The Peruvian Congress removed, through a motion of censure, the seventh president to govern this country in the last 10 years. Seven days after the second round of voting on June 7, 2026, Peru still does not have an elected president. This Sunday, Peru’s National Office of Electoral Processes reported that it has already counted 100% of the ballots, almost a week before the second round of the presidential elections.
Keiko Fujimori is poised to become the new president of Peru with fewer than 300 ballots left to be counted. It seems that Peru has a new president, and watch out because he is one of the most beloved figures in the entire country. This Sunday, Peru’s National Office of Electoral Processes reported that it has already counted 100% of the ballots, almost a week before the second round of the presidential elections.
The results give the victory to the right-wing Keiko Fujimori over the left-wing Roberto Sánchez with only 4209 votes. In case anyone didn’t get it, it was irony. Okay, the elections were very close. In fact, Peru has taken several days to clarify who won the elections. Hey, don’t yell at Homer, he’s just a little slow. Ah, he said something bad.
What was it? What was it? Don’t yell at Homer. No, no, no, no. That was very good. He said he said it was slow. They told me to be slow. Who dares to call me that? Hey. Ah, Homer, you’re still here, huh? Wow, you ‘re slow. But surprisingly, in Peru they call this “Monday afternoon,” because the craziest thing of all is that this is not the first time it has happened in the country.
The last three presidential elections have been decided with a difference of less than 1% between the candidates. It’s as if the entire country plays a coin toss every 5 years to decide its future. And the metaphor isn’t far off the mark because it’s literally about betting. He only lasted 4 months in power.
José Gerí is no longer the president of Peru. The Peruvian Congress removed, through a motion of censure, the seventh president to govern this country in the last 10 years. And it’s not that Peruvians are slow with so much, well, okay, a little bit, yes, you have to admit that, Peruvians who are watching this video, hurry up a little , but Peruvian democracy has a level of chaos that makes Spain look like Switzerland.
Since 2016 they have had eight presidents. One tried to stage a coup and said he had been drugged, that they had put drugs in his cocoa. And the last president before these elections publicly defended sex with girls in the style of Jeff Epstein. The new head of state will also have a short term and arrives shrouded in controversy due to his history, riddled with corruption allegations and marked by controversial statements about sexual relations with minors that he made when he opposed the law that banned child marriage in Peru.
And no, this isn’t a low-budget Netflix series, we’re talking about the Republic of Peru and now a surname that I’m sure you’ll all recognize is making a comeback . Fujimori. Yes, Keiko Fujimori. The daughter of Alberto Fujimori, the man who ruled Peru in the 1990s and was sentenced to 25 years in prison for crimes against humanity, who bought media outlets, organized forced sterilizations of indigenous women, and died in 2024 without having served his sentence.
His daughter, Keiko, had made four attempts to become president. He lost in 2011, he lost in 2016, he lost in 2021 and now finally the fourth time’s the charm by a few thousand votes in a country of 33 million inhabitants. It’s like winning the Champions League in a penalty shootout, but without the drama.
Seven days after the second round of voting on June 7, 2026, Peru still does not have an elected president. The official count by the National Office of Electoral Processes, ONPE, updated this Monday, June 15, shows an advance of 98.59% of the tally sheets counted out of a total of 92,766 tally sheets. And I know what you’re all wondering right now.
Who did he win against? Well, against Roberto Sánchez, who is a leftist who put on the straw hat of former president Pedro Castillo, went to visit him in jail, promised to pardon him if he won and included Pedro Castillo’s brother and daughter-in-law on the electoral lists. To sum it up, a man whose main campaign argument was to vindicate the president who tried to stage a coup, and a cheap, stupid version at that, one of the stupidest men in history.
Yes, he was supporting him, and he was the main leader of the opposition. What do you want me to say? If you ‘ve seen our latest video about Peru, you’ll be asking yourselves the following questions. But what exactly does Fujimori’s return to power mean? Can Keiko govern a country that is split exactly in half and with two halves that seem irreconcilable? And more importantly, does Peru have any chance of breaking out of this political loop? Today we’re going to answer these questions, but first there’s a moment when we
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And now, let’s look at a little history. I am Fonseca. Welcome to Only Fons. To understand what just happened in Peru, you have to know the Fujimori family because this family is to Peruvian politics what the Corleones are to Hollywood. We’re talking about a family saga with an authoritarian patriarch, children fighting over the inheritance, and quite a bit of violence involved.
