AUSTIN -- Rock-and-roll is alive and well and shrieking beside a bus. The bus belongs to John Paul Jones, the former bass player for Led Zeppelin, and the shrieking belongs to a twenty-something damsel who is pirouetting on the sidewalk and waving a t-shirt.

"I was on the bus and he signed my shirt!" she shouts to everyone. "HE SIGNED MY SHIRT!"

It's true. The garment, however, is emblazoned with the words "Page and Plant," a souvenir from a tour by Zeppelin founders Jimmy Page and Robert Plant. To his chagrin, Jones wasn't invited on that round-the-world jaunt, so asking him to sign this particular jersey was a bit like asking John McCain to slap a "Bush For President" bumper sticker on his minivan.

That's the traveling Jones circus in miniature: haunted a bit by a pair of flamboyant ex-bandmates, but too gracious to get worked up about it. Twenty years after Led Zeppelin foundered and more than four decades after he first strapped on a bass guitar, the 54-year-old Briton is finally striking out on his own, supporting "ZOOMA", supporting his first-ever solo album, on a nationwide tour that lands tonight at Jaxx in Springfield.

"I wouldn't have signed it," he says of the T-shirt, chuckling. "But I thought if I sign it, she'll get off the bus."

Unlike the movie industry, rock has never been good at celebrating its best supporting actors, and Jones is among the most uncelebrated of all. That's partially a function of personality. For a guy who spent eleven years in a band known for exhibitionism and black-magic dabblings -- according to fan lore, he's the only Zeppelin member who didn't sell his soul to Satan -- Jones seems startingly well-adjusted. As a rock star, he's easy to overlook.

"ZOOMA", a blustery collection of bass-heavy instrumentals, could change that. At minimum, the album and tour underscore just how vital his contributions to Zeppelin really were. He crafted some of the band's best-loved riffs, including the classic fusillade that propels "Black Dog". (It's the burst that follows "Hey hey mama, said the way you move, gonna make you sweat, gonna make you groove.") Most of the strings and all of the band's keyboards are the work of Jones, the most technically expert of the quartet.

Chatting in his hotel after a show at the South By Southwest Music Festival here, Jones seems fit and peaceful enough to pass for a yoga instructor. Nothing in his manner suggests that he once held down the bottom for one fo the best-selling and most famously debauched bands in history. Odder still, this tranquility, say colleagues from Zeppelin's early days, is nothing new.

"I'm sure he's a complicated guy, but he kept his complexity to himself," said Danny Goldberg, a record executive who got his start handling publicity for the Zeppelin. "You never heard of him throwing TVs out of hotels or getting into altercations. He's a shy person and very clearly brilliant."

Jones is playing a handful of Zeppelin songs on this tour, including "Black Dog", for an eminently practical reason: He needed them to fill out his two-hour show. More important, "Zeppelin for me was the best band in the world," he says. "And people like to hear those songs. They're no small part of the reason that some come to see me."

Having all but grown up in theaters in England, where he still lives, Jones knows a thing or two about pleasing a crowd. His parents were a musical-comedy act during the age of vaudeville. (Mom played the accomplished singer; Dad played the fumbling pianist.) The bills were crammed with exotica, so young John Baldwin, who toured with his parents nonstop, heard a lifetime of music before he turned six. "There'd be Chinese juggling groups, Arabic tumblers, South Americans, someone from Poland. I heard all this music all the time," Jones recalls.

So as improbable as it sounds, the roots of Zeppelin's exotic eclecticism - the Middle Eastern spice of "Kashmir", the Brazilian samba break in "Fool In The Rain" - can be traced to the same source that gave us W.C. Fields. Likewise, the band's occasional forays into quasi-religious melodies are rooted in Jones' formative years. At 14, he launched his performing career by playing organ and leading a choir at church.

Soon, though, he got his hands on a Jerry Lee Lewis record and his ecclesiastical days were behind him. At 16, he began frequenting a particular corner of Archer Street, where London's musicians milled around in what amounted to a daily casting call for musical talent. After touring with Jet Harris and Tony Meehan, formerly of the Shadows, he adopted the name John Paul Jones and briefly tried his hand at a solo career, releasing a single in 1964 called "Baja".

