listen I’m not shaming people for their looks but I am though you give an ugly guy a chance he thinks he rules the world this is when Tom Holland trolled zindaa in front of tens of Paparazzi Zena tried to get in the car as fast as she could and didn’t want any attention first Billy has Tourette’s Syndrome but her condition isn’t what you actually might think she was diagnosed with Tourette’s when she was just 11 and her ticks are quite noticeable you know or like I did that a lot Billy was hiding her ticks for years
and was always asking the editors to cut them out of the video during the interviews but one time everything went absolutely wrong from the very beginning but then there was this one interview where they didn’t tell me they weren’t going to cut the questions out so I’m sitting there answering the questions like uh-huh and then they they start asking me question I’m like and sadly some people in the comments thought Billy was just making faces when in reality it was her Tourette’s ticks but in real life most of her ticks are very
subtle and you’d probably never notice them even if you talk to Billy in person I wiggle my ear back and forth and like raise my eyebrow and click my jaw and do that and like like Flex my arm here and flex this arm and flex these muscles these are things you would never notice like if you’re just having a conversation with me it was always a very complex topic for Billy and yet she’s happy she was brave enough to share it with her fans most importantly Billy made it clear that Tourette’s is a part of her life but she surely doesn’t
want it to be the main part of her character I didn’t want that to Define who I was I didn’t want it to be like Billy I the artist with Tourette’s Billy I eyelashes on Ellen but what if I told you that Billy never grew out of her childhood fears I don’t want to go outside when it’s dark alone like that freaks me out I still when I get in my bed at night I still jump from like 2 ft away cuz I’m still afraid something’s going to grab me from underneath still I’m still afraid of my closet and while shooting the music video for you should
see me in a crown Billy wasn’t actually afraid of spiders crawling on top of her cuz she even put a live spider right in her mouth I sort of just like love making stuff that people get freaked out by I put a spider in my mouth I know I saw that what was the spider called do they name I think his name was like Tom or Brad or something speaking of fears Billy could easily die while shooting the cover for Hit me hard and soft the photo was taken in a very deep tank and Billy was scared to death no but there’s like a tank in this giant place and it
was like 10 ft deep and uh I I popped my little ass in there and I was in there for 6 hours for some reason Billy decided to wear a really heavy clothes and even had some weights attached to her to keep her deeply underwater I was wearing like big long pants like giant PE Club shorts I was wearing a thermal long sleeve a buttonup flannel a tie Rings arm warmers bracelet and a weight I had a weight strapped to me that was and the weight was to keep you down down yeah and I also idea was that yours yeah guys it would be so cool if I could
almost die dude I’ve done it so many times almost died in these shoots and speaking of dangerous shoots Billy said she will never use a green screen in her music video videos and since then she does all of the risky stunts by [Music] [Music] herself and while filming all the good girls go to hell she wore wings that weighed over 70 lb and those left her with a lot of bruises on her body but this isn’t the hardest thing Billy had to go through her ex-boyfriend Jesse Rutherford was an absolute creep Billy was his fan since she was 11 but they
first met when she was 16 and he was 27 my life to a point where I Not only was known by a person that I thought was the hottest alive but pulled his are we kidding me after their breakup Jesse released a very mean song about his relationship with Billy and he even blamed her for having the daddy issues then says I know she got Daddy Issues welcome to the family which is a funny little reference if you’re just talking about your song daddy issues and not the fact that you are a 31-year old old man dating a 21-year-old woman who you met
when she was 16 Billy responded with the song Wildflower in which she sneakily mentioned her friend Devon Carlson who started dating Jesse right after his breakup with Billy but did you know that Billy ish was almost named pirate Billy ish ish is my middle name actually pirate was supposed to be my actual first name my uncle didn’t like it and then bar is my mom’s last name or con is my dad so when Billy’s brother s was 4 years old he was obsessed with pirates and when he knew he’s going to have a sister he started
begging his parents to name his sister pirate and when Billy’s parents were actually about to name her pirate Billy’s grandfather William suddenly passed away and she was eventually named after him pirate you got me they got me on that one but Billy’s parents still gave her a pirate middle name so now her full government name is Billy ish pirate Berto Connell and people know that Billy is a generation artist but she also holds a plenty of some crazy world records and first there is something that might sound impossible for an
average person because Billy fit a ukulele in her mouth not once but twice and when she showed this trick on Tik Tok everyone in her comments went [Music] crazy do you guys remember when I was 15 and I fit an entire ukulele head in my mouth should we see if I can do it again I very much doubt it but I shall try next record is even crazier though cuz Billy literally broke the internet when she added a whopping 120 million people as close friends on Instagram this number is so huge it’s literally every third person in America but then Billy
