Keith Richards once said, “You have the sun, you have the moon, you have the air that you breathe – and you have The Rolling Stones!” But not everybody thinks the world revolves around the British rock band. In fact, Elton John seems to think that they are merely arthritic primates of some sort, reprising the blues with a bit of gyration. Although, you can’t help but think that they’ve never seemed to mind naysayers like Elton either, forever feeding off of feuds and friction like proto-punk vampires.
For a long time, the band were even ostracised by some circles of the media after the chaos and tragedy of Altamont was seen as pushing rock ‘n’ roll too far, but, if anything, this also happened to be perhaps their most fruitful creative period. Now, almost half a century later, the gang are still kicking it and upholding their tenets of playing the blues with a bit of punk vigour.
In the past, that has garnered record sales in excess of 200 million, but also a legion of outliers who take issue with their methods and attempt to call time at the bar for the “mummy’s boys” of rock ‘n’ roll. Clearly, the Stones are having none of it, and their fanbase keeps growing, slowly but steadily creating the illusion that in 2123, we might be covering a ‘One Last Time’ tour.
However, if the folks below had their way, the rockers from Dartford would never have been met with an ounce of reverence. So, from the pop stars caught up in bickering matches to rockers who think they’re frauds, these artists have expressed a deep dislike of The Rolling Stones at one point in time.
Five artists who hate The Rolling Stones:
Elton John
Lord knows how the feud began, but at one point, Richards slandered Elton John by calling him “an old bitch” and adding that ”his writing is limited to songs about dead blondes”. The Rocketman was determined not to be outdone, and his response is also comically commendable. “It would be awful to be like Keith Richards,“ he said. “He’s pathetic. It’s like a monkey with arthritis, trying to go on stage and look young. I have great respect for the Stones but they would have been better if they had thrown Keith out 15 years ago.“
This mark of begrudging respect is commonplace among Stones detractors. When Steve Coogan was cutting them down to size, he still admitted, “They’ve only written about eight brilliant songs“. However, aside from having Richards in their ranks, Elton’s modicum of respect for the band is chipped away further by what he sees as pretence and hypocrisy. When Richards called his act simple ”showbiz”, he replied with, “Please, if the Rolling Stones aren’t showbiz, then what is? You know, with their inflatable naked women.”
Lemmy
Richards might have said that David Bowie’s act was “all fucking posing”, but Lemmy thinks that the Stones were guilty of a spot of it themselves, the type that bellies their rock ‘n’ roll image and implies a lack of sincerity. It’s well-regarded that Mick Jagger went to The London School of Economics, but for the most part, aside from his slightly public Tory-leaning politics, the band have managed to swerve questions regarding their grit and rouse a stance as rebellious radicals in the annuls of the arts.
Lemmy wasn’t having it. “The Rolling Stones were the mummy’s boys,” the Motörhead rocker reckons, ridiculing their image in his memoir, White Line Fever. “They were all college students from the outskirts of London,” he writes. “They went to starve in London, but it was by choice, to give themselves some sort of aura of disrespectability.”
He clearly felt that this artifice also symbolised the lack of true roots in their actual music. His cutting remarks continue: “I did like the Stones, but they were never anywhere near the Beatles – not for humour, not for originality, not for songs, not for presentation. All they had was Mick Jagger dancing about.”
Adding: “I went to go see the Rolling Stones in the park and they were awful, completely out of tune.“
Ginger Baker
Ginger Baker didn’t like much in life; even his own son has often remarked on the misanthropissed’s wicked ways, and the Stones far from escaped his wrath. “I won’t go within ten miles of a Rolling Stones gig,” the former Cream drummer once told Rolling Stone, adding that “they’re not good musicians, that’s why. The best musician in the Stones is Charlie [Watts] by a country mile”.
The drummer’s vitriol didn’t stop there. ”I hate the Stones and always have done. Mick Jagger is a musical moron. True, he is an economic genius. Most of ’em are fucking morons,” he said. When it came to their songwriting, he wasn’t impressed either. He believed that they simply didn’t have what it took technically to produce anything worthwhile and, as such, were left floundering, as Paul McCartney once said, as a ”blues cover band”.
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John Lennon
When Frank Zappa was appraising the Stones, he claimed to like them but felt that they were commercial rather than artistic. He commented, ”Ultimately, though, the music was being done because it was product. It was pop music made because there was a record company waiting for records.” In many ways, this was the same opinion that John Lennon had of the band, provided you significantly dial down the liking them part.
In a scathing diatribe against the band, he labelled Jagger “a joke” and used a condemnable homophobic slur while speaking to Rolling Stones in 1971. “I think it’s a lot of hype. I like ‘Honky Tonk Woman’ but I think Mick’s a joke, with all that fag dancing, I always did. I enjoy it, I’ll probably go and see his films and all, like everybody else, but really, I think it’s a joke.“
“I was always very respectful about Mick and the Stones, but he said a lot of sort of tarty things about The Beatles, which I am hurt by, because you know, I can knock the Beatles, but don’t let Mick Jagger knock them,” he continued, revealing the source of his feud. “I would like to just list what we did and what the Stones did two months after on every fuckin’ album. Every fuckin’ thing we did, Mick does exactly the same – he imitates us. And I would like one of you fuckin’ underground people to point it out, you know Satanic Majesties is Pepper, ‘We Love You’, it’s the most fuckin’ bullshit, that’s ‘All You Need Is Love’. I resent the implication that the Stones are like revolutionaries and that the Beatles weren’t.“
David Crosby
While his view might have softened in his later years, for a time, you got the sense that David Crosby blamed the Stones for burning down the dream of the 1960s. He lived up in Laurel Canyon, where a community of bands fostered a prelapsarian hope for peace and love through arts. The Rolling Stones didn’t share this sentiment and often dished out digs to their peers and pushed the punkiness of rock ‘n’ roll towards a dangerous end that only served themselves.
After the horrific events at Altamont, where the band hired the Hells Angels as security in a regrettable move that resulted in fatalities, Crosby commented, “I think the major mistake was taking what was essentially a party and turning it into an ego game and a star trip of The Rolling Stones, who… qualify in my book as snobs. I think they’re on a grotesque, negative ego trip, essentially, especially the two leaders.”
He later said that they were far more limited in range than The Beatles and that they couldn’t harmonise ”for squat”, so he wasn’t too hot on the quality of their music either.
