January 7th, 1986. West 9th Street, Bensonhurst, Brooklyn. Three men in a moving car. Thomas Huck Carbonaro behind the wheel. Nicholas Momando riding shotgun. And in the backseat, a 63-year-old man everyone in the neighborhood simply called Old Man, Joseph Peruta. Momando had been told there was a sit-down happening at Tally’s, a bar and restaurant on 18th Avenue owned by Sammy Gravano.
He’d been told to have Carbonaro swing by and pick up Old Man Peruta on the way over. Nothing unusual about any of it. This was just another Tuesday in Bensonhurst. Another car ride, another meeting, another night in the only world Nicholas Momando had ever known. He had no reason to be suspicious of the man in his backseat. Peruta wasn’t some stranger.
He was a fixture embedded so deep into the fabric of Gravano’s crew that his presence in a car felt about as threatening as a grandfather at Sunday dinner. Somewhere along West 9th Street near Bay Parkway, Joseph Peruta pulled out a pistol and shot Nicholas Momando twice in the back of the head. Directly behind them, watching the whole thing unfold through a windshield, was Sammy Gravano himself, riding with his brother-in-law Edward Garofalo.
The car kept moving. Momando’s body was thrown out into a vacant lot like a bag of garbage. It was found the next morning. He was 41 years old. He left behind 10 children. His youngest, a baby girl, just 6 weeks old. The case went cold. No arrests, no witnesses, no breaks. For 6 years, the murder of Nicholas Momando was just another unsolved killing in a Brooklyn neighborhood that had seen plenty of them.
It was finally solved in 1991 when the man who ordered it sat down in a federal prosecutor’s office and told them everything. If you’re new here, hit subscribe and drop a comment telling us where in the world you’re watching from. Now, let’s get into it. This is the story of Nicky Cowboy. What he was, what he became, and what happens when the most loyal man in the room is also the most dangerous liability in the organization.
To understand Nicholas Momando, you have to understand the ground he grew up on, Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, southwestern corner of the borough, pressed up against the waterfront. A neighborhood of row houses and social clubs and old men who sat outside the same storefront every morning for 40 years. It was Italian-American to its core.
The kind of place where the mob wasn’t an outside force that moved in and corrupted things. The mob was the neighborhood. The men who ran it settled disputes, provided work, commanded respect. Every block had its hierarchy, and that hierarchy had been in place longer than most people living on those blocks had been alive.
Sammy Gravano was born into that world on March 12th, 1945. His parents, Girolamo and Caterina, had come over from Sicily with nothing and built something honest. His father, Jerry, worked hard, kept his head down, and walked past the social clubs every single day telling his son to do the same. Get a real job. Stay out of it. Sammy couldn’t stay out of it.
By his early teens, he was already throwing hands in the streets and collecting a reputation that preceded him. The nickname, “The Bull,” wasn’t given to him. It was earned in a brawl where the ferocity he showed made grown men take a step back. He joined the army in the mid-1960s, did his 2 years, got his honorable discharge, came back to Bensonhurst, and walked straight into organized crime like he’d never left.
His first mob connection was with the Colombo family in 1968. His first murder was in 1970. A man named Joseph Colucci, who had been plotting to kill a fellow associate without clearing it with anyone first. Gravano described pulling that trigger as surreal, almost cinematic, like the sound of the street dropped away and he existed outside of time for a moment.
After that, it was a straight line into the Gambino family. Formal induction into La Cosa Nostra in 1976 and a climb through the ranks that didn’t slow down for anyone. By the early 1980s, Gravano was running construction companies, loan sharking operations, gambling. He opened a nightclub in Bensonhurst called The Plaza Suite.
Packed every weekend, lines wrapped around the block. He was building a crew that would become one of the most effective enforcement units in the entire Gambino family. And Nicholas Mormando was one of the cornerstones he built it around. Mormando was born in Brooklyn on October 28th, 1944. His family’s roots traced back to Mormondo, a town in Milan, Italy.
The surname adjusted when they arrived in America. He grew up barely a stone’s throw from the same streets and social clubs that raised Gravano. And from a young age, he was close with another neighborhood kid named Michael DeBatt, who would eventually end up in Gravano’s crew alongside him. His nickname, Nicky Cowboy, wasn’t flattery.
In mob culture, a cowboy is a guy who acts [clears throat] on impulse, who moves without getting the green light, who doesn’t wait for permission because asking for permission feels like slowing down and slowing down isn’t in his DNA. Cowboys were tolerated in the mob for one reason. When you needed something done fast and dirty and you couldn’t afford hesitation, they were the ones you called, but they were also the ones that gave bosses sleepless nights because a man who operates on instinct is a man you can never fully control.
Momando was Gravano’s kind of cowboy, useful, loyal, and for a long time disciplined enough to keep the wildness pointed in the right direction. He sat alongside Joseph Stymie D’Angelo Laborio, Louie Milito, Thomas Huck Carbonaro, and old man Joseph Peruta as a key figure in the inner circle of Gravano’s Bensonhurst operation.
