This is when Ariana Grande unintentionally becomes a comedian, like the time she couldn’t stop cursing at a red carpet. Everyone’s done incredibly this year. I’m like looking around like holy I’m not allowed to say that. I’m sorry. That’s okay. You’re Ariana Grande. We got you. We got you. two seconds. I know.
Or the time she accidentally roasted Chris Pratt on TV. Ariana Grande, you know, Ariana, I work out to your music. Gets me pumped. crazy. You know, I was such a big fan of your movies. Whenever I can’t sleep at night, I watch them and they make me so um tired. You’ve got I think one of the best Thank you.
And how do I get You couldn’t even lie. YOU COULDN’T EVEN LIE. ALL YOU DID IS GO WHAT? But one time Ariana Grande tried teaching Jimmy Fallon Japanese and it was a disaster. Something interesting to say that I promise no Japanese person would ever expect you to say What does she know? Is that what you want to tell them to say? No, no one would expect me to say that. I I agree.
You wouldn’t think I would say that. Here we go, right? What does she know? What does she know? Is that what you want to tell them to say? Is that what you want to tell them to What does she know? Is that what you want to tell Is that what you want to tell them TO WAIT, THAT SOUNDS like something else happened.
I might not finish. Do you want to know what it means? No, wait. the space between my high sock and the hem of my skirt is very sexy. I’m like I don’t know, man. I just do it. No, you’re in. I’m so excited. You’re so hot. No, I’m not. You are. I don’t like sweetener. No way.
He goes sweetener. This is Espresso by Sabrina Carpenter? Yes. What is it doing here? I’m having people sing it, but I wasn’t going to ask you to sing. You weren’t going to ask me to sing? I didn’t think you’d want to. Um you’re mistaken, ma’am. I’m working late cuz I’m a singer. Can it feel my general anxiety or It can. That’s what it’s for.
Cool. OH, SWEET. SWEET. IN THIS MOMENT, ARIANA went on Hot Ones and accidentally said how disgusting their sauces were. It’s not a spice problem, a flavor problem. tone. Yeah, no, it’s disgusting. Is this one that you famously hate? Oh, we actually make it. I love Do you ever fall into a wormhole on TikTok and you get into the part where it’s like 1,000 creatures you’ve never seen before and you’re like, what planet do I live on? Where you’re like, whoa, time to leave.
You really don’t do contacts. I mean, you do mostly, but you wear big glasses. Nah, if I’m honest, I don’t want to see. You’re Edna Mode glasses. I’m good, man. I’ve seen enough. And Ariana Grande never wears shorts. So, when she wore them to the Jimmy Fallon, she couldn’t stop being nervous about it.
I’m wearing shorts, I never wear shorts in my life, so I’m going to stand. I don’t know how to sit. I’m going to take Hold on, cut to closer while I figure it out. Yeah, okay. Is this okay? Fantastic. Is that all right? Yes. Oh my god, am I out? Is it all out? No, it’s not. No, it’s It’s all Everything’s fantastic. Yeah, it’s great.
Okay, cool. Now, tell me let’s talk ABOUT YOUR NEW NO, I’M SERIOUS. COULD YOU PLEASE TOUCH me with me? OH MY PLEASE TOUCH ME WITH ME. But Ariana thinks the moon landing was fake. So, this is when she got exposed by a lie detector. Do you think the moon landing was fake? Jesus Christ, what do you take me for? No.
No. In conclusion This is what I’m saying, but it’s hilarious. Can you believe that the moon landing is fake? No, not till now. Not till Stephanie puts that in me. But, you know, we’ve been there. The machine is showing deception. And Ariana Grande hates her name, but almost nobody knows why. Hi, I’m Chris Pratt.
I’m hosting the season premiere of SNL with Ariana Grande. Ariana, do you want to translate for our Spanish viewers? I’m actually Italian. That’s No, that’s what I meant. Do you I What I meant do you want to pizza? Ariana Grande putana. Like, literally my name. Like I’m a pizza. I’m a meatball. Like you know what I mean? I’m I’m I’m Parmesan.
The joke isn’t that the name is a joke. Grande Butera. What is that? A special at La Maseria? Ricky was like, “Why did I get the worst line?” And I was like, “What do you mean?” He was like, “Everyone else’s line is so nice and mine is like meh. Can be stretched.” I was like, “No, I could have said that.” So I was like I could have said that but I didn’t.
And I said no I listen and laugh cuz it didn’t work out. But one time Ariana tried making an ASMR and it was a nightmare. How do they hold it? This is super duper heavy. Yeah, it’s loaded. Yeah, that’s the real deal. Let’s let’s look at this. This is your fragrance, pal. I like the box. Thank you so much. And look at this guy.
I know you’re involved with down to the detail of all these designs but I love the little Take Bunny Box. Yeah. You said there’s a way to spray this. How do you spray this? Oh, like how do I spray it? Personally, I like to do a little bit of Ariana Hey Ariana ARIANA STOP. STOP. STOP. That’s a lot of perfume.
