Moby, Robert Plant in the Trakai castle

VILNIUS - The Trakai castle, situated on an island in a lake near Vilnius, used to be the headquarters of Vytautas, ruler of the largest European state, Lithuania, and a cult personality – according to a Lithuanian who served in the Soviet army near the Black Sea in the 1960s, a local Karaite, or Tartar, threw fresh white sand on a path to the Black Sea there each week to honor Vytautas, who supposedly rode that path to the coastline. This upcoming summer will bring two cult personalities in the history of music to the Trakai medieval castle: Moby, king of electronic dance music, will give his concert on June 13, while Robert Plant, former vocalist and lyricist of the legendary English rock band Led Zeppelin, will sing there on July 25. Tickets can be bought via www.bilietupasaulis.lt, and it is better to hurry because tickets are being sold fast for these two events.

Moby (real name Richard Melville Hall) was born on the now symbolic day of Sept. 11 in New York in 1965. He sings and plays keyboard, guitar and drums. Moby started his career in the punk band Vatican Commandos. Later he moved into the techno music world and was nominated for Grammy and MTV Awards – he won the MTV Video Music Award in the category of Best Male Video in 2001. “Moby was one of the most important dance music figures of the early ’90s, helping to bring music to a mainstream audience both in England and in America,” wrote allmusic.com about this vegan and animal rights’ defender, having very sane philosophical views: he is a libertarian and Christian, not aligning himself with any one specific denomination, and allergic to orthodoxy and fundamentalism. Fundamentalists should go into the streets doing good deeds and spreading love instead of angry preaching, according to Moby.

“I’m sort of a libertarian. People should be able to do what they want. I ultimately defer the wisdom to an adult to make their own choices,” Moby told the libertarian Web site of the educational NGO Advocates for Self-Government. “When I say I love Christ and love the teachings of Christ, I mean that in the most simple and naive way. I’m not saying I’m right. [...] Basically what led me away from fundamentalism was looking at the world around me. The fundamentalist is always trying to conform his or her experience to his or her orthodox belief, to his or her fundamentalism. But then you look at the world around you and you realize, you know what, the world is flexible and fluid in ways that cannot be contained within a fundamentalist ideology,” Moby told BBC, adding that the aggressiveness of fundamentalists shows that they do not really believe in the power of their ideas themselves.

During his career, Moby recorded songs with such superstars as Brit David Bowie and French-Canadian Mylene Farmer (her and Moby’s Bleu Noir was song No. 1 in France’s MCM TV Top 50 chart last week). In 2002, Moby was Electronic Artist of the Year and author of Electronic Album of the Year, according to Billboard magazine. Moby says he has known a lot about Lithuania since his childhood and looks forward to his first concert in this country on June 13.

On July 25, the concert by Robert Plant, the greatest rock vocalist of all time and all nations, will probably attract a little bit different audience, more kind of Big Lebowski-type dudes. He will arrive with the Band of Joy – interestingly enough, one of his bands, before the creation of Led Zeppelin in 1968, had the same name. Led Zeppelin was a band on the scale of The Beatles, Deep Purple and Pink Floyd. Plant was the soul of Led Zeppelin. He was interested in history (he will enjoy singing in the Trakai castle), Welsh, Scandinavian and Germanic history-related myths as well as fantasy novels by J. R. R. Tolkien and there is this feel in such songs of Led Zeppelin like The Battle of Evermore. Led Zeppelin’s song Stairway to Heaven is definitely one of the best songs ever created by humankind. Plant will sing his new songs as well as some of the rock classics of Led Zeppelin in Trakai. A funny Led Zeppelin-related fact is that in the 1970s, many young Lithuanians had suspicions that Led Zeppelin band members could be of Lithuanian origin, because they named their band Cepelinai (“Zeppelins” in Lithuanian), which is the name for the Lithuanian national potato dish, also known as
didzkukuliai.