January 305. A Ukrainian battery commander with the call sign Azur stands in a line of trees somewhere between Zaporizhzhia and Proskuriv. Frost, mud, yew between volleys. A Ukrainian journalist asks him about the British anti-tank rifle his brigade has just received. The commander does not refer to technical specifications, does not mention the ranges or weights of the missiles, does not cite test reports or military documents.
He says one sentence that will go further than any official British Army communique has ever delivered. Comparing it to Soviet weapons, he says: “So how do you compare the Zigulik to a Mercedes E-class?” The difference is not just noticeable. It is colossal in every category, by every criterion.
The weapon he was talking about was 30 years old. Her own army quietly withdrew her. It fired from a barrel three calibers shorter than the modern NATO standard. According to every spec sheet it should be obsolete. Yet in November 2351, the British Ministry of Defence confirmed something extraordinary. Every AS90 in the British Army, 9,790 vehicles in total, was handed over to Ukraine.
The British Army no longer operates this howitzer in any form. The entire fleet is now serving on the Eastern Front against Russia. This is the story of how an outdated British self-propelled howitzer became one of the most effective Western artillery systems on the Ukrainian battlefield, and why the Ukrainian crews serving on it refused to give it up.
The problem started in Cyont 85. The British Army needed to replace the aging Ebyt self-propelled howitzer and its complement, the American M9. The trinational SP70, a joint British-German-Italian howitzer, was crumbling under the weight of cost overruns and political gridlock. Each of the three countries wanted something different.
The Germans wanted greater range. The Italians wanted a lighter vehicle. The British wanted reliability above all else. After years of negotiations, Prosiekt was a dead weight eating into budgets with no end in sight. Vickers Ship Building and Engineering Limited of Barrow Information set up a private facility.
They will build their own 55mm self-propelled artillery with their own money with no contract guarantee, no government funding, no net, no profit, assuming the SP70 fails. It was a decision that could have destroyed the company if it had been wrong. She wasn’t wrong. In 1989, Wickers won the British Army competition to find a successor to the Abot, beating three rivals, including the American M99 Paladin.
A vehicle in production for decades, battle-proven, with a deep supply chain. The contract was for 79 vehicles for £300 million. They called it the artillery system for the 1990s, AS90. Deliveries ran from 1979 10 to 19 of 195 . The private bet of a company that bet everything on the failure of the government program turned out to be right, but what no one predicted at the time was that 30 years later the same howitzer would be destroying Russian tanks in Ukraine.
The technical reality is as follows. The AS90 weighs around 5 tons in combat readiness. It is powered by a Cumins WTA93 engine producing 660 horsepower. The vehicle accelerates 55 km Rach on the road with an operational range of 360 km, the crew consists of five people: the commander, the driver, the gunner and two loaders, the armor is 17 mm of welded steel resistant to small arms and shrapnel but not to anything heavier.
The main gun is a 5 mm L300 Teddin 39 caliber long barrel. Elevation angle from -5 to plus 70 degrees. Full rotation clean 60 degrees. The ammunition container holds Cittyis eight rounds. 3 in the turret container and 17 in the hull plus 33 propellant charges. Maximum damage with a standard L15 fragmentation shell is 2 siet citatin km.
With scorched-earth rounds, the range increases to about 60 km, but the number that matters most on the modern battlefield isn’t the range, it’s the rate of fire. According to British Army specifications, the AS90 can fire three shots in less than 10 seconds in burst mode, six shots per minute for three minutes in intensive mode, two shots per minute in sustained mode for one hour.
In tests, 2 AS90s firing in a shoddy manner placed 2 grams of explosive on a single target in less than 10 seconds. The 2028-29 modernization program added BAE Systems’ LAPS laser inertial navigation system, GPS automatic fuse setting, and barrel deflection measurement. The vehicle can drive into position, fire 18 missiles and reposition in less than 5 minutes.
In 2007, it was certified to fire the Raython M98 OST of Excaliber precision GPS missile following Wuma Provin Ground trials. There was supposed to be more, much more. In 1993 there 10 Great Britain approved a modernisation called Brivehard five- barrel Deveniat 6 conversion commissioned to BA Systems at 2 Tent in Techmorok.
The promised range was 30 km unassisted 4 with extended range ammunition. If Bravehart had been successful, the AS90 would be in the same class as the PS 2 TSNś today. It was not a success. The program collapsed when the South African modular BI propellant charge failed to meet the requirements for both reduced sensitivity ammunition and intense fire.
