July 1944. The Western approaches west of the Silly Isles. A German Yubot commander faces an impossible choice. Above him, a British frigot has locked onto his position with sonar. In deeper water, he would dive, execute a hard turn the moment contact was lost, and slip away while depth charges exploded harmlessly behind him.
That tactic had kept Yubot crews alive for 5 years. But he is in shallow water hunting convoys near the coast and the seafloor is barely 60 meters below. He cannot dive deep enough to escape. Then he hears it, a triple thump from somewhere above. Not behind him where depth charges would fall.
Ahead, three heavy objects are plummeting through the water directly toward his boat. He has 7 seconds to react. The weapon falling toward him looks crude, almost primitive. Three stubby barrels mounted on a rotating frame, lobbing what appear to be oversized dust bins into the sea. Royal Navy sailors called it the Squid. German submariners had no time to call it anything at all.
The Battle of the Atlantic should have been won by 1942. Britain had a dick, the sonar system that could detect submerged submarines by bouncing sound waves off their hulls. Escort vessels knew where the Ubot were. The problem was killing them. A depth charge is a simple weapon. A steel canister filled with explosives rolled off the stern of a ship sinking until water pressure triggers the detonator at a preset depth against a stationary target devastating against a moving evading submarine commanded by a skilled captain. Nearly useless. The mathematics
were brutal. AIC could track a submarine until it passed roughly 200 to 300 yd beneath the attacking ship. At that point, the submarine disappeared from the sonar picture, hidden directly below the hole where the sound beam could not reach. This dead zone directly beneath the ship created a fundamental tactical problem that no amount of operator skill could solve.
The escort then had to travel another 40 seconds to pass over the target position, then wait 25 to 30 seconds for the charges to sink to the submarine’s estimated depth. Total blind time exceeded 60 to 90 seconds. During that window, the submarine was invisible and free to maneuver in any direction. German commanders exploited this ruthlessly with a hard immediate turn.
The instant sonar contact was lost. They threw the helm hard over and went to full power. Even a modest turn rate of 3°/s meant the submarine could shift 90° off its original course before depth charges reached their preset depth. By the time explosives detonated, the yubot was simply elsewhere.
The charges exploded where the submarine had been, not where it was. British tactical analysis pointed to blind time as the killer variable. Cut the blind time and kills would increase proportionally. The numbers proved the scale of the problem. According to postwar Royal Navy assessments, traditional depth charges achieved a kill ratio of roughly 60 to1.
60 attacks for one submarine destroyed. Some Hubot survived staggering punishment. In one of the war’s most extreme reported cases, U427 was said to have endured hundreds of depth charges in April 1945 without sinking, often cited as 678. The account demonstrates just how small positioning errors multiplied into complete failure.
Each charge that exploded more than 20 ft from the hull caused little damage. The submarine commander who correctly anticipated the attack vector and turned away could survive almost indefinitely, waiting out the escort’s ammunition supply. The depth setting compounded the difficulty. Without depth determining sonar, escort commanders could only guess how deep a submarine was running based on the range at which contact was lost.
And their experience with previous engagements. A depth charge set for 150 ft that exploded while the submarine was at 200 ft achieved nothing. The margin for error was measured in feet. The room for miscalculation was enormous. Experienced yubot captains varied their depth constantly during attacks, knowing that each depth change invalidated the escort commander calculations.
Shallow water should have favored the escorts. Submarines could not dive deep to escape, limiting their vertical evasion options. The continental shelf around Britain, where most convoy battles occurred, gave submarines a maximum depth of perhaps 100 m in many areas. The waters of the English Channel, the Irish Sea, and the approaches to major ports offered nowhere to hide vertically, but the blind time problem remained fully intact.
A submarine at 30 m depth had the same 60 to 90 seconds of horizontal evasion time as one at 300 m. The seafloor prevented deep diving, but did nothing to prevent the hard evasive turn. Shallow water neutralized depth charges just as effectively as deep water through a different mechanism. Escort commanders watched Ubot escape repeatedly in waters they should have dominated.
The solution came from an unlikely source. The Directorate of Miscellaneous weapons development known informally as the Weezers and Dodgers operated from a requisitioned pier at Western Super Mayor. HMS Bernbeck was not a ship but a Victorian pleasure pier commandeered for weapons testing because it extended over tidal waters deep enough for trials.
The team included author Neville Shoot serving as Lieutenant Commander NS Norway alongside motor racing photographer Louis Clementi. Leading them was Sir Charles Frederick Goodivve, a Canadian-B born chemist who had already developed a goring systems to protect ships from magnetic mines. These were not conventional weapons engineers.
