner country hit “A Satisfied Mind” and the five-part harmonies that turned Bob Dylan’s “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” into a moving elegy.

Those harmonies are a new weapon in Plant’s arsenal; he often blended in with the ensemble, putting the focus on songs he admired, whether Richard Thompson’s “House of Cards” or Townes Van Zandt’s “Harm’s Swift Way.” He was wise to let the band do the heavy lifting, because they were up for it. It shimmied at every opportunity, thanks to the work of bassist Byron House and drummer Marco Giovino, who mixed mallets, brushes and percussion knickknacks like a master painter. Miller played the resident mystic, even more so than Plant. He played guitar solos that simmered like a hot sun on asphalt during “Please Read the Letter” and a cover of Low’s luminous “Silver Rider.”

It was music that couldn’t easily be defined or pinned down, elusive and allusive, much like Plant himself.

The openers, a stripped-down version of the North Mississippi Allstars, did some roots-excavating of their own. Guitarist Luther Dickinson and his younger brother, drummer Cody Dickinson, dug into the trance-boogie traditions of their hill-country neighborhood. Even more impressive was a brief acoustic set by the duo, swapping rapid-fire guitar runs like back-porch virtuosos.
     
greg@gregkot.com

Robert Plant’s set Saturday at the Auditorium Theatre:

1. Black Dog
2. Down to the Sea
3. Angel Dance
4. Black Country Woman
5. House of Cards
6. Monkey
7. Somewhere Trouble Don’t Go (Buddy Miller vocal)
8. Silver Rider
9. A Satisfied Mind (Darrell Scott vocal)
10. Satan Your Kingdom Must Come Down
11. Twelve Gates to the City/Wade in the Water/In My Time of Dying
12. Ocean of Tears (Patty Griffin vocal)
13. Please Read the Letter
14. Houses of the Holy
15. Ramble On

Encore:
16. Tangerine
17. Harm’s Swift Way
18. A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall

Wire: The U.K. punk-era iconoclasts have trimmed themselves down to an even leaner and meaner trio, and the recent “Red Barked Tree” – only their 12th studio album in 34 years – functions as a solid career overview of the band’s many stylistic shifts, 9 p.m. Saturday at Metro, 3730 N. Clark St., $21; etix.com.

Robert Plant: The former Led Zeppelin singer has left a lot of money on the table to pursue his artistic muse rather than cashing in on reunion tours. His Band of Joy includes monster guitarist Buddy Miller and sublime vocalist Patty Griffin,  8 p.m. Saturday with the North Mississippi Allstars at the Auditorium Theatre, 50 E. Congress, $45, $75, $95; ticketmaster.com.

Emmylou Harris: The marvelous Nashville-based singer has forged a career that has skirted the edges of country convention while carrying forward the maverick soul of her ‘70s collaborator Gram Parsons. She headlines the Old Town School of Folk Music’s annual benefit concert, 6 p.m. Saturday at Old Town School of Folk Music, 4544 N. Lincoln Av., $250; 773-728-6000.

greg@gregkot.com

Low’s Alan Sparhawk vividly remembers the day last summer he got the news that Robert Plant was going to record two Low songs – “Silver Rider” and “Monkey” -- on his 2010 studio album, “Band of Joy.”

“It was a surprise, a big surprise” he says. “I mean, there are a few singers like Plant, Streisand – singers who are the ultimate when you think about someone singing one of your songs. The longer I do this, the more I have to admit to myself that I write songs, the more I have to wonder if any of them are any good. So to get something like this puts a little smile on my ego.”    

The erstwhile "golden god" of '70s hard rock ended up getting a Grammy nomination for “Silver Rider.” It was quite possibly the most high-profile, mainstream recognition the trio from Duluth, Minn., has ever received. For Low fans, it was long overdue.

Sparhawk; his wife, Mimi Parker; and a rotating cast of bass players, most recently Steve Garrington, have kept a pretty low profile over two decades, despite releasing enough stellar albums to fill their own rarefied niche: the slowest, quietest, most beautiful -- and beautifully disturbing -- band on earth.

To record his latest album, “No Better Than This” (Rounder), John Mellencamp hatched a plan with producer T Bone Burnett. They would set up a mono tape recorder and a single microphone and knock out a bunch of new songs with a small band.

It was old-fashioned recording in the extreme, with an added twist: The “recording studios” were the First African Baptist Church in Savannah, Ga., a sanctuary for runaway slaves before emancipation; Sun Studios in Memphis, one of the birthplaces of rock ‘n’ roll; and the Gunter Hotel in San Antonio, where blues legend Robert Johnson recorded.

It all might sound like a gimmick, but the music’s rambunctious charm and playful spirit argue otherwise. It adds up to one of Mellencamp’s best albums, in a career that has seen the former John Cougar move from a Springsteen-lite phase (“I Need a Lover”), find his niche as a small-town storyteller (“Jack & Diane”), become the unofficial voice of Farm Aid (“Rain on the Scarecrow”) and reinvent himself as a folk-oriented singer-songwriter. In 2006, he dropped his long-standing opposition to licensing his songs for use in TV commercials; his song “Our Country” appeared in a car ad and then anchored his final album for a major label, “Freedom’s Road.” But now he’s an independent artist, and he says his days of listening to record company executives’ advice about how best to sell and market his music are over. In a recent interview, Mellencamp discussed his life as a “recovering” rock star.

3 stars (out of 4)
 
Right about now, Robert Plant could be touring the stadiums of the world in Golden God mode. Instead, he’s chosen a more adventurous path. His solo career has embraced tangents instead of doing what many deemed obvious: a full-fledged reunion with all the surviving members of Led Zeppelin under the Led Zeppelin brand.
 
But the spirit of Led Zeppelin, specifically the acoustic side of the band’s third album, continues to inform his music. Another distant reference for his latest studio album, “Band of Joy" (Rounder), is the group named in the album title. Band of Joy was Plant’s pre-Zep group with John Bonham in the north of England, who took their inspiration from West Coast folk-rock and psychedelia.
 
Plant revisits those influences in the company of Nashville guitarist Buddy Miller and songwriter Patty Griffin. Like his acclaimed 2007 collaboration with Alison Krauss, “Raising Sand,” the new album aims for an eerily atmospheric vibe as it investigates a broad range of music, taking on blues via Lightnin’ Hopkins, bluegrass from Bascom Lamar Lunsford, ‘60s soul, and relatively recent tunes from Los Lobos, Low and Texas band Milton Mapes.
 
Whereas “Raising Sand” was revelatory, with some of the most nuanced and subtle singing of Plant’s career as he melded his voice with that of Krauss, “Band of Joy” comes off as a less-focused sequel. Plant is once again low-key, his voice snaking through the songs, while Griffin shadows him like a ghost and Miller’s guitar hovers with storm-cloud menace.
 
Not everything works. “Cindy, I’ll Marry You Someday” and “Satan, Your Kingdom Must Come Down” are twang classics, but they come off as creaky antiques – Plant is almost too reverent about them. And Plant’s attempt at setting Theodore Tilton’s 1867 poem “The King’s Ring” to unsettling music comes off as a haphazard indulgence on “Even This Shall Pass Away.”
 
But at its best, the mix of drone and melody, electric shimmy and acoustic simplicity, can be intoxicating, particularly on haunting versions of Low’s “Silver Rider” and “Monkey.” If Plant does nothing more on this album than draw attention to that Duluth, Minn., trio’s music, he deserves praise.
       
greg@gregkot.com