By most any metric, Led Zeppelin is one of the greatest rock bands of all time. Inducted into the sometimes controversial Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in its first year of eligibility, Led Zeppelin enjoys several entries on the list of the best-selling albums of all time.
Impressively piped singer Robert Plant, shredding guitar virtuoso Jimmy Page, and frenetic drummer John Bonham are often considered among the best ever to do what they did.
Led Zeppelin’s style of electric blues meets heavy metal proved highly influential on 20th century rock, and more than 50 years past the band’s heyday, standards such as “Whole Lotta Love,” “Immigrant Song,” and “Stairway to Heaven” remain staples of classic rock radio. While it sold millions of records and never had a No. 1 hit, Led Zeppelin is almost unparalleled in the canon of rock legends.
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And yet in spite of all those achievements and accolades, or maybe because of them in part, a lot of people just don’t like Led Zeppelin. Moreover, some of those who’ve spoken up to declare their dislike of one of the greatest hard rock acts of all time are important musicians themselves, so when they publicly note their distaste for the band, it gets a lot of ink. Here are some of the biggest rock stars of all time, united in their hatred for Led Zeppelin or its music.
Pete Townshend
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Although Pete Townshend regrets joining The Who, one of the loudest, heaviest, and most successful rock bands of the 1960s and 1970s, he much prefers the music of his group to that of another one operating in the same milieu during the same timeframe: Led Zeppelin. The guitarist considers Zeppelin something of a ripoff act. “We sort of invented heavy metal with ‘Live at Leeds,'” Townshend pointed out to the Toronto Sun (via Far Out), discussing The Who’s 1970 live album. “We were copied by so many bands, principally by Led Zeppelin, you know, heavy drums, heavy bass, heavy lead guitar.”
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In a 1995 interview, Townshend again discussed his frustrations with Led Zeppelin’s sound. “I just never, ever liked them. It’s a real problem to me, ’cause as people, I think they’re all really, really great guys. Just never liked the band,” he said. “They became so much bigger than The Who in so many ways, in their chosen field — I’ve never liked them.” Townshend got in one more tongue-in-cheek jab when delivering a lecture at the 2011 Radio Festival. “I think rock music is junk. I am a genius,” he said (via The Guardian). “The Who were okay, but without me, they would have all ended up working in the flower market, or worse — in Led Zeppelin.”
Keith Richards
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Led Zeppelin released its first, eponymous album in 1969. Right away, the guitarist from another major British rock band of the era, Keith Richards, was a fan — until he couldn’t get past Robert Plant’s vocals. “I played their album quite a few times when I first got it, but then the guy’s voice started to get on my nerves,” Richards told Rolling Stone in 1969. “I don’t know why; maybe he’s a little too acrobatic. But Jimmy Page is a great guitar player, and a very respected one.”
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More than 45 years later, Richards’ opinion hadn’t changed much. He still appreciated the contributions of a fellow guitarist but harbored insurmountable problems with a different member and the whole vibe of Led Zeppelin. “I love Jimmy Page, but as a band, no, with John Bonham thundering down the highway in an uncontrolled 18-wheeler. He had cornered the market there,” Richards told Rolling Stone about the group’s drummer. “Jimmy is a brilliant player. But I always felt there was something a little hollow about it, you know?”
Jack Bruce
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Along with Led Zeppelin, another British band from the late 1960s took some guitar blues traditions and made them louder and harder: Cream. The band consisted of just three people and was led by bassist and main vocalist Jack Bruce. The two groups were often compared to one another — in particular, the guitarists who drove the band’s sound: Eric Clapton of Cream and Jimmy Page of Led Zeppelin. Bruce didn’t think it was a fair contest. “What? You’re gonna compare Eric Clapton with that f***ing Jimmy Page? Would you really compare that?” Bruce asked rhetorically in an interview with Classic Rock Magazine (via Ultimate Guitar) in 2008 following a one-show-only reunion of Led Zeppelin’s surviving members.
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Bruce had some strong feelings about the reconstituted Led Zeppelin, which came about two years after a brief Cream reunion. “Everybody talks about Led Zeppelin, and they played one f***ing gig — one f***ing lame gig — while Cream did weeks of gigs; proper gigs, not just a lame gig like Zeppelin did, with all the keys lowered and everything,” Bruce said. “F*** off, Zeppelin, you’re crap. You’ve always been crap and you’ll never be anything else. The worst thing is that people believe the crap that they’re sold. Cream is 10 times the band that Led Zeppelin is.”