They were problem solvers recruited precisely because they thought differently, unconstrained by established naval doctrine. The Weezers and Dodgers had already proven the ahead throwing concept with the Hedgehog spigot mortar, which entered service in late 1942. Hedgehog fired 24 small projectiles in a circular pattern, landing roughly 200 yd ahead of the ship, while sonar contact was still maintained, no blind time.
Hedgehog achieved a kill ratio of roughly 5.7 to1, 10 times better than depth charges. The improvement was significant, but Hedgehog had limitations that became apparent with operational experience. Its contact fuses meant the bombs only exploded on direct hits. A near miss produced nothing, no damage, no pressure wave, no forcing the submarine to surface.
The submarine had to be struck directly by one of the 24 projectiles, and each projectile carried only 35 lb of Torpex explosive, enough to hold a pressure hull, but offering no margin for error. Estimating the submarine’s depth remained guesswork, dependent entirely on operator skill and experience. An earlier attempt called the fairly mortar developed by scientist BS Smith at the Aztec research establishment in Fairley North Asia had failed due to technical problems and interervice politics.
The experimental parnip weapon underwent trials on HMS Ambercade in February 1943 with unimpressive results. These failures informed what came next. Each dead end taught the development team what would not work. Each setback narrowed the options until the correct solution became apparent. Squid solved both the contact fuse limitation and the depth guessing problem through integration with a new type of sonar.
The type 147 Azdic featured what engineers called a sword-shaped oscillator that could determine depth directly, measuring targets to 1200 ft with accuracy within 20 ft. This was the crucial innovation. For the first time, an escort vessel could measure depth directly, often close enough to set the fuse without guesswork.
According to Admiral T development records, Squid was ordered directly from the drawing board in 1942, an unusually bold decision reflecting wartime urgency and confidence in the engineering team. The prototype was installed on HMS Ambercade in May 1943 for sea trials in the Clyde with submarines serving as cooperative targets.
The first production unit went to HMS Hadley Castle in September 1943. a castleclass corvette designed specifically around the weapon with hull reinforcement and magazine space allocated from the keel up. The squid itself was a three-barreled mortar firing 12-in caliber projectiles. Each bomb weighed 390 lb and carried 27 lb of Minnel 2, a wartime explosive mixture of TNT, ammonium nitrate, and aluminium powder that produced a more powerful blast than pure TNT alone.
The barrels were mounted in series, but offset slightly a skew to scatter the projectiles into an equilateral triangle pattern roughly 40 yard on each side, landing 275 yd ahead of the ship. This triangular pattern maximized the probability that at least one bomb would detonate close enough to damage the target regardless of which direction it turned.
Most Royal Navy installations used double squid, two mortar sets firing six bombs in rapid succession. The first three were set to explode at the targets estimated depth. The second three detonated 25 to 50 ft shallower, creating what crews described as a lethal sandwich. Convergent pressure waves from simultaneous detonations above and below a submarine could crush its pressure hull even without direct contact. The physics were unforgiving.
Water transmits pressure waves with devastating efficiency, far more effectively than air. A near mist that would merely shake a surface vessel could buckle hull plates, spring rivets, and rupture seals on a submerged submarine caught between converging blast waves. The critical advantage was sink rate.
According to Royal Navy trials data, squid bombs descended at 43 1/2 ft pers. Standard depth charges sank far more slowly, often in the single digits of feet pers, while even improved models like the American Mark 9 managed only about half the squid speed. A submarine at 300 ft depth had 7 seconds of evasion time after Squid fired, compared to over 30 seconds for conventional depth charges. 7 seconds.
Not enough time to execute a meaningful turn. Not enough time to change depth significantly. Barely enough time for the submarine commander to understand what was happening before it happened. The clockwork time fuse on each bomb received continuous depth information from type 147 sonar right until the moment of firing.
Depth setting was automatic, eliminating the guesswork that had crippled depth charge attacks. The fire control integration was sophisticated for 1943. Sonar operators tracked the target. The system calculated firing solutions continuously and the weapons launched at the optimal moment with depth settings updated in real time.
Reload time was approximately 3 minutes. Postwar ships like HMCS Haidider carried 114 bombs, enough for 19 full salvos. Now, before we see how this performed in combat, if you are enjoying this deep dive into British naval engineering, hit subscribe. It takes a second, costs nothing, and helps the channel grow. Right, let us get into the combat record.