ish became the first ever person born in the 21st century to get a number one hit on Billboard and just when you think she couldn’t possibly achieve anything more groundbreaking she made history Again by becoming the youngest musician ever to write a James Bond theme song and I don’t think any artist on this planet had so many world records at such a young age and even though Billy is extremely famous people know almost nothing about her family and sometimes Billy’s dad becomes a comedian when he texts her I was talking to my friend Nat
the other day and and Nat said you literally have the most beautiful eyes I’ve ever seen except for maybe your dad our mom also has really beautiful 100% most beautiful eyes ever for two parents anyway I was telling my dad this and my dad goes your mom said I have bird eyes and then he said and that I look like a baby dinosaur but what’s actually crazy about Billy’s family is that both of her parents actually worked in the entertainment her father appeared in Iron Man movie as a journalist in the crowd hey would it be all right if
everyone sat down when you just sit down that way you can see me and I but that’s nothing compared to Billy’s mom Maggie who actually voiced Samra one of the most important characters in Mass Effect 2 find peace in the Embrace of the Goddess but the most wonderful part is how much Billy’s parents believed in her Talent they were so committed to her dreams that they decided to homeschool her just so she could more focus on her music after Billy became famous and started touring Billy’s mom became her manager while her dad handled all the
technical stuff and they both traveled with her on tours to make sure she will always feel good but even such a wonderful family couldn’t be perfect because one time Billy’s mom wrote a script for her little movie and Billy wasn’t really happy about it let let but the funniest part is they actually kicked Billy out of the project and turned her childhood bedroom into the Phineas room for the movie but here’s an incredible truth about Billy’s childhood that might surprise you despite all her success now Billy actually grew up in Highland Park one of
the toughest neighborhoods in Los Angeles living there wasn’t easy at all and the streets were so dangerous that Billy couldn’t even go outside after dark and hearing gunshots was just a regular part of her life not to say that her family was extremely poor but her house was really small and her family was barely getting any money the acting careers of Billy’s parents weren’t really successful so her dad even had to work 12 hours a day 7 days a week as a construction worker simply to feed the family but we didn’t grow up with money
at all you know we grew up in a tiny little house and that was fine but the next thing is one of the saddest parts of Billy’s entire life because in 2018 Billy lost someone who meant everything for her on June 18th 2018 XXX tentasion who was a big friend of Billy died Billy and J were having a really close connection bonding over their unique way of seeing the world they would spend hours texting each other talking about how alien they felt in this life their connection became so meaningful to Billy that she wrote a special song called
6.18.18 to honor his memory after he died I just see the impact that he had on people and the impact that he had on me and I barely even knew him and that’s insane that’s unbelievably insane and people that didn’t even know him the impact that he had on them you know like oh my God he was like a beam of light and just tried to do everything for other people that was like the most selfless [Music] kid I’ve ever met in my life hands down he’d text me like every day if I was okay X had a pretty controversial life
and some people even tried to tell Billy how to feel about losing him and this might be the saddest Billy eyh moment I’ve ever seen if you’re watching this right now anybody if anybody is watching this don’t post your feelings don’t do it to yourself but when Billy steps into the studio she takes dedication to a whole another level and can easily spend thousands of hours working on her music usually what I do is a bunch of takes make sure that each one there’s something usable for every single part so do you see all of
those lines those are all separate audio files that have been put into one take we got up to like 87 takes recording a single vocal line could take her up to 100 takes for Billy just to get every single note absolutely perfect Phineas then carefully takes these takes together turning them into one Flawless track pay attention different take right this is all one take and then different different take different take different take really yeah different take different take different take and you would never know Billy also records way
more songs than she actually releases people know about dozens of her unreleased tracks that surface online including an exciting collaboration with Drake called Blind Faith and we know Billy is one of the best dressed artists on the planet but there’s one thing about Billy’s style that she doesn’t really like to talk about it started back in 2020 when the world couldn’t stop talking about her iconic neon green hair but this wasn’t just about looking cool Billy actually kept that green color longer than any other hair color
