The reason why Ginger Baker thought heavy metal was “repulsive”
Ginger Baker has never been one to beat around the bush. When it comes to speaking his mind, the former Cream drummer is as fluent as you would expect of someone with such a fearsome and puritanical reputation. Simply put, Baker doesn’t give a damn about you or your so-called taste. That is especially true, I’m afraid to say, when it comes to metal heads.
Opening up about some of his contemporaries in a recent interview with Forbes, Ginger Baker took some time to tear into the likes of Led Zeppelin, whose stadium-shaking sound helped establish the parameters of heavy metal music. “Jimmy’s [Page] a good player,” he began. “I don’t think Led Zeppelin filled the void that Cream left, but they made a lot of money. I probably like about five per cent 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 bullshit.”
For Baker, Jimmy Page was only the tip of the iceberg. His real problem was with John Bonham. Lashing out at the band’s legendary drummer, Ginger declared that he wasn’t “anywhere near what I am. He wasn’t a musician.” He went on to lay a hefty dose of scorn on the heavy metal genre as a whole, labelling it “incredibly repulsive” in an attempt to undermine the idea that Cream were instrumental in its creation.
Venting his frustration, Baker continued: “I’ve seen where Cream is sort of held responsible for the birth of heavy metal. Well, I would definitely go for aborting [laughs]. I loathe and detest heavy metal. I think it is an abortion. A lot of these guys come up and say, ‘Man, you were my influence, the way you thrashed the drums.’ They don’t seem to understand I was thrashing in order to hear what I was playing. It was anger, not enjoyment – and painful. I suffered on stage because of that [high amplifier] volume crap. I didn’t like it then, and like it even less now. That whole Rock and Roll Hall of Fame thing — at least half the people in there don’t have a place in any kind of hall of fame anywhere, in my opinion.”
John Bonham, on the other hand, regarded Baker as an innovator. “People hadn’t taken much notice of drums before Krupa,” Bonham explains in the book In Their Own Words. “And Ginger Baker was responsible for the same thing in rock.”
Continuing, he added: “[Baker] was the first to come out with this ‘new’ attitude — that a drummer could be a forward musician in a rock band, and not something that was stuck in the background and forgotten about.” It seems that Baker would have had a thing or two to say about that, Mr Bonham.
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