look at how the great problems of the queen and the monarchy in her lifetime have been all about love and marriage and sex the question a lot of people here in Britain are asking this morning is where’s the queen it’s like being brought up in a monry with glass walls everyone can look in and every moment of weakness it all be seen and exposed and ridicu the red lights on we are interviewing Larry Adler prin we are interviewing Commander Michael a we are interviewing lady jet Mary
Young For the First Time In Her Reign the queen put family before Duty we could now be witnessing the end of the monarchy and the reigning Queen could possibly be the last she was being the princess and working very
hard he was still in the [Music] Navy now in our innocence we thought this was going to go on for a very long time after all the King was quite Young there might have been 40 more years as [Music] Princess when we were on that Comm tour and we were in Kenya and the people of Kia having as a wedding person G them little cigar the lot we had a day s there to do to adjust and rest and do things Prince Philip went went to sleep in in a little room that
was off to one side the queen was at a desk writing letters third rang my colleague said Mike there a Gastly rumor getting around that the King has died and he was in amongst all the Press people there and they were saying that they’d heard so I said well Martin That’s frightening but I cannot do a thing on a rumor like that I mean I just W do anything and he said no I’m not suggesting you should down went the phone I saw a radio on the shelf above me and there’s a a door open to where the queen is sitting so I shut the door
and TCH on the radio and hunted about the BBC and then I could hear the bell of um Big Ben thought me go so my hair stood up a little bit more this is London it is with the greatest sorrow that we make the following announcement at 10:45 today February the 6th 1952 there that the king passed peacefully away in his sleep earlier this morning and uh that was that so I wizra into where Prince Philip was sleeping and told him his first reaction was one of almost as a huge way to hit [Music] him and he just stood there silently and thought
implications to the fact that she’s becoming the queen then he he straightened himself up and he went in to tell the queen and she was in you know weeping desperately for the loss of her father they walked up and down together very close and then she straightened up fully conscious of the fact that she was Queen and that she must tend to that Affair immediately and she went into the desk that she’ been working on and started to send all these telegrams off around the Commonwealth and to friendly countries like the
United States and so [Music] there was no time then for her if she had wanted to to grieve and a very typical reaction actually she said I’m so sorry it means um we’ve all got to go home as the plane was about to touch down at lant and the Prime Minister Winston Churchill and my parents the Duke and D of gler and all the receiving line of the cabinet were drawn up there in their black clothes and she sort of leans across looks out and says oh God they s the hearses meaning that instead of her car one of the big black cars and somehow
the way she said one knew this 25y old realiz that the end of her private life had come and that for the rest of her life she would be a public figure till day she [Music] died I asked you all whatever your religion to pray for me on the day of my coronation and as the storms of cheering surge with the approaching procession along the river here in contrast the Abbey holds its ancient peace I think what changed for the queen at the moment that she succeeded her
father was the that she was on her own I think that that’s what really changed for [Music] her she did have the enormous advantage of being trained by her own father but I think she must enjoyed those training sessions with Papa because it was something so special between those two nobody else had it I remember once saying to me that my father towar must always remember that whatever I said or did to anyone they would remember it so that if I show disapproval they will remember that I showed disapproval therefore I I
think she’s very very careful not to give any sort of impression that might be constu of disapproval [Music] the Duke of Edinburgh comes to vow lifelong allegiance to his [Music] Queen she’s the queen and he per force is the
husband so what does the husband do [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] Elizabeth as Princess and queen has always been Guided by her sense of Duty but it’s one of the extraordinary things about the queen is that she fell in love and married just about the first man she met [Music] my father happened to be there when the
king and queen took the two girls to D when I think princess Elizabeth was only about 12 years old and as Prince phip was almost the senior Cadet and of course this absolute Greek god and I think that the princess fell head long in love with him at that moment the queen was too young nobody thought of her uh falling in love and remaining in love with that person for the rest of her life I mean she was a child but clearly he made a great impression on her and the romance if you like developed sort of rather gradually
[Music] now it caused her parents great anxiety what parent wouldn’t be anxious about a daughter who wants to marry the very first man she’s fallen in love with it was a matter of her personal happiness it was a matter of the stability of the crown her parents in fact while accepting Phillip and having Philip because he was after all a member of the family to stay wouldn’t let her actually get engaged until she was over 21 several years after she wanted because you know she wasn’t just taking on the man she thought she loved she was taking
