(Credits: Far Out / Showtime Documentary Films)
Sun 7 December 2025 16:30, UK
This is going to sound a bit ‘old many yells at cloud’, but what we have here is a curious case in which both Keith Richards and Eric Clapton momentarily seem to forget who they were, and forget that they’re rock stars.
Part and parcel of being a rock star, especially one in the 1960s, is surely a bit of hearing damage. Before in-ears got so advanced and ear protection was available in little individually wrapped packed in jars on more venue bar tops, the people really were just pounding those eardrums.
Just image the noise level Richard has spent decades facing up to, not only through the sound of his own guitar, but having Charlie Watts pounding the drums behind him, and Jagger yelling his lyrics next to him. That doesn’t even account for the volume of their crowds as their fame grew, and the screaming likely reached shattering levels.
Isn’t that the whole point? Isn’t the entire branding of rock music that it’s meant to be played out until the speakers rattle and the room shakes? So what happened to both Richards and Clapton, two of the most famous rockers around, when their mutual issue with Led Zeppelin really seemed to come down to how loud they were?
“Bonham was a hell of a powerhouse drummer. Although I think he was heavy-handed,” Richard said, once saying it sounded like he was just “thundering down the highway in an uncontrolled 18-wheeler”. In some harsh words, he claimed the abrasive drummer put the “led” in Led Zeppelin, stating, “As a band, I felt they were aptly named, but they never took off for me, musically.”
Clapton felt the same. “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 said, talking about how the band started out inspired by Cream, and then tanked it.
“We had a really strong foundation in blues and jazz,” he said, seeing his own band as characterised by nuance and even a light-footedness. But in Zeppelin, he didn’t see that at all, with bandmate Jack Bruce also agreeing, stating, “Cream is ten times the band that Led Zeppelin is. You’re gonna compare Eric Clapton with fucking Jimmy Page?”
Bruce was really the harshest of them all, going all in when he said, “Fuck 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.”
But the issue once again came down to a loud, abrasive drummer that hurt their precious ears as Ginger Baker also joined in, once stating, “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.”
At the end of the day, both Richards and Clapton, as well as his old bandmates, seemed to see Zeppelin as nothing but a noisy unit with no nuance, as Keef concluded, “I always felt there was something a little hollow about it, you know?”
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