When the song failed to catch fire, he became a session man, a thriving mini-profession in an age when many bands didn't play on their albums, leaving the task to better-trained pros. Jones' resume from that era includes arrangement credits for Hermans Hermits ("A Kind Of Hush"), Lulu ("To Sir With Love"), and the Rolling Stones ("She's A Rainbow"), and playing credits for Tom Jones, Etta James, Bo Diddley, Sammy Davis and Burt Bacharach. He was also the guy who added horns to Donovan's 1966 hit "Mellow Yellow", an idea initially despised by everyone in the studio that day.

"Then Paul McCartney, who lived nearby, suddenly showed up, heard the horns and said, 'I really like that,' " Jones remembers. "That instantly changed everybody's mind."

But session life was exhausting. A good day's keep was $50 or $60, and that meant crisscrossing the city to help out with a jingle or two in the morning, then dashing to different recording studios in the afternoon. Jones' goal, like everyone else's in this racket, was to escape the grind and join a band.

That happened soon after his then-wife [he's still married to her - Baja ed.] urged him to call Jimmy Page, a blues-loving former session man who in 1968 was forming a new group. Eventually, Page gathered Jones, Plant, and John Bonham - a drummer who pounded so loudly he was banned by some clubs - in a boathouse on the Thames River. In a 20-by-20 foot room lined wall-to-wall with amplifiers, the quartet eyed one another a little warily and wondered what to play. By the end of "The Train Kept A-Rollin'" all four members were chuckling with nervous joy.

Though savaged by many critics at the time - the band was derided for its Wagnerian operatics and accused of desecrating the blues - Zeppelin immediately captured the hearts and eight-track players of a few million listeners, most of them young and male. In 1975, all six of their albums were planted on the Billboard charts. The song "Stairway To Heaven" alone generated a few thousand man-hours of slow dancing and heavy petting in the '70s.

During its notorious 26 tours, Zeppelin cavorted like a high school hockey team on spring break, although Jones managed to escape the scathing press that the other band members constantly generated. Not that he didn't carouse with the rest of them.

"I was in there with everybody else," he says with a laugh. "I had a great time. It's just that nobody saw me having a great time."

The good times ended in 1980, when Zeppelin broke up after Bonham died, having ingested 30 shots of vodka in one excessive evening. Relations among the remaining three were warm enough to bring the group together for a handful of shows, including Live Aid and their Hall of Fame induction. But in 1994, Page and Plant decided to hit the road without Jones - and without even giving him a heads-up about the tour. He learned about it from journalists seeking a reaction.

"I had to answer a barrage of questions from reporters who wanted to know, 'Why aren't you with them?' " Jones said. "I said, 'Why don't you ask them?' It was really sort of embarrassing. If there was a lot of Zeppelin content in the show, I should have known about it."

At South By Southwest, Jones has only 40 minutes to perform so he gives the Cliffs Notes version of his usual set, starting with the title track from "ZOOMA", a grinding rocker built around an overweight, descending riff. The crowd, mostly people in their twenties and thirties, seems thrilled to get a gander at the guy. A few bars into the music, they realize they're going to get a show.

It's at once familiar and deeply odd. All of "ZOOMA"s nine tracks are vocal-less instrumentals, which lends the songs the feel of Zeppelin sessions that somebody forgot to tell Robert Plant about. And through most of the set, Jones is playing a lap bass steel guitar, a contraption of his own making, on which he produces a sliding, supercharged, blues-metal sound that echoes the stylings of Jimmy Page.

The band, in short, seems like Zeppelin after a palace coup, with a couple of newcomers on guitar and drums, and the original bass player assuming the reins of power. Jones plays the thrilled, effusive host, apologizing a little for indulging in his own material and promising that it will soon be "dinosaur time."

That time arrives when Jones dusts off "When The Levee Breaks", a caterwauling classic based on an old Memphis Minnie number. Then there's "Black Dog" and "Nobody's Fault But Mine." Jones tackles both the lead guitar parts and lead vocals with his lap steel, while bass and occasional soloing duties fall to Nick Beggs, who plays a hybrid instrument called a Chapman Stick. Terl Bryant slaps the drums, but is outmatched by the material and memory of John Bonham.

Still, the crowd seems deliriously happy. Jones bows a few times, then disappears behind a curtain and heads toward his bus.

Unknown to him, there's a young lady waiting there with a T-shirt she'd love to have autographed.