on the man who had to shoulder almost half the burden of the monarchy [Music] well I was at this bachelor party the night before the wedding princess Elizabeth he was scared his face was white this man just began to realize what he was getting into and now he finds he doesn’t like it [Music] it was very much a conventional British household he was very much the man of the family he took the decisions she looked up to him in their private life
obvious as Princess she had a lot of official things to do but they were still able with these two small children to have this family [Music] group Prince Philip was basically a man and he was a big man and he was a man’s man too I think there must have been moments when it would have been pretty heavy for him to take this extremely active enthusiastic young man who suddenly B his so life is going to be taken away from him and
probably thinking he’ll become yes man for the rest of his life that’s really devastated that that actually is America could you tell me what is your job in your own mind well I got one I’m self-employed but you must have some clear idea of what role you fulfill in modern society very difficult to [Music] answer the queen can’t be the wife anymore the mother she really had very little time to be with
her children so Prince Phillip in a way sort of became the house husband and he was the one that looked after the children not actually physically looked after them but he organized [Music] them when she became Queen they would see her perhaps for half an hour in the morning 9:00 for half an hour and then she would go off for a week maybe a month maybe several months but in a good week she might be there in the evening and go up to see them having their baths and sit on a little guilt chair which be brought in by a Lackey not take part in
bath time of splashing or anything like that but just sit there rather uneasily and then Dash away after half an hour and I don’t think it was you know in that was that Prince Philip and indeed the queen was significantly different to an awful lot of upper middle class British parents so as that was the way that he behaved don’t cry in public you cuddle in public Etc life may be a lot more civilized but it wasn’t something peculiar to to Prince Charles’s relationship with his parents and it wasn’t that anybody
was being deliberately unkind or cold it was just that was the way you you did things what the queen and the Duke did with their children boarding school that often had strict discipline and didn’t always produce rounded human beings emotionally at the end of the process you know she’s really sacrificed her family in a way Duty really came before personal happiness and she had her work and that came first [Music] Elizabeth and her younger sister Margaret were always very close as children but both of them knew that in the
end Elizabeth would be on the throne and Princess Margaret would need to find a role for herself I don’t think she ever really settled to that to be [Music] [Music] honest the arrival of Princess Margaret and her husband is greeted with a cheers the crowd the flashing lights and nervous children dignified bedam rings [Music] most adults remember Margaret growing up with her sister and the two children were as loved by Americans as they were by [Music] Britain the British and European press
has tried to make Margaret the subject of romance with 29-year-old rod lellan but despite pictures of them in the Caribbean together there has been little substance to back up The Perennial gossip [Music] mongers Queen Elizabeth has ruled out divorce for her sister Margaret instead the 45-year-old Princess May obtain a legal separation from her husband Lord Snowden they’ve been married for 16 years but 10 of those years have reportedly been storming and recent stories of Princess Margaret’s involvement with a 28-year-old jet
Setter named Rody lellan provide motivation for the current separation talk divorce is a thorny subject for the British royal [Music] family she was a do for I think and the question whether it was appropriate for the king of England to be marri was first divorced this is London at quarter of an hour ago the Prime Minister came to the bar of the house and handed to the speaker a message from his majesty the king a few hours ago I discharged my last Duty as king and emperor that I have found it impossible to carry the heavy burden of
responsibility without the help and support of the woman I love we therefore do now hereby Proclaim that the high and mighty Prince Albert Frederick of George is now become our only lawful and rightful King God Save the [Music] King the two girls were in the house at hi Park Corner when Elizabeth heard that all the noise of the cheering when George became king and Elizabeth ran downstairs to see what all the excitement was and the
footman told her that her father was King she came back and told her little sister who was six and Princess Margaret said does that mean you’ll be Queen and she said yes someday princess Mar take poor [Music] you Princess Margaret has been leading an active and for royalty a somewhat untraditional social life now England is intrigued by the rumor that Margaret has fallen in love the man is Peter Townsen the war hero a captain in the RAF Townsen however has been once divorced and Powerful social and religious forces are marshaled against
the romance still Margaret wants to marry town [Music] the queen and Prince Philip very kindly invited me to dinner and we talked about this very disturbing situation obviously but the queen I shall never forget her reaction was one of great sympathy although no doubt she harbored the greatest anxiety I expect marriage seemed to be the least likely solution the queen was in conflict because as head of the Church of England she could not not really permit her sister to marry a divorced man but as the sister of Princess Margaret she
obviously was very keen that princess marget should be happy and it wasn’t easy I don’t think for a moment that the queen said to her listen listen here Margaret you can’t do that the queen would have been told by advisers that it was not on very painful for all concerned it’s something sometimes being misreported that it was the queen that said that this relationship couldn’t be allowed actually she was devastated that when push came to shove it was the government who said actually we can’t allow you to marry this