since she was 13 and there was a serious reason behind it because the color became a symbol of stability and a personal growth in her life then in 2021 something big happened right before dropping happier than ever Billy shocked Everyone by going blonde but just like her music Billy’s style keeps evolving and in 2022 she switched to a stunning black I got white and I had white hair black is kind of what feels the most like me weirdly um even though like I think I’m I’m naturally blonde I haven’t had natural hair color in a long time
but I think I’m naturally blonde it’s much easier to go out in the world and be a normal person with a a normal hair color for me so keeping the same color for long enough means everything for Billy since she knows her life’s going well and her mental health is okay but one time thousands of people were bullying Billy eyh because of her weight in 2020 the internet showed its ugly side when people started body shaming Billy over a single photo of her from a bad angle there’s this picture of me like running from my c of my brother’s
front door on like 110 day degree day in a tank top and everyone’s like damn Billy got fat I’m like nope this is just how I look you just never seen it before but Billy proved once again that nothing can bring her down a year later she went on a tour that turned out to be one of the most physically demanding tours of her career this wasn’t just any regular performance schedule cuz cuz every night included intense choreography and non-stop movement across the massive stage Billy started working out in May 2022 and what started as tour
preparation actually turned into a life-changing Journey so a bad photo and a tour eventually made Billy ish become a happier person I started like working out at a gym for the first time it’s become such an incredibly huge part of my life and I it makes me feel so much better as a person and the way that I can move on stage and now I feel like so much better but the world actually learned something new about Billy last year in an interview with variety Billy finally opened up about being bisexual and talked a lot about her love with
women I’ve spent my life loving girls and being really worried that they hate me for some reason and wanting to impress them and whatever else and I felt like one with the girls I don’t know I’ve never like felt like a girl really Billy even said that she thought it was obvious that she was bisexual and she was shocked when she realized people still don’t know that we need to get to a point where you don’t even have to come out so I just don’t really believe in it I’ve been doing this for a long time and I just didn’t talk about it
same I literally was like to my mom and dating women now I was like I saw the articles I was like oh I guess I I guess I came out today Billy’s feelings became even more clear in her song lunch where Billy was talking how she can eat some girls for thing about Billy is what truly makes her one of the best artists of Our Generation and I’m not talking about her music during her show in February 2022 something really really scary happened Billy noticed a fan having trouble breathing in the crowd and she immediately stopped the entire
concert it was a great move from Billy but things only got worse From This Moment Kanye West suddenly asked Billy to apologize to Travis Scott claiming she was throwing shade about the Astro World tragedy you needed a Heil [Applause] her can we just grab one but Billy stayed true to herself and handled the drama perfectly she said that she’s never said anything about Travis and was just helping a fan responding to a mean comment by celebrities so classy and saving a Fan’s life at the same day is the thing only Billy could do but coming
up at number five we’re going to go back to where it all began cuz in 2015 Billy’s dance teacher asked for a song to choreograph and little did anyone know this little homework will later change music industry forever and my dance teacher was like I know you like to make songs like would you want to make like a song and we can like make a dance to it I don’t know it might be fun and I was like so excited about that Billy’s brother Phineas wrote ocean eyes for his own band but then realized it would sound perfect with his sister’s
voice my brother wrote this song and he wrote it for his band and then one time he was like do you want to sing this song because I feel like it would sound better in your voice they uploaded it to SoundCloud just so her dance teacher could listen to it but something absolutely incredible happened the same night it was just like skyrocketing I was sitting in a Starbucks Phineas called me and he was like dude ocean eyes hit a thousand place I was like you’re lying and it was the biggest moment and I remember standing there and thinking wow like
this is my moment nothing like this is ever going to happen again and this is my moment and I’m going to just take it in and I’m so grateful for this it’s so cool and then like the next week it was on the radio and then here we are here’s where the story gets even more crazy right around this time Billy had to give up dancing because of an injury but ocean eyes became such a massive hit that Billy signed with major record labels and the song went on to sell millions of copies worldwide even crazier fact is that Katy Per had a
chance to collaborate on Ocean eyes before it came out but turned it down thinking it was just another random artist and she later admitted this was one of the biggest mistakes of her career but even Superstars like Billy sometimes find themselves in the middle of drama why is every pretty girl with a horrible looking man listen I’m not shaming people for their looks but I am though you give an ugly guy a chance he thinks he rules the world being a huge eco activist Billy doesn’t just talk the talk because when she released a merch