It all began in a humble Japanese village within the city of Kunamoto. There, in 1898, Naoichi Minami was born , who over the years would become the father of Alberto Fujimori. Alberto Fujimori was, as his own surname indicates, the son of Japanese immigrants and in 1990 he ran for election against Mario Vargas Yosa.
Yes, the Nobel Prize winner for literature and favorite of the entire Lima elite. And what happened? Well, Fujimori gave him a beating. Because? Because he knew what people wanted to hear in a country that was falling apart . Peru at that time had a hyperinflation of 7,000%. Almost nothing.
But they also had an absolutely bloodthirsty Maoist guerrilla group called the Shining Path, which blew up bridges, killed mayors, and terrorized half the country. And it turns out, surprise surprise, that the political class didn’t give a damn . Fujimori presented himself as an outsider, and the Japanese community in Peru had an impeccable image of hardworking people.
So the result was voted for even in Las Piedras. From 2 years before the elections, nobody doubted Vargas Josa’s victory. Vargas Jostaba had the support of the main newspapers, the most influential weeklies, all television channels and commercial radio stations. All the polling companies predicted his victory, and the large advertising groups managed his gigantic advertising campaign, as had never happened before in Peru.
But be careful because the Vargas Yosa anecdote deserves a minute of our attention because it is one of the greatest humiliations in Latin American electoral history. Mario Vargas Yosa entered the campaign as the absolute favorite; I mean, he was a very famous writer, he had the support of the entire elite, the media, and businessmen.
He also proposed an economic adjustment that convinced everyone, but in the end he was nothing more than an intellectual, offering austerity to people who ate once a day. Fujimori was different. He strolled through the markets, hugged the grandmothers, and promised that the adjustment would be smooth. Anyway, what can I tell you? Did he keep his word? Well, you can imagine.
What happened is that when he won, he implemented a tougher adjustment than the one Vargasiosa proposed. The writer left Peru, obtained Spanish nationality and wrote “The Fish in the Water”, a memoir in which he recounts the entire election campaign. And we have to give Fujimori credit for something.
He was the first Peruvian politician who understood that in a democracy, the one who wins is not the one with the best idea, but the one who best connects with the anger of the street. And what came next was a mixture of economic success and atrocities, because it is true that on the one hand Fujimori stabilized the economy with the Fujishock, a brutal shock therapy that skyrocketed prices in the short term, but controlled inflation.
In addition, he also captured Abimael Guzmán, who was the leader of this terrorist group, the Shining Path. The news you are about to hear is probably one of the most anticipated news stories of the century. Tonight, according to police reports, Dincote captured in Lima Peru’s main enemy, Abimael Guzmán Reynoso, the terrorist responsible for the death of 25,000 people and causing material damage exceeding 20 billion dollars.
They caught him thanks to him. Well, the truth is that it was an intelligence operation that had already been prepared before, by the one who governed the country before, even though Fujimori kept the medal. It’s a bit like what Donald Trump does with the wars he says he has stopped. The thing is, the Peruvian economy began to grow, and while all this was happening, Fujimori staged a self-coup in 1992.
As President of the Republic, I have directly witnessed all these anomalies and have felt the responsibility to take an exceptional approach to try to accelerate the process of this national reconstruction. And with this self-coup, Fujimori closed Congress, rewrote the Constitution so he could be re-elected, and created a propaganda machine to buy off the media.
His advisor, Vladimiro Montesinos, set up a network of bribery, espionage and murders that was recorded in the famous Vladivideos. And someone will say to me, “Well, is that all?” No, because the Colina group carried out the Barrios Altos and La Cantuta massacres, 25 dead. And if all this wasn’t enough, the Fujimori legend also includes more than 8,000 forced sterilizations of indigenous women that the Peruvian government ordered under a family planning program.
The court declared that the four charges against Fujimori were proven beyond a reasonable doubt and sentenced him to 25 years in prison. It was the first time that a democratically elected former president in Latin America had been found guilty of human rights violations in his own country. In 2000, Fujimori fled to Japan and governed from there by fax, which, in case anyone doesn’t know, was the WhatsApp of the time.