[Music] man the following statement has just been issued from clarence’s House by her Royal Highness Princess Margaret I would like it to be known that I have decided not to marry group Captain Peter Town mindful of the church’s teaching that Christian marriage is indisoluble and conscious of my duty to the Commonwealth I have resolved to put their consideration before any others I think she had a lot of sympathy for Margaret because after all the queen knew what true love was she had married the man of her [Music]
dreams I don’t envy the roals their life at all really they have to live under the glare of publicity all the time everything they do is reported and quoted and criticized but Princess Margaret she had a really difficult life I think this is one of the tragedies of her life that she never knew who she was never knew who she was supposed to be and she left it to others not least the media to work it out forward have [Music] [Music] it is a scene of chaos and destruction
this Castle dating back to the 9th century the fire started in the private Chapel near to St George’s fall the events read like a tabloid redo of Old Testament curses plague and pestilence have been replaced by fire rumor and outright Scandal rocking the British royal family with three broken marriages among her four children the Queen’s efforts to promote an image of family Harmony are now Under The severest Strain look at how the great problems of the queen and the monarchy in her lifetime have been all about love and
marriage and sex the abdication Princess Margaret and Peter townzen later and that creates [Music] problems Buckingham Palace has condemned the publication of a series of newspaper photographs of the Duchess of York and the Texan businessman John Brian [Music] div never been mentioned by anybody I just feel very sad I think it’s very sad when two people who appeared to be so happily married quite suddenly [Music] divorced Royal composure collapsed as Princess Di under extraordinary media tension broke down in tears since a book
detailing her unhappiness was published last week the book claims Diana’s marriage became so miserable that she tried to take her [Music] life 1992 is not a year on which I shall look back with undiluted pleasure in the words of one of my more sympathetic correspondents it has turned out to be an Anis horribilis new institution City monarchy whatever should expect to be free from the scrutiny of those who give it their loyalty and support not to mention those who don’t but we are all part of the same fabric of Our National
Society and that scrutiny by one part of another can be just as effective if it is made with a touch of gentleness good humor and [Music] understanding as a result of the occurrences over the course of the past several months and the pushing of the self-destruct button by the monarchy uh that we could now be witnessing the end of the monarchy and the reigning queed could possibly be the last Britain’s Queen Elizabeth said she has had it it’s time for Prince Charles and Princess Diana to officially end their troubled marriage the prince who
made his televised admission of adultery over a year ago is said to agree the princess who made her televised admission of adultery a few weeks ago is said to be devastated and will give her response after the [Music] holidays the queen actually tried to bring Diana under her Wing but Diana was very reluctant I think the Diana phenomena obviously Charles couldn’t handle it and neither could the [Music] Queen the Princess of Wales embroiled now in a fresh round of personal controversy the Polo playing former guards officer claims he had a
three-year affair with the princess this morning as she left her exclusive London Health Club the Princess of Wales was saying nothing rugby star will Carling and his wife Julia are splitting up and everyone’s asking is the Princess of Wales to blame confirmation of Princess Diana’s first serious romance since her split with Charles will be shown in London Sunday Mirror tomorrow the evidence a photograph of a kiss with millionaire dodel fired during a Mediterranean cruise cost $400,000 this is BBC 1 we’ve interrupted
our programs for a news report when I go over to Martin Lewis in the news Studio we interrupt this film to tell you we are getting reports that Diana Princess of Wales has been badly injured in a car crash in France [Music] just to confirm the news that Diana Princess of Wales has died in a car accident in Paris which also killed her companion dirty fired the question a lot of people here in Britain are asking this morning is where’s the Queen the oceans of flowers from Diana’s mourners are piling up in front of Buckingham Palace but they
haven’t been acknowledged and unlike the rest of Britain where the flags are at half staff in Diana’s memory there’s no flag flying over the the palace nobody’s [Music] home when the Princess of Wales died the queen was up at B with the two the princes whose mother had been killed and yet she was castable for not leaving there and coming to London to mourn in the streets with people who never even met the she had two grandchildren must be fairly cut up their mothers well s dead to rush them down to London for the
height of publicity seem to me unnecessary why you could be less feeling than the palace I don’t know [Music] [Applause] [Music] I’m now looking through the walls of the shattered School into the main hall which is a mass of people of firemen and policemen mothers fathers brothers and sisters and everybody [Music] this South Wales disaster it’s now
feared that nearly 200 lives were lost when the cold tip at Aban near mer Tido slid forward today one of the few regrets that the queen has about her rain was that she felt that she reacted too slowly in Wales at a place called abaan back in the 1960s there’s always been controversy and criticism about the queen not actually coming earlier to Aban or immediately to Aban because obviously Lord Snowden was the first Royal to actually come to Ouran princess Mar couldn’t understand why I wanted to go down I just did you know thought I I
