“Rock stars come and go. Musicians play until they die.”
- Eddie Van Halen
Back on 10-28-25, I wrote about Robert Plant wanting to borrow a hammer from my restaurant-owning buddy in Nashville. It's called Food and Hammers if you want to check it out. Here comes a recent Robert Plant tale.
Kendra just got home from a week of flying. She was in and out of several cities. Pilots have company coordinated ground transportation to and from the airport to their hotels wherever they are. Sometimes they have the same drivers and they get to know them a bit.
In this one city, a driver she's familiar with, a friendly talkative fellow, relayed a story to her about a time with a couple of his customers. He said he was driving this man and woman around the city to this place and that. At dinner time they requested to be taken to a particular restaurant for dinner. The driver told them that the place was popular and very busy that time of an evening, but if they didn't mind loud music, they could sit at the bar and get right in. The pair indicated that they were fine with loud music and appreciated the suggestion. Later he picked them up and returned them to their hotel.
Shortly thereafter he was talking to a co-worker and something about the couple came up. The co-worker said, “You know who that was, right?… Robert Plant and Alison Krauss. They're playing a show here tomorrow night.”
The driver thought, “Oh my!” He said he felt so dumb because he loved Led Zeppelin but he sure didn't recognize Robert Plant. Then he got to thinking back about all the things he'd said to them not knowing who he was talking to and felt silly about that. Kendra told him she bet they found it refreshing not to have someone always treating them with some special regard. He thought, well, maybe that was true.
One first officer Kendra flew with told her about a corporate flying job he got early in his career when he was building his hours. He went to the interview and the man asked him all the pertinent questions and then the last one was, “What kind of music do you like?" He thought that was an odd question. He didn't know a lot about music, but he answered with some general response. He got the job and on the first trip the man comes walking out to the plane carrying a guitar. He flew him to Atlanta where his new boss preformed at a sold out 5,000 seat theatre. Edwin McCain
Another pilot friend of ours told us about flying charters as one of his first aviation gigs. I think the company was out of Indiana. He said he'd flown quite a few famous folk around, Bryan Adams, Dennis Miller and a very memorable Billy Gibbons of ZZ Top. He said they flew Billy to Nashville one evening. Our friend and his co-pilot were trying to get things finished up to go to the hotel, but Billy seemed content to stand outside by the plane and shoot the breeze and talk about the stars. Before his ride came, he asked them if they liked music. They answered, “Sure.” He said he had to play at some awards show the next night and if they were interested in going, he'd send a limo to their hotel to pick them up. “Yes, thank you” they said, wondering if this was a real thing. Sure enough, the next evening at the appointed time, a limo pulled up and whisked them off to the venue where they had front row seats to the show.
Billy used to be in Memphis a lot. ZZ Top recorded seven albums there, including Tres Hombres and Eliminator. Generosity seems to be a common trait for him There's a frame shop there in town that Kendra and I used quite a bit, 1910 Frameworks down on Union. I was in there one day talking with Lind, the co-owner, and I noticed some ZZ Top artifact in the store. I mentioned it and she said, “Oh, Billy comes in here pretty often. We've done a good bit of work for him. He is so nice. Anytime they're playing in the area, he always calls here to make sure we have tickets if we want them.”
Happy rock star stories.