The Rolling Stones are 'not good musicians': Ginger Baker Is this the grumpiest musician alive? ... Cream drummer Ginger Baker sticks it to the Stones. It's a good thing The Rolling Stones make plenty of money because the thick wads of cash should be able to keep them warm in the chill of what is looking like a pick-on-the-Stones week. And no, not a week of criticism from the usual suspects - jealous journalists and upstart young bands wanting them to retire - but from some of their peers. It was bad enough when the grumpiest man in rock 'n' roll, former Cream drummer, Ginger Baker, laid into them in an interview with - oh the irony - Rolling Stone magazine. Baker, whose reputation for being at the extreme and bitter end of curmudgeonly was cemented last year in a documentary aptly named Beware Of Mr Baker, isn't nice to anyone, ever. See this hilarious description by a journalist/fan who did a public Q&A with Baker. So it was probably little surprise that when asked about the Stones he said that while drummer Charlie Watts was a friend of his, "I won't go within 10 miles of a Rolling Stones gig [because] they're not good musicians." He doesn't rate them as songwriters either. But then he doesn't rate either Pete Townshend or Bob Dylan - "I'm not a big anybody fan." Sticks and stones ... Mick Jagger and Keith Richards of The Rolling Stones keep on rockin' and rolling. But the real kick in the Stones teeth has come with Sir Paul McCartney reviving a 50-year-old argument by suggesting the five Londoners rode into success on the back of the Liverpool four. Citing the fact that one of the earliest Stones hips was a song given to them by John Lennon and McCartney, I Wanna Be Your Man, that the Beatles broke into the USA first and that some of the late '60s indulgences were remarkably similar to Beatles' ones, McCartney plumps for imitation as irritation. The Beatles go to America, a year later they come too. We wrote their first single (sic), I Wanna Be Your Man," he was quoted as saying. We go psychedelic, they go psychedelic. We dress as wizards, they dress as wizards... The problem for the Rolling Stones isn't in debunking that argument: after all, their success as writers and performers between 1965 and 1980 rests on a bit more than a Beatles copy or two. And they can always point to a basic question: how many people remember or even know who Ginger Baker is. However, annoyingly perhaps, while it's been decades since the Stones put out an album anyone talked about with something other than derision, McCartney has not only been knighted but in the past five years has put out varied and critically lauded albums. Still, no doubt Mick Jagger would point out you can't bank critical praise.