According to naval records, the first confirmed squid kill occurred on the 31st of July 1944 when HMS Lo Kllin and HMS Starling of the second support group sank U333 west of the Silly Isles. The engagement demonstrated what Squid could accomplish when the technology worked as designed. The submarine had no opportunity to evade.
The weapons tracked her depth automatically. The explosives reached her position before she could turn away. After 5 years of yubot escaping through the blind time window, Squid closed it permanently. The engagement demonstrated what Squid could accomplish when the technology worked as designed. The submarine had no opportunity to evade.
The weapons tracked her depth automatically. The explosives reached her before she could turn. HMS Lock Killin proved particularly lethal over the following months. On the 6th of August 1944, she engaged U736 in what would become a textbook demonstration of Squid’s capabilities. The attack caused catastrophic damage, forcing the Yubot to the surface with no chance of repair or escape.
The German crew had seconds to abandon ship as their submarine began its final dive. The sea took the boat, the frigot took the survivors. Within days of entering combat, Squid had proven that a single well- aimed salvo could end an engagement that depth charges might have prolonged for hours. Lockllin would later sink U1063 on the 15th of April 1945, combining gunfire with squid attack.
Other confirmed kills included U1018 by HMS Lock Fard on the 27th of February 1945, U877 by Canadian HMCS St. Thomas on the 27th of December 1944 and U12000 by a castleclass corvette group on the 11th of November 1944. Each engagement demonstrated the same pattern. Contact established, depth determined automatically, weapons launched while tracking continued, detonation before evasion became possible.
The statistics told the story of a weapon that had transformed anti-ubmarine warfare. According to postwar British Navy analysis, Squid achieved a kill ratio of roughly 2.9 to1, one submarine destroyed for every three attacks. Compared to depth charges at 60 to1, the improvement was extraordinary, a 20-fold increase in effectiveness.
Postwar trials confirmed what combat had demonstrated. The British assessment concluded squid was nine times more effective than traditional depth charges. In the first quarter of 1945, squid attacks achieved a 62% success rate. The weapon recorded 17 confirmed kills in 50 attacks by wars end. Some sources site 13 kills, the variation reflecting different counting methods for engagements where multiple weapons contributed.
The American response revealed different tactical philosophies. US Navy evaluators tested squid aboard USS Asheville in 1944 and concluded it was not much, if any, better than hedgehog for American operational conditions. The Americans never adopted squid for widespread service, continuing to rely on hedgehog and depth charges.
This reflected confidence in American sonar operator training that could maximize hedgehog’s potential and perhaps different operational requirements in the Pacific theater where deep water engagements predominated and the type 147 depth finding capability mattered less. Against the type 7 yubot, Germany’s standard Atlantic submarine with a crush depth of roughly 200 to 250 m.
Squid’s capabilities represented significant overkill. But against the newer type 21 electroboot, which could dive deeper, move faster underwater, and remain submerged longer, the automatic depth tracking provided crucial margin against an evolving threat. The Germans never deployed enough Type 21s to test this advantage fully.
But British planners knew what was coming and built the weapon to defeat it. Squid’s impact extended beyond individual kills. Yubot commanders learned that shallow water, once relatively safe due to depth charge limitations, had become a death trap. Coastal convoy routes that submarines had previously hunted with confidence, now carried unacceptable risk.
A submarine that surfaced to attack a convoy could be forced under by aircraft, then destroyed by squid equipped escorts before it could escape to deeper water. The tactical calculus that had governed the Battle of the Atlantic for 5 years shifted fundamentally. Areas that had been hunting grounds became killing grounds.
The weapon remained in Royal Navy service for 34 years after the war. HMS Salsbury, a type 61 frigot, conducted the last squid firing in April 1977. The Swedish Navy became the final operator using squid aboard Ostagotland class destroyers until 1982. By 1959, 195 installations had been produced. The successor system, Limbo, entered service in 1955 with improved range and automatic loading.
Limbo served through the Falklands War and was not fully retired until the 1990s. International adoption confirmed combat statistics. The Royal Canadian Navy fitted squid to tribalclass destroyers during their modernization program. The Royal Australian Navy equipped HMA ships Anzac and Tobrook with the weapon. Norway received castleclass corvettes with their squid installations intact.
New Zealand and South Africa followed. When navies worldwide needed to kill submarines reliably in the postwar years, when Soviet submarines replaced German ones as the threat, they turned to British engineering. The weapon that had seemed crude on first inspection had proven itself the most effective anti-ubmarine system of the war.