Ginger Baker
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Providing the rhythm for the blues-rock power trio Cream was drummer Ginger Baker. He joined the supergroup with Jack Bruce and Eric Clapton after training as a jazz drummer and playing with Blues Incorporated and the Graham Bond Organisation. He largely shared his frontman’s opinion of Cream’s late ’60s would-be blues-rock rival band Led Zeppelin. “I don’t think Led Zeppelin filled the void that Cream left. But they made a lot of money,” Baker told Forbes about that other group’s 1970s output. “I probably like about 5% of what they did — a couple of things were really cool. What I don’t like is the heavy bish-bash, jing-bap, jing-bash bulls***.”
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Baker’s feelings about Led Zeppelin drummer John Bonham were much more straightforward. “There’s no way John was anywhere near what I am. He wasn’t a musician. A lot of people don’t realize I studied. I can write music,” Baker said. “Bonham had technique, but he couldn’t swing a sack of s***,” Baker quipped in the 2012 documentary “Beware of Mr. Baker” (via the Miami New Times).
Eric Clapton
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All three former members of Cream have gone on the record about their lack of love for Led Zeppelin. Often held up as one of the handful of truly revolutionary rock guitarists, future solo superstar Eric Clapton cut his musical teeth and built his reputation playing in several major supergroups in the 1960s and 1970s, including John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers, Cream, Blind Faith, Derek and the Dominos, and the Yardbirds, responsible for classic hits such as “For Your Love” and “I’m a Man.” Despite his many collaborations, Eric Clapton is loathed by other musicians, and he doesn’t like a lot of them back, including a group co-created by one of his own ex-bandmates: Jimmy Page was a member of the Yardbirds before he joined Led Zeppelin.
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“We had a really strong foundation in blues and jazz,” Clapton said about Cream to Uncut in 2012. “Led Zeppelin took up our legacy. But then they took it somewhere else that I didn’t really have a great deal of admiration for.” That mirrors comments Clapton made to a reporter in 1969 after witnessing an early Led Zeppelin gig. “I thought it was unnecessarily loud,” Clapton said, as noted in Ritchie Yorke’s “Led Zeppelin: The Definitive Biography” (via Ultimate Classic Rock). “I really did like some of it. But a lot of it was just too much. They overemphasized whatever point they were making, I thought.”
Kurt Cobain
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Under the artistic guidance of frontman and main songwriter Kurt Cobain, Nirvana ushered in the grunge rock movement of the 1990s. Characterized by thundering guitar riffs played on down-tuned guitars, the music was a new form of punk rock, according to Cobain, while it also adhered to the traditions set forth by arena rock bands of the 1970s. Both forms of rock influenced Nirvana, although Cobain lamented having been a fan of some bands in particular when he was an impressionable teenager, for what he found to be a throughline of misogyny.
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“Although I listened to Aerosmith and Led Zeppelin, and I really did enjoy some of the melodies they’d written, it took me so many years to realize that a lot of it had to do with sexism,” Cobain told The Observer writer Jon Savage (via PRX) in 1993. “The way that they just wrote about their d**** and having sex. I was just starting to understand what really was p***ing me off so much, those last couple of years of high school. And then punk rock was exposed and then it all came together. It just fit together like a puzzle.”
Jimi Hendrix
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Like Led Zeppelin, Jimi Hendrix appreciated the blues and covered old standards of the genre. He died in 1970, and so the end of his career and life overlapped barely with the early years of Led Zeppelin. But he’d heard enough Led Zeppelin to realize he didn’t care for the band, and to tell his musical associates as much. Carmine Appice played drums for Vanilla Fudge, a band that toured with Hendrix and Led Zeppelin. Hendrix confided in Appice his dislike of Zeppelin. “Jimi Hendrix personally told me that he didn’t like Zeppelin because they were like excess baggage and that they stole from everybody,” Appice said in an interview with Classic Rock Revisited (via Blabbermouth) in 2006. “‘You Shook Me’ was on Jeff Beck’s record. ‘Dazed and Confused’ has a bit of Vanilla Fudge on it.”
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On Hendrix’s suggestion, Appice noticed other Led Zeppelin songs that may have been pilfered from other musicians, including Beck and even Vanilla Fudge’s bassist. “I think I was told by a member of the band that the ‘Good Times Bad Times’ riff came from Tim Bogart’s bass line.”
Angus Young
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Coming up behind Led Zeppelin on the list of the top-selling hard rock bands of all time as well as chronologically: AC/DC. As Led Zeppelin was wrapping up its run in the late 1970s, AC/DC was releasing album after album of straightforward, no-nonsense, fist-pumping stadium rock. During a 1977 conversation with reporter Harry Doherty, AC/DC guitarist Angus Young lamented the woeful direction that rock music had taken in recent years, and he put the blame on one band. “They musta progressed the wrong way. I’ll tell you when it stopped getting good — when the Rolling Stones put out ‘Jumpin’ Jack Flash’ and ‘Street Fightin’ Man.’ Past that, there’s nuthin’,” Young said (via Classic Rock). “Led Zeppelin and all that have just been poor imitators of The Who and bands like that. That’s when I reckon it stopped.”