And when he returned to Peru he was convicted. He died in 2024 after an irregular pardon. And who was his successor? Well, his daughter Keiko Fujimori. A woman who has spent 15 years rebuilding Fujimorism as an electoral machine. He has lost three times by less than 1% each time in 2021 against Pedro Castillo. The difference was 44,000 votes.
In that case, he denounced a fraud, although without providing serious evidence, again like Donald Trump. He then refused to acknowledge the results. But now, in 2026, he has finally achieved victory, probably thanks to the vote of Peruvians abroad, especially in the United States, where he obtained 76% of the vote.
And what does this woman propose? Well, we’re going to see it right now. Fonseca’s hair’s breadth Before we continue, if you’re new to this channel, let me remind you that we release new videos every week. The news gives you the news, I tell you the story. If you’re interested in geopolitics, international politics, economics, and all of it with a bit of sarcasm and dark humor, this is the place for you.
So, you know what to do: subscribe and hit the bell so you don’t miss any of our updates. And now, let’s continue with today’s story. Let’s see what Fujimori’s victory means. But first let’s see how this choice was decided, because it deserves a separate chapter. After two weeks of counting, right now Peruvians are a bit like this. Hey, don’t yell at Homer, he’s just a little slow. Ah, he said something bad.
What was it? What was it? Don’t yell at Homer. No, no, no, no. That was very good. He said he said it was slow. They told me to be slow. Who dares to call me that? Hey. Ah, Homer, you’re still here, huh? Wow, you ‘re slow. But the vote count has been curious to say the least, because Sánchez, the Peruvian, led during the first few days.
Then, almost at midnight on Wednesday, the votes from abroad turned the tide in favor of Keiko Fujimori. So, what did Sánchez do? Well, the same thing that Spain’s Pedro Sánchez would do , try a desperate move, that is, request the annulment of 2400 complete polling stations in the Fujimori strongholds of the capital of Lima.
In other words, to erase thousands of votes for Keiko in one fell swoop. The problem is Peruvian bureaucracy. In Peru, requesting the annulment of a polling station is not free. You have to pay a legal fee of about $300 for each one. Processing the paperwork for the 2,400 tables cost almost 0,000. And what happened? Well, the electoral jury has rejected it.
He rejected all the appeals at once because he did not attach the proof of payment. And to top it all off , when they wanted to fix it, the strict legal deadline had already expired. The rule is explicit. If the original proof of payment of the fee is not presented with the request for annulment, the special electoral jury declares it inadmissible.
It does not contemplate subsequent deadlines for rectifying the omission. So what did Sánchez do? So he started a crowdfunding campaign to pay the fees, a crowdfunding campaign titled Solidarity for the defense of the popular vote, and below it, two bank accounts. And meanwhile, what was Keiko Fujimori doing? So she went on vacation with her daughter and posted the photo at the airport on her Twitter account.
The difference in attitude between the two speaks volumes. Let’s see what happens now with this money that they’ve put into bank accounts. And you might say, “In any case, where does this left-wing candidate, Mr. Sánchez, come from?” Well, from a place you wouldn’t expect.
He is a psychologist by training, the son of a hairdresser and a laundress. He wanted to be a priest, but he didn’t finish seminary and then founded his political party in 2008 and had no influence in Peruvian politics until 4 months ago when he almost died. He was campaigning in a rural area of the south when he contracted acute appendicitis.
He was taken to a health center that had no specialists and visited three hospitals. He lost consciousness, miraculously underwent surgery, and when he recovered he returned to the election campaign and suddenly began to rise in the polls. Another parallel with Donald Trump. Well, this one is a bit of a stretch, but in any case, the campaign image was more than ready.
a candidate who almost died because there are no hospitals and is obviously campaigning on that. Had the decision not been made to carry out several transfers due to limitations in hospital conditions, we would probably be mourning a tragedy,” they emphasized. But who was his mentor? None other than Pedro Castillo.
Yes, the same one who came to power in 2021 as a rural teacher riding a horse with that giant pencil he carried. I don’t know if you remember. This man went to every debate and every interview with a giant pencil that represented education, but anyway, it was a comical sight, especially with the little hat. He had such a goofy face that no one was really surprised when he ended up doing what he did.