Do you want I can do some for you. Yeah, do it for me. Just a little? Yeah, go for it. JUST A LITTLE. OH, BILLY. OH MY GOD. CONGRATULATIONS. SORRY. And when Ariana Grande was on Ellen, she had to explain the famous bicycle lyrics in Side to Side. First time I heard Nicki’s verse um and she says the phrase um bicycle and uh that the idea was born and I really committed to it AND I WHAT? YEAH, she has a lyric in the song.
She says bicycle. What does that mean? Uh, you know, UM UM I I REALLY DON’T. STOMACH IS EMPTY. YOU WANT TO GET SOMETHING? LIKE A little bar or something we Yeah, there will be, for sure. We can grab you something right here. Okay. How did that Okay. Here we go. Hello, I’m Ariana Grande.
I must be carried. Can I leave that explain my thing? What size would you like? Oh, I’m going to get a grande. Did you know I demand to be carried everywhere? If you see me anywhere, it’s cuz I didn’t walk there myself, I promise. There we go. Bye. Is there anything else you need before we get back in the car? Nothing. Thank you.
pleasure. Perfect, just what I’m used to. I thought you WERE TRYING TO HEY, EXCUSE ME, WHERE’S THE BATHROOM? HAPPY BIRTHDAY, MILEY. WOO! One day, you got to teach me how to make my the few studio sessions that I did, which are all um all over TikTok. Thank you so much.
Uh, I’ll see you in jail. Literally. Did you get your nose done? No. Did you get a boob job? No. Did you get a facelift? imagine? No. Not yet. I’m open. Truthful. Wait, and go back to the other one. She’s telling the truth. There we go. This is the best day of my life. Okay. Take that, you YouTube people. Ready? Yes.
Did you get a fox eye lift? No, but I I discovered it through people who thought I did, and I said, “Thank you.” Yeah. She’s telling the truth. There we go. What about a chin implant? How do they do that? Taking the lyrics of Defying Gravity and really holding space with that. And so, you know, for me, I’m sitting next to Cynthia, and I’m like, “Holding space with that.
” And uh, Cynthia goes, “I didn’t know that was happening.” And I’m like, “Wait.” So, I kind of missed what I’m like, “What’s happening?” At that point, Tracy then responds and kind of doesn’t know what Cynthia took it as. It seemed like it seems like Tracy was like, “Oh, no, I I I mean, I saw it a few times. I’ve seen it a few times.
I mean, I am in queer media.” And I’m like, “What the fuck?” Is any of this interactive? What does it mean? I didn’t know what it means and I’m just trying to comfort Cynthia cuz she’s very emotional. And so I like um cuz we’re very like physical touch, we’re very like you know, that way. So I grab her finger cuz I cuz I see that she’s getting like choked up by what Tracy has shared and I am like and I’m like, “Oh shit.
” And I grab her finger and I just go like this cuz I don’t know what else to do with myself. But when Ariana was The Voice, she had her own thank you, next button and the way she was using it was crazy. gives those singers opportunities to come back. Monday, but here’s a look. Okay, have a look at me.
You’re doing great, Tamarin. It’s very strong. YEAH, BOOTY THOUGH. ARIANA GRANDE, SAY WHAT WE WERE THINKING. I love you. Yeah, booty though. I was admiring. It looks beautiful. I got it from my mama, okay? feminine in this little dress here and then we saw that booty. I’m sorry.
My theme of my birthday party when I was like 2 years old was Jaws. I loved it. That was my When you were two? That was my favorite movie. No kids came. They came and left. I’m scared of Jaws now, let alone if I was 2 years old. in there. It’s weird in there. So kids would come to your birthday but like, “What’s the theme?” Oh, you know, the sharks that [music and singing] eat people.
And the new artist of the year award goes to Ariana Grande. Oh my god, I’m so nervous. Okay, um thank you so much. This is for my fans. I have the most loving supportive fans in the world and I love them so much and I’m so nervous. Okay, my mom made me this thing and I have it in here so that I don’t forget anybody. Um okay, um thank you to the AMAs for nominating me and I have 10 seconds.
Oh my god, I have 9 seconds. That’s too intimidating. Monte, Charlie, Wendy, Republic Records, Scooter, Allison, Jen, Stephanie, Dana Schneider, Nickelodeon, I love you guys. Thank you for supporting my music career. And I love you guys so much. Thank you. This is crazy. I love you. Thank you. But Ariana Grande truly humiliated Jimmy Fallon one time and he’s going to remember it for the rest of his life.
Who was my first celebrity crush? So embarrassing to actually write it down. I mean, everyone Everyone kind of knows. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Maybe I’ll show mine first. Okay. Yeah, go ahead. Ready? Don’t look. All right. I’m going to show yours. Let me show you something.
First celebrity crush, Jim Carrey. Very close. I was very close. This is the one that counts. What is my most embarrassing bad habit? Why did you write it that fast? Like you like All the other ones you really thought about it. And then this one you just look at it and write it like three sentences. All right. I’m going to show mine first.
Should I show mine first? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Go ahead. Most embarrassing bad habit is Wow. I’m going to write laugh too much. No. I like your laugh. You’re good in that department. This was the one. No!
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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