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Ignacio
When I met Robert Plant, it was in 2002. I was working at a phone company in Las Vegas called and I had done really well for the month. I made, like, $6,000 that month, so I felt like I was king of the world, because at 22 years old, making that amount of money was completely absurd. I bought tickets from a ticket broker in a seedy part of town, and I paid cash for it. It was like $200 to see Robert Plant at the Hard Rock at a venue called The Joint inside the Hard Rock. When I got to the Hard Rock, after I had bought my tickets, I saw that there was a major line to get into The Joint, and prior to that, I had smoked a good amount of marijuana for the show, and I was pretty much in a haze.
I was walking around the casino, blah blah blah. Next thing you know, I run into somebody that is selling two tickets with two back stage passes, and I went up to him and I said, “No fucking way. Are you really selling these right now?”
He’s like, “Yes. $400. Right now.”
What winds up happening is everybody is kind of corralled into a hallway where everybody has to be either on the left or the right, and in time, we’re brought to an upstairs area of the Hard Rock Hotel and I was the first one on the right side of the hallway for the whole line, and I had made sure that I had brought a disposable camera because I wanted to get my picture taken.
Prior to us being corralled into this hallway, since I was there by myself and I didn’t know anybody else, I just picked a random guy that was standing in line with his own tickets, and I said “Hey, today’s your lucky day. You’re going to get to meet Robert Plant.” The people behind the guy that I had given the backstage pass to, it was a married couple in their 50s.
The guy next to me actually had Led Zeppelin’s first album liner notes with him. I saw Robert Plant autograph that for him, and the guy was ecstatic, out of this world, like he never thought in a million years he would get to meet Robert plant, but with me, I shake his hand. My name is Ignacio. The nickname for that is Nacho. The guy who invented nachos, his name was Ignacio. They would have been named bills if his name had been William. So I must preface what I’m about to say with that, because I say to Robert plant, in a stoned daze, star struck at the same time, “Hello, I’m nacho.” And he just looks at me, and he goes to the person next to me.
The other people, the married couple in their 50s, they had a disposable camera that looked identical to mine, and I was fortunate enough to bother Robert Plant for a picture, which I got, but it happened to be on their camera instead of mine. When I went to develop the film, I got a picture of Robert Plant with the guy’s wife. So somewhere out in the great beyond is a picture of me with Robert Plant.