He handled collections. He handled enforcement. He was the guy you sent when a threat needed to have real weight behind it. Gravano ran that crew with a general’s mentality. Everyone had a lane. Everyone kicked up. Everyone asked permission before doing anything that went outside their assignment. And for years, Momando stayed close enough to that line that it worked.
The moment that defined who Nicky Cowboy really was, the moment you have to understand before anything else makes sense, happened on June 25th, 1982. Frank Fiala was a Czech immigrant, a drug dealer, and the kind of man who confused having money and muscle with having actual power. He had agreed to buy the Plaza Suite from Gravano for a million dollars.
He paid $650,000 upfront. And then, before the paperwork was even finished, he started acting like he already owned everything in sight. Fiala moved his own security into the club and told Gravano’s staff to answer to them. He had a helicopter pad installed on the roof. He kept a collection of weapons in the back rooms.
And at one point, in a moment of staggering arrogance, he pulled out a submachine gun in front of Gravano and told him casually that he could have anyone killed. Gravano went to Paul Castellano and got permission to have Fiala removed. Castellano agreed with one condition. It couldn’t be traced back to Gravano.
There needed to be distance. There wasn’t much distance. On the night of June 25th, as Fiala walked out of the Plaza Suite after signing the final sale documents, Gravano’s crew was waiting. Liborio Milito put bullets in Fiala’s head and then fired a shot through each eye. A deliberate message about what happens to men who talk to Sammy Gravano the way Fiala had talked to Sammy Gravano.
Nicholas Momando was positioned around the corner with a shotgun. His job was simple. If anyone in Fiala’s crew reached for a weapon, Momando was to open fire in a public street in front of whoever was there and not stop until the threat was eliminated. He sat there without hesitation, ready. Fiala’s men were too stunned to move.
Momando never pulled the trigger, but the fact that he was sitting there, loaded shotgun in hand, prepared to turn that street into a war zone for Sammy Gravano. That’s the measure of the man in 1982. Afterward, the crew gathered at a bar called Doc’s, run by Joseph “Stimy” D’Angelo. Gravano walked in and told them it was a beautiful piece of work.
Then the fallout began. Castellano was furious. He hadn’t sanctioned Gravano’s crew being directly involved in the murder. And because the hit wasn’t officially approved in that way, Momando couldn’t receive credit for it toward becoming a made man. The murder that should have been his initiation, the one he’d risked everything for, was the murder the organization had to pretend he hadn’t committed.
Gravano sent the crew to his farm in New Jersey to wait out the heat. Word filtered back that Castellano was angry enough that executions were on the table. Gravano gave Momando an out. “Take your guys, go somewhere else. Let this die down.” Momando looked at him and said, “Sammy, we’ll load up. We’re ready.” Let that land for a second.
Paul Castellano was the boss of the most powerful crime family in New York City. He controlled construction, labor unions, the docks, garbage collection across the five boroughs. He was untouchable by any normal standard. And Nicholas Momando, an associate with no official rank, no formal title, no protection beyond his own loyalty, was telling Gravano he was ready to go to war with him.
That’s who Nicky Cowboy was in the summer of 1982. Gravano talked him down. The situation cooled. The crew came back to Brooklyn. Roughly four years later, Gravano put him in the ground. Crack cocaine hit New York City in the mid-1980s like a demolition crew. It was 10 times cheaper than powder. It hit faster. It grabbed harder.
And it didn’t let go. Harlem, the South Bronx, Bed-Stuy, entire communities hollowed out almost overnight. And it made its way straight into Sammy Gravano’s crew. Nicholas Momando got hooked. By 1984 and into 1985, the enforcer who had sat stone still with a shotgun waiting for Gravano’s signal was deteriorating fast.
He was blowing off crew protocols. He was making decisions nobody authorized. The cowboy behavior that had always been a managed risk was now running completely unchecked. No discipline, no judgment, just addiction and paranoia driving every move. And then Gravano got information that Momando was the one who had introduced crack to Michael DeBatt, his childhood friend, another key figure in the crew.
Two men compromised at the same time by the same substance. Two men who knew too much now becoming unpredictable in the worst possible way. The mob has always understood something that addicts don’t. A man who is desperate for his next fix will do things that a clear-headed man would never do. He’ll talk to the wrong people. He’ll make unauthorized deals.
He’ll trade information for cash. An addict inside an organization built on secrecy isn’t just a personnel headache. He’s a walking vulnerability. And then Momando crossed the final line. He told Gravano he was done. He was leaving the crew. He was going to start his own operation. You don’t leave the mob. That’s not a figure of speech.
You don’t take everything you know, the names, the faces, the locations, the methods, and announce that you’re walking out the door with all of it to build something that competes with or threatens the people who trusted you with that information. That’s not a resignation. In that world, that’s a declaration. Gravano’s calculation was straightforward and brutal.
A crack-addicted man who had already proven he couldn’t follow rules, who now wanted to go rogue with intimate knowledge of the crew’s operations, was not a problem that could be managed. He was a problem that had to be ended. Castellano was already dead by this point. On December 16th, 1985, Castellano and his driver, Thomas Bilotti, had been gunned down outside Sparks Steakhouse in Midtown Manhattan.