That crude looking weapon on Bernbeck Pier solved a problem that had consumed thousands of lives and hundreds of ships. The Weezers and Dodders eliminated blind time by throwing weapons ahead rather than dropping them behind. They automated depth setting by linking fire control to depth finding sonar, removing human error from the critical calculation.
They increased sync rate to compress evasion windows from 30 seconds to 7. Each improvement multiplied the others effects. Together, they created a system where a well-trained crew achieved 50% kill rates, where a submarine captain’s skill and experience counted for nothing against physics and mathematics. For German Yubot commanders who had learned to exploit the depth charges weaknesses, who had survived dozens of attacks through timing and nerve and hard evasive maneuvers, Squid offered no such opportunities, no blind time to
maneuver, no depth setting errors to exploit, no shallow water refuge. The weapon that looked like three dust bins on a swivel achieved what 5 years of depth charge development could not. British engineering had solved the problem that nearly lost the war, not through some wonder weapon or secret technology, but through methodical integration of existing capabilities into a system that worked when it mattered most.
German commanders learned this lesson 7 seconds at a
QQ4 Bob Dylan and Keith Richards have been close friends for nearly 40 years. The friendship began on a live television program in November of 1986 in the 11 seconds after Bob Dylan called Keith Richards music derivative on camera. Keith Richard’s response to that assessment, one sentence said without anger, without performance, with the specific directness of a man who has nothing to prove and knows it made Bob Dylan laugh.
Then made Bob Dylan go quiet. then made Bob Dylan say two words that people who know Bob Dylan say he almost never said to anyone. This is the story of those 11 seconds and the 40 years that followed them. The program was a live music interview special broadcast on an American network on the evening of November 3rd, 1986. The format was simple.
Two musicians, a host, an hour of conversation about music and the state of it. The producers had assembled the pairing of Bob Dylan and Keith Richards with the specific calculation of television producers who understand that two people with equally strong and potentially incompatible views about what music is and what it should do will produce better television than two people who agree about everything.
The calculation was correct, though not in the way the producers had anticipated. Bob Dylan was 45 years old in November of 1986. Bob Dylan had released Empire Burlesque the previous year and had been on the road for most of the intervening period as part of the True Confessions tour with Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers.
Bob Dylan was in November of 1986 in one of the most prolific and restless phases of a career that had consisted almost entirely of prolific and restless phases. A career that had moved through folk, rock, country, gospel, and back again, that had been declared finished at least six times by the music press, and at each time continued with the serene indifference of a river to the opinions of people standing on its banks.
Bob Dylan had been redefining what music could be. Since 1962, Bob Dylan had invented and reinvented himself so many times that reinvention had become his defining characteristic, not in the superficial sense of a performer changing costumes, but in the deeper sense of a musician who had never allowed his work to settle into a form that could be anticipated or categorized from the outside.
Bob Dylan understood influence and originality and the relationship between them better than almost anyone alive in 1986. Bob Dylan had spent 24 years thinking carefully and specifically about where music came from and where music was going and what it meant that those two things were always in constant conversation with each other.
Keith Richards was 42 years old in November of 1986. Keith Richards had been playing guitar professionally since 1962. Keith Richards had built a career on a foundation of American blues and rhythm and blues. A foundation that Keith Richards had studied with the systematic devotion of someone who understood that the tradition he was building on was not incidental to the music he was making, but essential to it.
that you could not understand what Keith Richards did without understanding where Keith Richards had come from and what Keith Richards had been listening to since he was a teenager in Dartford with American Import Records and a secondhand guitar and no teacher except the recordings themselves. Keith Richards had never pretended otherwise. Keith Richards had in fact spent considerable energy across his career making the lineage explicit, naming the artists, citing the recordings, insisting on the acknowledgement of influence that the mainstream music
industry had a long history of suppressing or ignoring or crediting to the wrong people. If anything, Keith Richards was more transparent about his sources than most musicians of his generation. Keith Richards had always said openly that the Rolling Stones came directly from the blues, that Muddy Waters and Robert Johnson and the specific tradition of the Mississippi Delta were not background influences, but foundational ones.
The music Keith Richards made was in direct and sustained conversation with that tradition, something Keith Richards considered not a limitation, but a responsibility and a form of respect. The interview had been running for 8 minutes when the host asked Bob Dylan about the current state of rock and roll.
Bob Dylan answered with the density and the indirection that characterized Bob Dylan’s responses to direct questions, turning the question over, approaching it from an unexpected angle, finding his way to what he actually thought through a series of observations that moved like a river rather than a road. Bob Dylan was not a straightforward interview subject.