for her latest album she proved that amazing music doesn’t have to hurt the planet the vinyl was made from 100% recycled materials but even such a nice thing somehow started a big drama on the same day when the album was released Taylor Swift made an unexpected but very calculated move Taylor released one of many expanded versions of her tortured poet’s Department album along with tens of different vinyl variants because of this move from Taylor to hit me hard and soft ended up in second place on the Billboard charts and obviously Billy’s
and Taylor’s fan bases started a drama the whole situation got even crazier when Billy spoke up in a billboard board interview about artists releasing tons of vinyl variants just to boost sales she called it extremely wasteful and everyone knew exactly who she was talking about but sometimes people try to cancel Billy ish over the dumbest reasons ever when Billy first started making music many people didn’t understand why her songs carried such Deep Emotions so Billy had to make a response why are your songs so sad and I
remember hearing that being like what are you what are we talking about people seem to forget that when you are a child and a teenager emotion is the most intense thing in the world Everything feels like the end or the beginning I was just talking about this with a friend that like Middle School felt like life was over and that that’s how everything felt then and so you know to to be like how could anyone young understand emotion are you stupid that’s all they have is emotion needless to say Billy was receiving tons of hateful
comments online when she was just a teenager while people were calling her emotions fake she was actually going through the the hardest times in her life she’s like a little rich white girl and she’s and it hurts so bad to see that when I literally was bleeding on the bathroom floor during these dark times one person never stopped believing in Billy and of course it was her mom Maggie their bond became a literal lifeline and Billy has been incredibly open about how her mother literally saved her life when Billy was recording
a very sad song her mom asked her if she’s seriously talking about hurting herself and her voice was trembling in in this video Are you seriously implying that you jump off the roof do you feel okay about a song like that you don’t worry about this song is the reason I don’t like having this way of saying it instead of doing it is better and even s years later Billy keeps showing just how much her mom means to her this powerful motherdaughter connection helped turn Billy’s pain into a beautiful art that connects with millions of fans around
the world I want to thank my mom for being truly the best mother that I could ever ask for and thinking um never for herself and only for others and um I you know I feel like a bad person all the time because she’s such a good one and Billy is a great performer but sometimes her fans can interrupt her shows and it can go really wrong cuz one day someone actually threw a bag of Takis right at Billy’s face everyone sit down that and um but instead of getting mad Billy just started eating them right on stage in the middle of the show but sometimes
people can even throw their clothes at Billy we’re nearing the end you guys this is the biggest goddamn BR I literally thought it was a shirt and it might seem funny at first but Billy ish has to experience it during all of her shows and sometimes she can get tired of getting so many items thrown at her he does not throw at me so me like why would you throw this at me it doesn’t make me feel very liked I’ll say that I love all the gifts but when you throw shoes I mean what are you doing anyway but at number one we truly
have the most important thing for Billy herself it all started when Billy and her mom founded a nonprofit organization named support and feed in 2020 this organization actively fights climate change and helps to feed people in need for over 5 years now and yet 34 million people in the US alone are going to bed hungry tonight support and feed is providing nourishing restaurant quality plant-based meals the local community orgs to address human health food equity and climate change what began in Los Angeles has now spread to 41 cities
worldwide Billy provides plant-based meals to communities in need work with local restaurants and teaches people about sustainable eating Billy even set up Eco Villages at every venue where fans could discover how their everyday choices can help saving the planet and it wasn’t just a concert it was a chance to make a real change Billy went from making eco-friendly vinyls to using literal solar power at her concerts if you take this little thing out here is my 100% recycled standard black final of Hit me hard and soft but Billy ish
didn’t stop here what makes Billy truly special isn’t just what she does it’s why she does it every time she steps on stage every song she writes and every small action she takes it’s all part of her Mission she’s not just making music for herself or her fans she’s literally fighting for a better world Billy knows that being famous comes with a huge power and she managed to put her power in such a wonderful things so Billy isn’t just a regular artist she’s a Superhero
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.
Share this with someone who needs to be reminded that the right sentence said at the right moment can completely change the entire direction of a relationship. Ring the notification bell for more untold stories about the extraordinary human beings behind music’s greatest legends.
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