Keith Richards’ scathing review of five classic rock albums: “It’s like ‘Mein Kampf’”
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!” And as far as he was concerned, everyone else could get in the sea.
With the exception of a few of his blues heroes, Richards has never been one to wax lyrical about his peers, preferring to keep up the rock ‘n’ roll image of a rebel. With a cigarette cellotaped to his bottom lip, he identified early on that indifference is cooler than going cockahoop. Even his own bandmates are prone to a bashing if he can be bothered.
His goal has always been to present the image of a man who marches to the beat of his own drum. And boy has he done some marching. Along his merry way, he’s landed blows on Prince, David Bowie, The Band, and called Elton John “an old bitch“ whose “writing is limited to songs about dead blondes”. While he has copped the odd “monkey with arthritis“ response in retort, you’d be hard-pushed to say that he cares one bit about what others have said about him.
When it comes to specific records, however, Richards has been rather mute. His influences have largely remained in the roots and blues music that first prompted him to pick up a guitar. “What I love about reggae,” Richards explains in the recent Under the Influence documentary, “Is that it’s all so natural, there’s none of this forced stuff that I was getting tired of in rock music.”
He then goes on to clarify, “Rock ‘n’ roll I never get tired of, but ‘rock’ is a white man’s version, and they turn it into a march, that’s [the modern] version of rock. Excuse me,” he adds with his trademarked slurred yet genteel humour, “I prefer the roll.”
But roll is hard to come by. Angus Young even claims that the Stones themselves lost it after ‘Jumpin’ Jack Flash’ and began playing “soul” music. While Richards might not agree that it is absent from his own discography, he’s certainly bemoaned the wider loss of an integral groove in classic rock at large.
This has left a lot of classic albums open to criticism from the callous guitarist. With that in mind, we’ve compiled a few classic records below that Richards has attempted to cut down to size. You can’t accuse him of picking on the little guys, either.
Five classic rock albums Keith Richards hates:
‘Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band’ – The Beatles
Richards has had a multitude of thoughts regarding The Beatles over the years, and most of them pertain to thinking that they went rapidly downhill. “I think The Beatles had passed their performing peak even before they were famous,” he once opined. “Musically, The Beatles had a lovely sound and great songs,” he told the Radio Times. “But the live thing? They were never quite there,” he continued, despite the fact that they amassed around 1400 performances in their six years as a touring entity.
However, at one point, he thought the music was never there either. And he levelled that criticism at Sgt. Peppers, “I think they got carried away. Why not? If you’re the Beatles in the ’60s, you just get carried away – you forget what it is you wanted to do. You’re starting to do Sgt. Pepper. Some people think it’s a genius album, but I think it’s a mishmash of rubbish,” he scythed with all the sneaky aggression of an Argentinian centre back. It might have sold an unprecedented 30m copies and changed the world, but Richards isn’t having it.
‘Their Satanic Majesties Request’ – The Rolling Stones
Despite Richards not liking Sgt. Peppers set a psychedelic precedent that he unfortunately followed. And speaking of the imitation of Satanic Majesties, he said, ”Oh, if you can make a load of sh*t, so can we.” Later in his memoir, the guitarist claimed: “None of us wanted to make [Satanic Majesties], but it was time for another Stones album, and Sgt. Pepper’s was coming out, so we thought basically we were doing a put-on.” He and his bandmates have claimed that they were simply so “strung out” from endless recording and touring in the period that they figured the easiest route would be to cruise on the backseat of a bandwagon.
While Richards doesn’t mind the songs ‘2000 Light Years from Home’, ‘Citadel’ and ‘She’s a Rainbow’, he ultimately concludes that the record “was a load of crap”. In fact, ‘2000 Light Years from Home’ and ‘She’s a Rainbow’ are the only two songs from the album that the band have played live, largely casting the rest of it to the ash heap of history. And even Mick Jagger has questioned whether they came out of their psychedelic experiment smelling of roses, too.
‘She’s the Boss’ – Mick Jagger
After the disappointment of the dreadful Dirty Work, a rift grew in the Stones, and Jagger and Richards silently decided to call a hiatus on things. So, in 1985, Jagger unceremoniously went solo for the first time. Richards didn’t like that. “Mick’s album was called She’s the Boss, which said it all,” Richards reflected.
“I’ve never listened to the entire thing all the way through. Who has? It’s like Mein Kampf. Everybody had a copy, but nobody listened to it,” he concluded in a very odd analogy, revealing more about the company he keeps than the reading habits of the masses. Fascism is, unfortunately, on the rise, but ‘everybody’ seems a stretch.
Sadly, though, he did seem to put his finger on the general consensus when it comes to She’s The Boss and Jagger’s solo years. By 2002, the Rolling Stones were back on better terms, but Richards was no kinder about Jagger’s fourth solo effort, Goddess in the Doorway. He told Guitar World, “What, Dog Shit in the Doorway? I listened to three tracks and gave up on it. Sometimes, you wonder.”
He concluded, “With the Stones, he’s great. It’s best to keep him on a short leash.” And away from the albums, he’s even had a dig of his frontman’s apparently diminutive spam javelin, citing, “Marianne Faithfull had no fun with his tiny todger. I know he’s got an enormous pair of balls- but it doesn’t quite fill the gap.” With friends like these, ay?
‘Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols’ – Sex Pistols
“They look great. That’s all that matters,” Richards once said of the Sex Pistols. Ostensibly a compliment, when you look into the feud between the two, there is also a hint that he’s saying they’re rock ‘n’ roll in rags and not much more. Because, when it came to their music, he offered the barbed comment, “There’s more to it than saying ‘shit’ on TV or learning to spit by practising in the mirror.”
Mick Jagger joined him in this battle. Punk wasn’t merely about vitriol and violence, but that is where Jagger was willing to war with the Sex Pistols. Regarding their run-ins, the gyrating frontman scolded: “They’ve stopped short at violence. I think even Sid Vicious is basically a nice guy, but Johnny Rotten keeps talking bad about me.” And then came the threat: “He’ll get his rotten teeth kicked in one day.”
‘Willy and the Poor Boys’ – Credence Clearwater Revival
In November 1969, Richards was in the offices of Rolling Stone when the recent Credence Clearwater Revival album blared out of the speakers. He was asked for his opinion, and he never needs to be asked twice. “Yeah, I’m into a very weird thing with that band. When I first heard them, I was really knocked out, but I became bored with them very quickly. After a few times, it started to annoy me,” he said.
”They’re so basic and simple that maybe it’s a little too much,” he continued. In some ways, this also played into the unfortunate ‘Boy Scouts of Rock’ tagline that had begun to beset the band at the time. After all, in the very same Rolling Stone interview, Richards laid down the incendiary tenets of his own band, stating: “It’s always been the Stones’ thing to get up on stage and kick the crap out of everything. We had three years of that before we made it, and we were only just getting it together when we became famous. We still had plenty to do on stage, and I think we still have. That’s why the tour should be such a groove for us.”