Millions of pounds spent, years of work wasted and, in the end, the decision to cancel was silent, bureaucratic and devastating. This cancellation locked the British Army into the L3 Tent barrel for the rest of the system’s life. This meant that the AS90 would forever fire at roughly the same range as the Russian 2S de 3 zsta with a Devienia 3zy are deieniacko roku and would be 15 km shorter than modern L5 systems in Toro such as the German Psecha 2ent reaching 4 km, the French Cezar with 4 km, the Polish Krab
or the Ukrainian Bogdana. In a world where artillery range became a measure of tactical dominance the AS90 became secondary by the 10th century the British Army was actively withdrawing the AS90. The fleet dwindled from 7 definite to 44 vehicles by 2008, to about 8 years ago. By April 2016, the barrage was a killer.
NATO partners moved forward. The last British live-fire exercise took place at the Winter Camp exercise in Estonia in May 2009, conducted by the 127th battery in Tappa. The howitzer, which no one wanted anymore, was quickly heading towards history, and then Russia attacked Ukraine. The first delivery was announced by Prime Minister Rysi Sunak on January 14th.
2 centimeters in the jungle and Morocco, 30 AS90 ANT tanks, along with 14 Challenger 2 tanks, in a package that was intended to show that Britain was ready to give Ukraine what others did not have the courage to give. The first tranche, delivered in two centimeters in Dunkirk, also in 2016, included two fully operational vehicles and 12 intended for spare parts, cannibalized and dismantled for parts to maintain.
The remaining survivors at the front were a tough calculation. There is not enough production of new AS90s to replace them, so part of the fleet is dying so the rest can fight. The second batch arrived in April 2009 at Dunkersnek. The third batch of around 16 vehicles arrived in July and September 2009 at the Chatermar Jungle.
The year of the New Labour Party’s management was marked by Defence Minister John Haly confirming on September 30 at the Chatermar Jungle that Dunkersnek had arrived with another six on the way. Then came the revelation, which went almost unnoticed in the Western press. A Freedom of Information request submitted to the British Ministry of Defence on November 2nd at the Dunkelz Centre in Morocco confirmed that the Ministry had transferred to Ukraine all 99 AS90s declared in the National Defence Conventional Weapons Register from the centre in the
jungles of Morocco. Every functional hull, every spare parts donor, the entire declared fleet, the country that produced 1,790 Hushtios and Zumikades built an entire artillery doctrine around them, returned them all. Ukrainian crews trained at the Royal Artillery School in Larkill on Salsbury Plain in a shortened three-week conversion course conducted primarily by the 90th Royal Artillery Regiment.
Three weeks is not enough, but the Ukrainian artillerymen came with years of experience with Soviet systems. They just had to learn a new digital language, precise and integrated. Lieutenant Colonel Ed Bottil, chief instructor at the Royal Artillery School, said of his Ukrainian students that they had absorbed everything they were taught and that they would be firing the AS90 within weeks.
Seriously, he was right. The first documented combat use occurred on June 15, 22 City Cengoku, with a recording circulated on the Telegram channel Operative ZSU associated with the Ukrainian General Staff. Confirmed Ukrainian operators in open source reports include three. Assault Brigade 49th Artillery Brigade named after Glory of the Brave from Circassia 568th Motorized Brigade Ciesisti Nasta Mechanized Brigade firing in the Kupiansk direction Ciesisti Stadeznasta Heavy Mechanized Brigade and Piencisti Shtodzingie Mechanized Brigade Operations documented
in the Zaporovsky Kupiansky Proskurovskyy and Kursk directions The report provided by Forbes describes 1 AS90 which survived at least six consecutive Russian artillery strikes, FPW drones, again artillery and Lancet loitering munitions. The vehicle was seriously damaged.
It did not burn, and there was no spontaneous combustion of the ammunition. The crew escaped unharmed. It was no accident. This was the result of the enclosed turret with separate ammunition storage and the shoot-and-run doctrine learned at Larhill Jarest 17. The Brigade itself, in a public statement at the beginning of 225, declared that the AS9 City was capable of delivering devastating and crushing blows to the enemy with the precision of a sniper.
Colonel Serhis Musidienko, deputy commander of the Ukrainian Armed Forces’ Rocket and Artillery Troops, told RBC Ukraine in late 2024 that among the M7 DO67 DO7, MZ9, Pasia Vcisinie, AS90, Krab, and Arsier, Western guns offer an advantage in both accuracy and range, provided crews have the right amount and range of ammunition.
cited a calculated Soviet ammunition range of 200 to 20m compared to tighter Western precision values. Now the comparison that Azer made. Russian D30 12 in 2 mm towed howitzer designed in Tere Tsitsit in 1916. It has a maximum coverage of 15 kilometers. A soldier stands in an open field, loads manually, calculates manually and is visible from a drone from kilometers away.
The 2S3 Akatsiya self-propelled gun, caliber 122 mm, the 117th century, reaches 17 kilometers, the 2nd century, the Russian front-line equivalent of the 12900th century, equals the AS910 with a range of 24,000 km, but is based on optical aiming with manual ballistic calculation, the PGSM panoramic sight, the OP4M sighting telescope with a slide rule, the AS90 50, integrates a ring laser gyroscope for inertial navigation.