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Young took a dislike to Led Zeppelin after catching a lackluster concert by the group. “I’ve seen that band live and they were on for three hours. For two and a half hours, they bored the audience, and then at the end they pull out old rock ‘n’ roll numbers to get the crowd movin’,” Young recalled. “That’s sick. They’re supposed to be the most excitin’ rock ‘n’ roll band in the world.”
Bob Dylan
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Bob Dylan is such a highly regarded lyricist that he’s as much of a poet as he is a musician, and in 2016 he won a Nobel Prize for Literature for his large body of songwriting work. His lyrical compositions are often flowery and cryptic, but he didn’t need very many words to memorably express his distaste for the music of Led Zeppelin.
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After playing keyboards in the Small Faces and the Faces, Ian McLagan became a member of Dylan’s backing band, touring with the singer-songwriter in the 1970s and 1980s. When Led Zeppelin was still an active band in the mid-1970s, the group’s manager, Peter Grant, spotted Dylan at a star-studded event. McLagan remembered their brief conversation in his memoir, “All the Rage” (via Vulture): “‘Hello, Bob. I’m Peter Grant, I manage Led Zeppelin.'” Dylan’s retort: “‘I don’t come to you with my problems.'”
The band Spirit
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Randy California, a protege of Jimi Hendrix, tragically died in 1997. His career included a stint as a guitarist in Deep Purple and playing in the 1960s and 1970s psychedelic rock trio Spirit with Jay Ferguson, who would go on to score a top 10 hit in 1977 with “Thunder Island” and write the theme song to the U.S. version of “The Office.”
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In 2014, the estate of Randy California filed a copyright infringement suit against Led Zeppelin’s Jimmy Page and Robert Plant, writers of “Stairway to Heaven.” The suit alleged that the introductory guitar part of Led Zeppelin’s signature song was lifted from Spirit’s 1968 instrumental cut “Taurus.” Page and Plant were absolved of any wrongdoing with a 2016 lawsuit dismissal, but an appeals court threw out the ruling, which necessitated another trial. In 2020, Led Zeppelin once again emerged victorious. “What you have here is a big win for the multi-billion dollar industry against the creatives,” Francis Malofiy, the lawyer representing Spirit’s side, told Rolling Stone. “I love Led Zeppelin, as a man, and I can separate my appreciation for them as four band members playing amazing music, but they’re the greatest art thieves of all time and they got away with it again today. They won on a technicality. But they absolutely stole that piece of work.”
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Paul Simonon
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Punk rock — characterized by short songs made out of straightforward and simple guitar riffs and generally angry lyrics — emerged in the late 1970s in the U.K. and the U.S. in part as a musical response to the grand and complicated blues-based rock made popular earlier in the decade by bands such as Led Zeppelin. When compared to bands like the often loud, sloppy, politically conscious, and tragedy-beset Clash, Led Zeppelin’s highly theatrical and technically impressive songs about mystical and arcane subjects seemed bloated and out of touch.
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In 1977, the Clash’s bassist, Paul Simonon, spoke out on behalf of his band and his movement by slamming Led Zeppelin to a music reporter. When asked if he liked the music by the still-major arena rock juggernaut, Simonon was rather dismissive. “Led Zeppelin? I don’t need to hear the music,” he said (as quoted in Nigel Williamson’s “The Rough Guide to Led Zeppelin”). “All I have to do is look at one of their album covers and I feel like throwing up.”
John Paul Jones
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John Paul Jones played bass for Led Zeppelin. While he’s mostly proud of his band’s output, one 1973 song annoyed him: the reggae-influenced “D’yer Mak’er,” because of John Bonham’s drumming. “It would have been all right if [Bonham] had worked at the part,” Jones told reporter Chris Welch (via George Case’s “Led Zeppelin FAQ: All That’s Left to Know About the Greatest Hard Rock Band of All Time”). “The whole point of reggae is that the drums and the bass really have to be very strict about what they play. And he wouldn’t, so it sounded dreadful.”
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After Bonham’s death in 1980, Led Zeppelin ended. The surviving members reunited for charity concerts in 1985 and in 2007, while just Robert Plant and Jimmy Page teamed up in 1994 for an MTV special, the album “No Quarter,” and a support tour. Jones seemed miffed at being left out. “I’ve read what they’ve had to say, that they wanted to do a separate project, whatever,” Jones told Rolling Stone. “I just thought I should have been informed about it. To find out about it in the papers was a bit odd.”
However, Jones never considered Led Zeppelin to be anything more than a collection of co-workers. “We have never socialized. As soon as we left the road, we never saw each other,” Jones told Q in 2007 (via Far Out). “We weren’t friends.”
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