The Band

Given his dedication to blues and rootsy rock, you’d think that Keith Richards would be a big fan of Robbie Robertson, Levon Helm and the rest of The Band. However, it all started in 1966, when Richards and Bob Dylan reportedly came to blows over the American troubadour claiming his new backing band, The Hawks, who later became The Band, were better than the ‘Paint It Black’ outfit.

Three years later, Richards still hadn’t fully moved past that moment. Despite The Band’s 1968 debut, Music from Big Pink, being a roots rock classic, blending forms that Richards had always loved, as typified by the infallible ‘The Weight’, he made his thoughts on them clear in a notorious 1969 Rolling Stone interview.

He said he’d witnessed Bob Dylan and the renamed Band perform their iconic set at the Isle of Wight Festival that year, but was “disappointed”. Although he maintained that Dylan “was beautiful”, especially in the songs he did by himself, “The Band were just too strict.”

He said, “They’ve been playing together for a long, long time, and what I couldn’t understand was their lack of spontaneity. They sounded note-for-note like their records. … They just didn’t seem to come alive by themselves. I think that they’re essentially an accompanying band.”

Creedence Clearwater Revival

John Fogerty, his late brother Tom, and the rest of Creedence Clearwater Revival (CCR) were masters at making swamp rock, southern rock, and country their own despite hailing from California. With songs like ‘Green River’, ‘Born on the Bayou’ and ‘Fortunate Son’, John put his own unique twist on the essence of musical Americana, while imbuing it with a distinctly countercultural spirit.

For that reason, CCR remain one of their generation’s best-loved outfits. And for a solitary year in 1970, they were the biggest band in the world, seemingly destined to pick up The Beatles’ recently vacated mantle, and selling millions of albums in the process.

In that fiery 1969 interview, Richards tore into the El Cerrito quartet. At first, he said he loved them, but their very definitive style quickly started to wear thin. “When I first heard [CCR], I was really knocked out,” Richards conceded. “But I became bored with them very quickly. After a few times, it started to annoy me. They’re so basic and simple that maybe it’s a little too much.”

Grateful Dead

Keith Richards is synonymous with countercultural hellraising. During the 1960s, he committed to many drug-fuelled exploits that have become the stuff of legend. One of which is the notorious 1967 Redlands drug bust, where he, Jagger, and the frontman’s girlfriend, Marianne Faithfull, were just coming down from an extensive acid trip at his Sussex estate but were arrested by the police, making front-page news. This was the moment that Richards and the band became symbolic of their generation’s carefree drug experimentation.

They weren’t the only group who were inextricable from drug use. The definitive hippie band, the Grateful Dead, led by Jerry Garcia, also made a name for themselves with their lengthy live jams and their own pool of madcap, drug-influenced tales, which features eating a cake laced with 800 hits of acid. Regardless of their shared penchant for voyaging on the astral plane and rootsy sounds, though, Richards has never been a fan of the San Francisco outfit.

“The Grateful Dead is where everybody got it wrong,” he explained to Billboard in 2015. “Just poodling about for hours and hours. Jerry Garcia, boring shit, man. Sorry, Jerry.”

Guns N’ Roses

This is one that most people can get behind. Although their music has hair metal and punk twists, Los Angeles hard rock outfit Guns N’ Roses is steeped in the essence of classic rock, mostly through the context of lead guitarist Slash, who calls former Rolling Stones guitarist Mick Taylor his “biggest influence” – and frontman Axl Rose’s primal wails. However, their derivative sound and gross-out behaviour outside of the studio have put a lot of people off.

Richards actually admired the band’s brash attitude when they broke out with 1987’s debut, Appetite for Destruction, but, reflecting his character, it was their look that really pissed him off. He felt they were ripping older statesmen off like Rolling Stones rhythm guitarist Ronnie Wood and Led Zeppelin’s Jimmy Page.

“I admire their guts,” he told Rolling Stone in 1988. “[But] their look – it’s like there’s one out of this band, one looks like Jimmy [Page], one looks like Ronnie [Wood]. Too much copycat, too much posing for me.” Given that he also thought David Bowie was guilty of being all pose, it is clear how dearly Richards holds authenticity and uses a lack of it to bash his more experimental peers.

Led Zeppelin

Richards is a purist when it comes to rock music. He prefers simple, straight-to-the-point sounds over the prolonged noodling of Jerry Garcia and his band or the slow, sludgy work of Black Sabbath and the metal genre they started, a form he loathes. This love of raw, no-nonsense sonics also led him to hate Led Zeppelin, no matter how much he’s a fan of guitarist Page’s fretboard-traversing efforts.

“The guy’s voice started to get on my nerves. I don’t know why. Maybe he’s a little too acrobatic,” he pondered in Rolling Stone in 1969. In typical Richards fashion, even the simple act of calling Robert Plant ‘the guy’ seems like a subtle dig. Then, many years later, he affirmed his beliefs.

“I love [guitarist] Jimmy Page, but as a band, no, with John Bonham thundering down the highway in an uncontrolled 18-wheeler,” he told the same publication in 2015. “He had cornered the market there. Jimmy is a brilliant player. But I always felt there was something a little hollow about it, you know?”