Pete Townshend

“When I grew up,” Pete Townshend once said, “what was interesting for me was that music was colour and life was grey.” What is interesting for all of us is that Townsend joined that colourful world with The Who in 1965, four years before Led Zeppelin entered the fray. In that short time, life in England had only gotten greyer, and music’s continued kaleidoscopic rainbow seemed oddly misplaced to a few folks. As such, a couple of bands from the industrial rubble of Birmingham figured maybe music shouldn’t be so colourful after all, and suddenly heavy metal abounded.

Townshend never liked this even though he told the Toronto Sun that The Who “sort of invented heavy metal with [our first live album] Live at Leeds (1970). We were copied by so many bands, principally by Led Zeppelin, you know heavy drums, heavy bass, heavy lead guitar,” said Townshend. Alas, imitation was not the finest form of flattery on this occasion. In fact, he viewed it as the highest source of embarrassment.

In 1995, he was far more cutting. “I don’t like a single thing that they have done, I hate the fact that I’m ever even slightly compared to them,” he said. “I just never ever liked them. It’s a real problem to me cause as people I think they are really, really great guys. Just never liked the band. And I don’t know if I have a problem, block too, because they, well that became so much bigger than The Who in so many ways, in their chosen field, I’ve never liked them.”

Bob Dylan

Bob Dylan isn’t the most outspoken about his peers, so often you happen upon his opinions almost inadvertently. As the comical story goes, Led Zeppelin’s manager Peter Grant infamously approached the folk troubadour in 1974 backstage at a Los Angeles show and, with an extended hand announced, “Hello Bob, I’m Peter Grant, I manage Led Zeppelin.” Dylan then proceeded to dismiss the handshake and utter with unerring wit and disdain, “Do I come to you with my problems?”

Despite his comical tiff with Peter Grant, Dylan has remained on good personal terms with the rest of his fans in Led Zeppelin. It just so happens that they arrived at a time when the original vagabond was concerned that rock ‘n’ roll was losing its glorious mix and being racially segregated into black soul and white British rock. Similar to Richards, he figured that it was losing its groove and becoming a little more sinful in the process.

Whether or not Led Zeppelin remains beyond Dylan’s own taste, he is not the sort who would fail to recognise that they have, indeed, fulfilled the highest purpose of art (according to Dylan himself) and inspired a generation of musicians despite the odd naysayer.

Keith Richards

Keith Richards has never gone in for the whole hero-worship thing. He called David Bowie “all pose”, said Prince was “an overrated midget” and called Elton John “an old bitch”. He even said that Mick Jagger has a “tiny todger“ in a regrettable moment. But he was rather more measured in his nevertheless damning appraisal of Led Zeppelin. His main issue was with the genre they operated in. “Rock ‘n’ roll I never get tired of, but ‘rock’ is a white man’s version,” he said of Led Zeppelin’s heavy revolution in Under the Influence, “and they turn it into a march, that’s [the modern] version of rock. Excuse me, I prefer the roll.”

Aside from that sweeping statement, it is poor old Robert Plant who has borne the brunt of Richards’ criticism. “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. I don’t know why; maybe he’s a little too acrobatic,” he opined.

Nevertheless, he did reserve some praise for the band. “Jimmy Page is a great guitar player,” he added, “and a very respected one.” In fact, he even went a step further in another interview and stated: “To me, Led Zeppelin is Jimmy Page if you want to cut the story short.”On his own website, Richards candidly added: “As a band, I felt aptly named, it never took off for me musically. At the same time, Jimmy Page is one of the best guitar players I’ve ever known. Bonham was a hell of a powerhouse drummer, although I think he’s kind of heavy-handed, myself — that’s when the ‘Led’ comes in.” Rounding off his assessment when he told Rolling Stone: “I always felt there was something a little hollow about it, you know?”

Kurt Cobain

Kurt Cobain was a rocker who considered morals to be an important tenet of good rock ‘n’ roll, and the Nirvana man thought that Led Zeppelin’s were questionable. “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 realise that a lot of it had to do with sexism,” Cobain remarked to Rolling Stone in 1992. “The way that they just wrote about their dicks and having sex. I was just starting to understand what really was pissing me off so much those last couple years of high school,” he explained.

Cobain thought that this compromised the music, and he was looking for something a little bit more inclusive, progressive and pointed. “And then punk rock was exposed, and then it all came together,” Cobain continued. “It just fit together like a puzzle. It expressed the way I felt socially and politically. Just everything. You know. It was the anger that I felt. The alienation.” While Led Zep’s music might have moved him, it didn’t quite resonate in the same wider way.

Previously, he had liked the energy of Led Zeppelin but thought that they were lacking when it came to profundity and purpose. When punk came along and illuminated another way, he distanced himself from a band he once admired, vowing to ensure his own lyrics and attitude subverted stilted old tropes.

Cream

Cream were not a band who shared many opinions; they could barely even agree to disagree, but one thing they all shook hands on was a hatred for Led Zeppelin. “We had a really strong foundation in blues and jazz,” Eric Clapton explained to Nigel Williamson in 2004. “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,” he added. This is as close to praise as any Cream member ever got when it comes to the band—the others have been far more scathing.

“Fuck off, Zeppelin, you’re crap,” Jack Bruce once exclaimed. “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 ten times the band that Led Zeppelin is. You’re gonna compare Eric Clapton with fucking Jimmy Page?” Bruce’s view is one that has been shared by Eddie Van Halen, who found Page to be a “sloppy” player. But the cutting comparisons don’t stop there. When Ginger Baker was compared with John Bonham in the documentary Beware of Mr. Baker, the misanthropissed sticksmith, growled: “The general public are so fucking dumb that anyone could think [that] Bonham was anywhere near this kind of drummer I am is just extraordinary. Bonham had technique, but he couldn’t swing a sack of shit. Or Mooney, for that manner. I mean, if they were still alive today, ask them!” It’s not ideal when a comparison makes you lose faith in the collective intelligence of society at large. That’s as damning as it gets.