must and I stayed there just going into people is making up some te they wanted to talk but they were in a state of terrible [Music] shock so for the queen I think her decision not to come at that time wasn’t probably the right decision for surviving people and I think to this day the queen actually had a bit of guilt about that [Music] herself the queen stood there as a mother knowing that had circumstances been somewhat different her child’s name
might be fastened to the sandbag to mark his place of honor in death’s final ceremonial [Music] occasion I know with all the trategies in the world I think Alber van has been the main one that’s touched the queen forever in a day really until the day she dies [Music] Queen Elizabeth and the rest of the royal family are on summer holiday as usual in Scotland and apart from a customary trip to church on Sunday the Queens made no public appearance and no public statement but to those who are close to the royal family that’s no
surprise and if ever the monarchy wobbled it was in those 48 Hours when they were stuck up in Bal moral when the country wanted the queen in London and [Music] grieving on the eve of Princess Diana’s funeral the royal family is returning to London hoping in perhaps to quell some of the criticism of their actions since Diana’s death the Queen’s Convoy arrived in London as it swept up the Buckingham Palace the limousine halted at the gates and the Queen and Prince Philip got out to take in the mass of floral tributes the queen was actually
extremely nervous because she could feel the hostility and actually she heard it was say oh about time you’ve come you know you they can hear an awful lot of things that the crowd say and then I think a woman actually gave her a bunch of flowers said would you like me to place it for you and woman said no ma’am it’s for you and that sort of broke the ice it was that moment and I think suddenly people saw her instead of feeling all prickly and angry they suddenly thought my goodness this this this is a grandmother and she’s got to deal with
all this [Music] Queen Elizabeth will speak publicly today about the death of Diana Princess of Wales joining me from London is NPR’s Michael Garb to talk about the extraordinary move by the queen to speak to her subjects any idea what she will say today uh it will be a very carefully crafted speech because people will listen to it with great interest since last Sunday’s dread for news we have seen throughout Britain and around the world an overwhelming expression of sadness at Diana’s death so what I say to you now as your
queen and as a grandmother I say from my heart first I want to pay tribute to Diana myself she was an exceptional and gifted human being in good times and bad she never lost her capacity to smile and love laugh nor to inspire others with her warmth and kindness I admired and respected her for her energy and commitment to others I hope that tomorrow we can all wherever we are join in expressing our grief at danna’s loss and gratitude for her all too short life I thought she said everything she should have said can’t think of anything
that she left out at all think is completely [Music] right and they’re Gathering now at the entrance this is an extraordinary uh view we’re seeing here we’ve never as far as I’m aware seen the royal family standing like this the gates of Buckingham Palace at the funeral the queen was very dignified and she bowed her head when Diana’s coffin went [Music] past and it was spectacularly done I for one believe there are lessons to
be drawn from her life and from the extraordinary and moving reaction to her death it is a chance to show to the whole world the British Nation United in grief and [Music] respect Mr Speaker today her majesty the queen becomes the the country’s longest reigning monarch and it is of course typical of her selfless sense of service that she would have us treat this day just like any other but Mr Speaker while I rarely Advocate disobeying Her Majesty least of all in her own Parliament I do think it’s right that today we should
stop and take a moment as a nation to mark this historic Milestone and to thank her majesty for the extraordinary service that she’s given to our country over more than six decades in 63 years and 216 days she’s worked with 12 Prime Ministers six archbishops of Canterbury nine cabinet secretaries she’s answered three and a half million pieces of Correspondence send over 100,000 telegrams to centenarians Across The Commonwealth and met more people than any other Monarch in history she has served this country with un earring
Grace dignity and decency and longm continue to do so the important thing to remember about the early upbring of Princess Elizabeth was that although she was a princess she was not in line for the throne and I believe this gave her a modesty that people respect I think the only thing she might allow herself to feel is to say to her father look I’ve done it I’ve been Queen for such a long time and I’ve tried to do it the way you taught me there is a motto which has been born by many of my ancestors a noble motto I
serve I should like to make that dedication now it is very simple I declare before you all that my whole life whether it be long or short shall be devoted to yourself service Ander the service of our great Imperial family to which we all belong 
QQ4 Bob Dylan and Keith Richards have been close friends for nearly 40 years. The friendship began on a live television program in November of 1986 in the 11 seconds after Bob Dylan called Keith Richards music derivative on camera. Keith Richard’s response to that assessment, one sentence said without anger, without performance, with the specific directness of a man who has nothing to prove and knows it made Bob Dylan laugh.