One of the boldest mob hits in American history, carried out in the middle of Christmas shopping season. John Gotti had orchestrated it. Gravano had helped plan it. Now Gotti was boss, and Gravano was rising beside him. The first piece of business Gravano brought to his new boss was Nicky Cowboy.
Gotti said, “Yes.” What happened next was elegant in the way only the simplest traps are elegant. Gravano didn’t come at Momondo with force. He didn’t send a crew to his door. He used the one thing Momondo couldn’t defend against, his own trust. A message was passed. There was a meeting at Tally’s, Gravano’s restaurant, safe ground.
Thomas Huck Carbonaro would come pick him up and on the way swing by and grab old man Peruta. Joseph Peruta, 63 years old, known throughout the neighborhood for decades, quiet in the way that only the most dangerous men tend to be quiet. He was the last person on earth who read as a threat. He was a fixture, a grandfather figure in a crew full of younger men.
Getting in a car with Joe Peruta was no different than sitting down for espresso. Momondo climbed in. They rolled through Bensonhurst, streets he’d walked his entire life, streets he probably could have navigated blind. West 9th Street, Bay Parkway, the neighborhood he was born into, the neighborhood that had given him everything he had and everything he was.
Joseph Peruta raised his pistol and shot Nicholas Momondo twice in the back of the head. Sammy Gravano watched it happen from the car right behind them. He and Edward Garofalo drove past the spot where Momondo’s body was thrown without stopping. Nicky Cowboy had said, “We’ll load up. We’re ready.” when the threat was Paul Castellano.
He never saw the threat that actually killed him because it wore the face of a man he trusted completely. Six years passed. In 1991, the FBI rolled up John Gotti and Sammy Gravano in a RICO sweep that had been years in the making. Wiretaps planted in an apartment above Gotti’s Ravenite Social Club in Little Italy had captured hundreds of hours of conversation.
Gotti running his mouth about everything, including his own underboss. Gravano listened to those tapes. He heard himself being discussed like a problem. He ran the math. On November 8th, 1991, Sammy Gravano agreed to cooperate with the federal government. He was the highest-ranking member of any of the five families to ever break omerta and testify against his own organization.
As part of his agreement, he confessed to participation in 19 murders. Nicholas Momando was among them. Gravano walked prosecutors through the entire setup, the phone call, the car, old man Peruta in the backseat, the drive down West 9th Street, the body in the vacant lot. A 6-year-old cold case was solved in a conference room in Manhattan by the man who gave the order.
Gravano received 5 years for cooperating despite those 19 confessed murders. He was released in 1994, entered witness protection, relocated to Arizona. >> [clears throat] >> And because Sammy Gravano was constitutionally incapable of walking away cleanly, he got himself arrested in 2000 for running an ecstasy trafficking operation out of Phoenix.
He was sentenced to 20 years, released on parole in September 2017. Today, he runs a YouTube channel and podcast called Our Thing. He tells his stories in a Bensonhurst accent to audiences of hundreds of thousands. He is, in any honest accounting, living a kind of media celebrity that the 19 people whose deaths he confessed to will never experience.
In November 1998, the family of Nicholas Momando joined the families of Michael DeBatt and Joseph Colucci in filing a wrongful death lawsuit against Gravano in New York State Supreme Court. They named not just Gravano, but also the author Peter Maas, publisher HarperCollins, Gravano’s literary agency ICM, and 20th Century Fox, which was allegedly developing a film adaptation of Gravano’s memoir Underboss.
The families argued that profits were being made from accounts of their relatives murders without any recognition or compensation. Michael DeBatt, Momando’s childhood friend from the same Bensonhurst streets, was murdered in 1987 on Gravano’s orders, shot multiple times while working behind the bar at Tali’s, the same restaurant Momando had been told he was heading to the night he was killed.
DeBatt’s wife had reportedly gone to Gravano and begged him to get her husband help with his addiction. Gravano told her he would look into it. What he looked into was how to clean up the problem permanently. Gravano later said the DeBatt murder tore him up inside. He never said anything remotely like that about Nicholas Momando. The story of Nicky Cowboy is ultimately a story about a very specific kind of tragedy, one the mob produces in volume.
A man who proved his loyalty in the most extreme way possible, who was willing to put himself in the crossfire of the most powerful crime boss in New York City for the guy standing next to him, and who was eliminated not by an enemy, not in a war, but by the organization he’d given everything to protect.
The crack cocaine didn’t just destroy Momando the enforcer, it transformed him from an asset into a liability, and in that world, there’s only one way that classification ends. He died on a street he knew by heart, killed by a man who’d been at his side for years, ordered by the person he’d once been ready to die for. Nicky Cowboy never saw it coming.
He loaded up for Paul Castellano. He never thought to load up for Sammy Gravano. That’s it for today. If you want more stories like this, the mob figures who get left out of the headlines, the guys behind the bosses, the men who built empires and got buried in vacant lots, subscribe and hit the bell.
Drop a comment below with who you want covered next. We’ll see you in the next one.
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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Disclaimer : This content may be created by AI for entertainment purposes. Any resemblance to real persons, events, or places is coincidental.