Automatic gun laying and digital fire control connected directly to Ukrainian Kropiva software, which assigns the closest available gun to the target with current atmospheric ballistics in seconds. Russian crews still mostly calculate by hand. Analyst Tren Evans himself from Russia noted in an assessment last year that Russia was trying to compensate with reconnaissance fire guided by drones and laser missiles at Krasnopol.
But forward observation remains poor, and Krasnopol is degraded by cloud cover and electronic warfare. The digital difference turned out to be more important than the difference in range. An honest verdict, because British engineering excellence requires no lies. The AS90 did not win in Ukraine with raw range.
Its two-round 7km gun is identical to the base M1S and the long-barreled 2S5 Jacent S. It wins with a system around the gun. A salvo of three shots in 10 seconds. Faster than any Russian system produced in large quantities. Digital fire control connected to the dropper. A fully enclosed air-conditioned turret with NBC protection, the 2S5 exposes the crew during firing in a way that has proven disastrous on drone-saturated battlefields.
Compatible with NATO ammunition, including Exekalibur, and crews trained at Larkell in the Shoot and Run doctrine, treating survivability as a daily discipline. According to ORK’s tracking of open source data by August 20, Russia has lost approximately 246 visually confirmed MS 5TA modernized MTAS M2 Cicunadu Akats and 76 D30s howitzers on the Ukrainian battlefield.
Ukrainian AS90 losses amount to approximately 19 visually confirmed vehicles, 40 destroyed and six damaged out of approximately 68 transferred by mid-2000 since the fifth year. Crews particularly point to Lancet loitering munitions as the dominant threat and consistently place their howitzers in trench or concealed positions.
The exchange is merciless. Russia is losing artillery systems at a rate it cannot sustainably replenish. Ukraine loses individual vehicles and survives attacks that would have destroyed open Soviet systems. Britain is replacing the AS90 not with another tracked howitzer, but with the KF50 RCH 15, an unmanned automated turret on a Boxer 8 chassis, and on 23 April 2000, Britain announced its choice.
On 28 December 2000, the UK and Germany signed an early capability demonstrator contract worth £52 million for three prototypes under the Trinity House Agreement. The lesson Britain has written into its next artillery programme comes directly from the Ukrainian battlefields. Mobility, automation, fire, range. Let’s go back to that tree line.
Azur stands next to a 45-ton British howitzer designed when the Cold War was still a current war. He has a tablet with the Kropywa program. It has the three-month equivalent of Lin’s SBREP encoded in the crew’s muscle memory . It has Excalibur-certified ammunition and a fire control computer that talks to drones overhead and has a memory of a Russian battery somewhere over the horizon, still using optics his grandfather would recognize.
Comparing it to Soviet weapons is like comparing a Zigulik to a Mercedes E-Class. The numbers prove him right. The combat record backs him up and the British Ministry of Defence, in plucking its own army from every legal AS90 to put them in his hands, has voted the most expensive vote any government can cast.
The old British howitzer that no one wanted anymore turned out to be exactly what the European front needed. Thirty years after leaving the drawing board, British engineering is still producing work that Russian engineering cannot match. This is the story this gun tells, and it’s not a story about Mercedes.
This is a story about what gets built into a gun when it ‘s built right. The UK is replacing the AS90 not with another tracked tank, but with the RCA 15 FIA5, an unmanned automated turret on a Boxer 8 As8 chassis. On April 23, 2020, Great Britain announced its choice. On 28 December 2020, the UK and Germany signed an early capability demonstrator contract worth £51 million for three prototypes under the Trinity House Agreement.
The lesson Britain has written into its next artillery programme comes directly from the Ukrainian battlefields. Mobility, automation, rate of fire, range. All four together in one system that doesn’t require five people deployed to drones to load and launch. Let’s go back to that tree line. The Azeri stands next to a 45-ton British howitzer designed when the Cold War was still a current war.
He has a tablet with the Kropywa program. It has the three-week equivalent of Salsbay Plain dogfish encoded in the crew’s muscle memory. It has Excalibur-certified ammunition and a fire control computer that talks to drones overhead and has a Russian battery somewhere over the horizon in its memory. still using optics his grandfather would have recognized.
Comparing it to Soviet weapons, he says: “So how do you compare the Zhigulik to a Mercedes E-Class? The numbers prove him right. The combat record proves him right, and the British Ministry of Defence, by stripping its own army of every operational AS90 to put it in its hands, voted the most expensive vote any government can cast.
The old British howitzer that no one wanted anymore turned out to be exactly what the European front needed. 30 years after it left the drawing board, British engineering is still doing work that Russian engineering can’t match. This isn’t a story about Mercedes, this is a story about what gets built into a weapon when it’s built right from the start.
Yeah.
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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