Then made Bob Dylan go quiet. then made Bob Dylan say two words that people who know Bob Dylan say he almost never said to anyone. This is the story of those 11 seconds and the 40 years that followed them. The program was a live music interview special broadcast on an American network on the evening of November 3rd, 1986. The format was simple.
Two musicians, a host, an hour of conversation about music and the state of it. The producers had assembled the pairing of Bob Dylan and Keith Richards with the specific calculation of television producers who understand that two people with equally strong and potentially incompatible views about what music is and what it should do will produce better television than two people who agree about everything.
The calculation was correct, though not in the way the producers had anticipated. Bob Dylan was 45 years old in November of 1986. Bob Dylan had released Empire Burlesque the previous year and had been on the road for most of the intervening period as part of the True Confessions tour with Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers.
Bob Dylan was in November of 1986 in one of the most prolific and restless phases of a career that had consisted almost entirely of prolific and restless phases. A career that had moved through folk, rock, country, gospel, and back again, that had been declared finished at least six times by the music press, and at each time continued with the serene indifference of a river to the opinions of people standing on its banks.
Bob Dylan had been redefining what music could be. Since 1962, Bob Dylan had invented and reinvented himself so many times that reinvention had become his defining characteristic, not in the superficial sense of a performer changing costumes, but in the deeper sense of a musician who had never allowed his work to settle into a form that could be anticipated or categorized from the outside.
Bob Dylan understood influence and originality and the relationship between them better than almost anyone alive in 1986. Bob Dylan had spent 24 years thinking carefully and specifically about where music came from and where music was going and what it meant that those two things were always in constant conversation with each other.
Keith Richards was 42 years old in November of 1986. Keith Richards had been playing guitar professionally since 1962. Keith Richards had built a career on a foundation of American blues and rhythm and blues. A foundation that Keith Richards had studied with the systematic devotion of someone who understood that the tradition he was building on was not incidental to the music he was making, but essential to it.
that you could not understand what Keith Richards did without understanding where Keith Richards had come from and what Keith Richards had been listening to since he was a teenager in Dartford with American Import Records and a secondhand guitar and no teacher except the recordings themselves. Keith Richards had never pretended otherwise. Keith Richards had in fact spent considerable energy across his career making the lineage explicit, naming the artists, citing the recordings, insisting on the acknowledgement of influence that the mainstream music
industry had a long history of suppressing or ignoring or crediting to the wrong people. If anything, Keith Richards was more transparent about his sources than most musicians of his generation. Keith Richards had always said openly that the Rolling Stones came directly from the blues, that Muddy Waters and Robert Johnson and the specific tradition of the Mississippi Delta were not background influences, but foundational ones.
The music Keith Richards made was in direct and sustained conversation with that tradition, something Keith Richards considered not a limitation, but a responsibility and a form of respect. The interview had been running for 8 minutes when the host asked Bob Dylan about the current state of rock and roll.
Bob Dylan answered with the density and the indirection that characterized Bob Dylan’s responses to direct questions, turning the question over, approaching it from an unexpected angle, finding his way to what he actually thought through a series of observations that moved like a river rather than a road. Bob Dylan was not a straightforward interview subject.
Bob Dylan had been asked about rock and roll in hundreds of interviews across 24 years and had developed the habit of treating the question as an invitation to think out loud rather than a request for a prepared position. The producer Gerald Sherman said afterward that in the first 8 minutes of the interview, he had been slightly anxious, not because anything was going wrong, but because nothing was going anywhere in particular yet.