In any case, Pedro Castillo’s government had 80 ministers in just a year and a half. Think of it like having a new minister every six days. Then they found $20,000 in the palace bathroom. The prosecutor’s office accused him of leading a criminal organization from within the government, and when he was about to be impeached for the third time, he tried to shut down Congress by force, just like the father of… Fujimori 30 years earlier.
And it also came out that he ended up being arrested by his own bodyguards. His legal defense was even better than Elisa Moulia’s, because he literally said that he staged the coup because he was drugged, because someone had slipped drugs into his hot chocolate and he didn’t know what he was doing. Yes, you heard right.
He does n’t remember anything. He told me this in his own words. He says, “I don’t remember reading the message to the nation where the closure of Congress was ordered.” That’s his answer and we have to respect it. In any case, what we are seeing in Peru is a country split in two. Think about this.
Sánchez’s voters are concentrated in the Andes and especially in the south, which is the poorest and worst connected area of the country. And Keiko Fujimori’s voters are in the most industrialized areas. What does this remind you of? Well, it’s similar to what has happened in other Latin American countries, because of course there are many things that can only be explained by knowing a country in depth, but what is happening in Peru is better understood by seeing the context of the region and right now there is a pendulum swing. In the last two years,
only center-right and right-wing candidates have won across Latin America. Edmundo González Urrutia in Venezuela, Noboa in Ecuador, Paz in Bolivia, Cast in Chile, Fernández in Costa Rica and now Fujimori in Peru. Of course, Miley in Argentina was already on the right track, and Bukel in El Salvador has been established for years.
Bolsonaro planted the seed in Brazil, and the Latin American left in general, the one that met with Pedro Sánchez in Barcelona a few months ago, is clearly in retreat. And it was on the Friday before the vote that Keiko posted that she had spoken with María Corina Machada, the leader of the Venezuelan opposition.
He literally said, and quoted himself, that history gives us powerful lessons about the paths to follow and those to avoid. I close quotation marks. The message was clear. Vote for me or you’ll end up like Venezuela. And in a country where millions of Venezuelans have arrived fleeing Nicolás Maduro, that argument is not just any argument.
The question now is, will it be easy to govern? No, it’s Peru. Nothing is easy in Peru. Keiko has a majority in the Senate and in Congress, which gives her an advantage that no other president has had in a decade, but she governs a country where 67 of the 130 deputies in the previous Congress were under investigation by the prosecutor’s office.
The situation is serious. Organized crime is deeply entrenched in the state. It is estimated that 30% of the budget is lost to corruption, and to that must be added social division. Keiko will have to form a government beyond Fujimorism because within the country Sánchez has won and it remains to be seen how she will treat those southern rural territories that did not vote for her.
And I know what more than one person is wondering, that it’s only a matter of time before they remove it by the very law that her father designed, who, ironically, was also vetoed by that law. Well, let me tell you, no. And the fragmentation that exists right now in Peru could save his skin quite a bit, because since 2003 the method to declare the vacancy requires 87 deputies and 40 senators.
But before that, an accusation has to be filed because it’s not a matter of firing a president just because they don’t like him. That accusation must be presented in the Chamber of Deputies where Fuerza Popular, which is Fujimori’s party, has 41 of the 130 available seats. The regulations require 40% of the votes of the attending deputies.
If everyone is present at the session, 52 votes are needed to admit the motion, and that’s where the process gets complicated because he would need to get another 11 votes to stop an impeachment. That means she’s completely lost. Well, he can’t turn to a potential ally, sorry, which is the Renewal party.
Popularity, with the 15 deputies this force has, has more than enough to block the eviction in the lower house, or it can impact the other party with which it also has good relations, the civic party which has 14 seats. With all of them they have the possibility of forming an alliance, although not a friendship, but hatred towards the other.
So it’s possible that we may finally see a female president in Peru who lasts more than a year in office. To be honest, I wouldn’t bet my money on it, but it could happen. So now that we’ve reached this point, it’s your turn. Do you think they’re going to oust Fujimori soon? Will the other parties support her? Will he manage to clean up his image? You can leave your answer in the comments.
And as always, don’t forget that here at Solo Fonseca we release new videos every week. So subscribe to this channel and hit the bell so you don’t miss any of our updates. If you liked this video, give it a like and we’ll see you in the next one. Thank you for being there and see you soon.
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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