The interview had the feeling of two conversations happening simultaneously. Bob Dylan’s internal one and the external one visible to the cameras. And Gerald Sherman was not certain in those first eight minutes that the two conversations would converge into something. Bob Dylan talked about influence. Bob Dylan talked about originality.
Bob Dylan talked about the difference between music that absorbed a tradition and transformed it and music that absorbed a tradition and reproduced it. And then Bob Dylan made his assessment. And then Bob Dylan said with the precision of a man making a musical assessment rather than a personal judgment that the Rolling Stones work, and Bob Dylan was specific, naming Keith Richards as the guitarist whose approach he was discussing was derivative in a way that Bob Dylan found limiting.
Bob Dylan said it without hostility. Bob Dylan said it as a technical observation about the relationship between source material and the work that came from it. Bob Dylan said that Keith Richards played the blues the way the blues had already been played, rather than using the blues as a starting point for something that had not yet been played.
Keith Richards had been listening to this with the specific attention Keith Richards gave to things being said about music by people who knew music. Keith Richards did not interrupt. Keith Richards did not shift in his chair or display any of the visible signals of a person preparing a defensive response. Keith Richards listened to Bob Dylan’s complete observation all the way to its conclusion without interrupting and without displaying any visible signal of preparing a response.
Then Keith Richards said one sentence. The sentence was not a rebuttal. The sentence did not defend Keith Richards music or argue for its originality or challenge Bob Dylan’s characterization of what the blues meant in the context of rock and roll. The sentence was something else entirely, something that required a specific kind of confidence to say.
The confidence of a person who has spent long enough thinking about the same things as the person they are talking to that they can locate the exact point where their thinking diverges and say something useful about that point rather than simply defending their own position. The sentence acknowledged everything Bob Dylan had said, the assessment, the distinction Bob Dylan was drawing, the specific musical concern underlying the observation, and then turned it 90°.
Keith Richards took Bob Dylan’s own framework, the one Bob Dylan had used to analyze Keith Richards relationship to the blues tradition, and applied it back to Bob Dylan’s work with the same precision Bob Dylan had used to apply it to Keith Richards. Spare aimed. The sentence asked Bob Dylan something about Bob Dylan’s own music, about the relationship between Bob Dylan’s sources and Bob Dylan’s output that Bob Dylan had not been asked on television before.
The sentence did not attack. The sentence illuminated. Bob Dylan laughed. The laugh was not the polite laugh of someone responding to a joke. The laugh was the involuntary laugh of someone who has been genuinely surprised. The specific kind of surprise that a person of exceptional intelligence experiences when someone else’s intelligence exceeds their expectations.
Bob Dylan laughed for 4 seconds. Then Bob Dylan stopped laughing. Then Bob Dylan was quiet for 3 seconds in the way that Bob Dylan was quiet when Bob Dylan was thinking rather than performing thought. Then Bob Dylan said, “You’re right.” The producer in the booth, a man named Gerald Sherman, who had been working in television for 14 years, said afterward that in 14 years of live television production, he had never heard Bob Dylan say those two words in a public forum.
Gerald Sherman said he had worked with Bob Dylan on two previous occasions and had observed Bob Dylan in numerous other contexts and that you’re right was not a phrase that Bob Dylan deployed easily or often because Bob Dylan had spent 24 years being right about music in ways that other people eventually caught up with. And the experience of being right ahead of everyone else does not generally produce a man who says you’re right readily when someone else makes a point.
The host of the program, a journalist named Patricia Wells, who had been interviewing musicians for 12 years, said afterward that the 11 seconds between Bob Dylan’s assessment and Bob Dylan saying, “You’re right,” were the most extraordinary 11 seconds of television she had been present for. Patricia Wells said that what she witnessed in those 11 seconds was not a debate or a confrontation or a celebrity exchange of competing opinions.
Patricia Wells said what she witnessed was one musician recognizing another musician as an equal, which was in the specific context of Bob Dylan in 1986, not something that happened in public very often. The interview continued for another 42 minutes after those 11 seconds. The conversation between Bob Dylan and Keith Richards in the remaining 42 minutes was described by everyone who watched it as fundamentally different from the first 8 minutes.
The host, Patricia Wells, who had been conducting music interviews for 12 years and understood the difference between the performance of conversation and actual conversation, said that at approximately the 9-minute mark, something shifted in the studio. That the formal interview, architecture dissolved, and what replaced it was something less structured and more genuine.
Bob Dylan and Keith Richards talked about influence and originality and the blues and what it meant to build on a tradition without being consumed by it. They talked about specific recordings and specific musicians with the specificity of two people who had spent their entire adult lives thinking about these things and rarely found another person who had thought about them with equivalent care.
They talked about where music came from and where music was going and whether those two questions were actually one question or two. Patricia Wells said afterward that she had asked approximately four questions in the remaining 42 minutes because Bob Dylan and Keith Richards did not require questions. They required only a room and a camera and the shared understanding that what they were saying together was worth recording carefully.
She said it was the best interview she had ever conducted and that she had conducted the smallest part of it. After the program, Bob Dylan and Keith Richards were in the corridor outside the studio when the host Patricia Wells passed them. Patricia Wells said she did not stop because she did not want to interrupt.
She observed them for approximately 30 seconds from a distance. She said they were talking with the ease of people who had known each other for years rather than people who had met for the first time 2 hours earlier. She said that something had shifted between them during the broadcast that the broadcast had made permanent rather than temporary.
She continued down the corridor and did not look back. She said in her account of that evening that she had decided in that moment not to interrupt the conversation because some conversations are more valuable than any question a journalist might ask and that the conversation she had observed for 30 seconds in the corridor outside the studio was one of them.
She had been a music journalist for 12 years. She recognized the difference. Bob Dylan and Keith Richards have maintained their friendship across four decades. They have appeared together at various events, most significantly at the concert for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1995, where people who were present described them as inseparable for most of the evening, occupying the same corner of the backstage area and talking with the concentrated attention of people who only have a limited amount of time together and intend to use it
well. Bob Dylan has spoken about Keith Richards in interviews with the specific thoughtful care that Bob Dylan reserves for musicians whose work Bob Dylan considers genuinely important rather than merely culturally prominent. Keith Richards has spoken about Bob Dylan in similar terms with the specific respect of someone who recognizes in another person a commitment to music that goes deeper than career.
Neither Bob Dylan nor Keith Richards has made a public statement specifically about how the friendship began or about the November 1986 interview. Bob Dylan has not mentioned the 11 seconds. Keith Richards has not mentioned the sentence. The interview exists in the archive. The 11 seconds are there. The laugh is there. The two words are there.
What is also there for anyone who watches the interview from its beginning and pays attention to the shift that happens at the 9-minute mark is the specific moment when two people who thought they were appearing on a television program discovered they were actually talking to each other. What Keith Richards said in that one sentence has never been officially reported.
The people who were in the studio that evening, Gerald Sherman, Patricia Wells, the floor crew, the two camera operators, the makeup artist who was watching from the side of the set, have described the sentence in consistent terms. They have described its effect. They have described Bob Dylan’s laugh and Bob Dylan’s silence and Bob Dylan’s two words.
They have not repeated the sentence itself in the specific understanding that the sentence was said between two musicians on a television program and that its power resided in the specific context of that exchange and would not survive removal from it intact. What can be said is this. Keith Richards said something to Bob Dylan about Bob Dylan’s music that used Bob Dylan’s own observation about Keith Richards as its starting point and arrived somewhere that Bob Dylan had not anticipated.
Keith Richards turned Bob Dylan’s assessment 90° and showed Bob Dylan something about the music they had both spent their lives making that Bob Dylan recognized immediately as true. And Bob Dylan said, “You’re right.” Two words said by Bob Dylan in public on live television in 1986 to Keith Richards in response to a single sentence Keith Richards had said about music.
Two words that Gerald Sherman, who had worked with Bob Dylan on two previous occasions, said he had never heard Bob Dylan say in a public forum. Two words that Patricia Wells, who had been interviewing musicians for 12 years, said were the most significant two words she had heard in those 12 years. Not because of their content, but because of who said them and what it cost to say them and what it meant that Keith Richards had produced them in 11 seconds from a conversation that began with Bob Dylan calling Keith Richards’s music derivative. And Keith Richards and
Bob Dylan have been close friends for nearly 40 years. The sentence did its work in 11 seconds on the evening of November 3rd, 1986. The work has been ongoing ever since. If this story moved you, subscribe and leave a comment below. Have you ever said something to someone that turned a potential disagreement into an unexpected and lasting connection? Tell us about it in the comments below.
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