Bob Dylan had been asked about rock and roll in hundreds of interviews across 24 years and had developed the habit of treating the question as an invitation to think out loud rather than a request for a prepared position. The producer Gerald Sherman said afterward that in the first 8 minutes of the interview, he had been slightly anxious, not because anything was going wrong, but because nothing was going anywhere in particular yet.
The interview had the feeling of two conversations happening simultaneously. Bob Dylan’s internal one and the external one visible to the cameras. And Gerald Sherman was not certain in those first eight minutes that the two conversations would converge into something. Bob Dylan talked about influence. Bob Dylan talked about originality.
Bob Dylan talked about the difference between music that absorbed a tradition and transformed it and music that absorbed a tradition and reproduced it. And then Bob Dylan made his assessment. And then Bob Dylan said with the precision of a man making a musical assessment rather than a personal judgment that the Rolling Stones work, and Bob Dylan was specific, naming Keith Richards as the guitarist whose approach he was discussing was derivative in a way that Bob Dylan found limiting.
Bob Dylan said it without hostility. Bob Dylan said it as a technical observation about the relationship between source material and the work that came from it. Bob Dylan said that Keith Richards played the blues the way the blues had already been played, rather than using the blues as a starting point for something that had not yet been played.
Keith Richards had been listening to this with the specific attention Keith Richards gave to things being said about music by people who knew music. Keith Richards did not interrupt. Keith Richards did not shift in his chair or display any of the visible signals of a person preparing a defensive response. Keith Richards listened to Bob Dylan’s complete observation all the way to its conclusion without interrupting and without displaying any visible signal of preparing a response.
Then Keith Richards said one sentence. The sentence was not a rebuttal. The sentence did not defend Keith Richards music or argue for its originality or challenge Bob Dylan’s characterization of what the blues meant in the context of rock and roll. The sentence was something else entirely, something that required a specific kind of confidence to say.
The confidence of a person who has spent long enough thinking about the same things as the person they are talking to that they can locate the exact point where their thinking diverges and say something useful about that point rather than simply defending their own position. The sentence acknowledged everything Bob Dylan had said, the assessment, the distinction Bob Dylan was drawing, the specific musical concern underlying the observation, and then turned it 90°.
Keith Richards took Bob Dylan’s own framework, the one Bob Dylan had used to analyze Keith Richards relationship to the blues tradition, and applied it back to Bob Dylan’s work with the same precision Bob Dylan had used to apply it to Keith Richards. Spare aimed. The sentence asked Bob Dylan something about Bob Dylan’s own music, about the relationship between Bob Dylan’s sources and Bob Dylan’s output that Bob Dylan had not been asked on television before.
The sentence did not attack. The sentence illuminated. Bob Dylan laughed. The laugh was not the polite laugh of someone responding to a joke. The laugh was the involuntary laugh of someone who has been genuinely surprised. The specific kind of surprise that a person of exceptional intelligence experiences when someone else’s intelligence exceeds their expectations.
Bob Dylan laughed for 4 seconds. Then Bob Dylan stopped laughing. Then Bob Dylan was quiet for 3 seconds in the way that Bob Dylan was quiet when Bob Dylan was thinking rather than performing thought. Then Bob Dylan said, “You’re right.” The producer in the booth, a man named Gerald Sherman, who had been working in television for 14 years, said afterward that in 14 years of live television production, he had never heard Bob Dylan say those two words in a public forum.
Gerald Sherman said he had worked with Bob Dylan on two previous occasions and had observed Bob Dylan in numerous other contexts and that you’re right was not a phrase that Bob Dylan deployed easily or often because Bob Dylan had spent 24 years being right about music in ways that other people eventually caught up with. And the experience of being right ahead of everyone else does not generally produce a man who says you’re right readily when someone else makes a point.
The host of the program, a journalist named Patricia Wells, who had been interviewing musicians for 12 years, said afterward that the 11 seconds between Bob Dylan’s assessment and Bob Dylan saying, “You’re right,” were the most extraordinary 11 seconds of television she had been present for. Patricia Wells said that what she witnessed in those 11 seconds was not a debate or a confrontation or a celebrity exchange of competing opinions.
Patricia Wells said what she witnessed was one musician recognizing another musician as an equal, which was in the specific context of Bob Dylan in 1986, not something that happened in public very often. The interview continued for another 42 minutes after those 11 seconds. The conversation between Bob Dylan and Keith Richards in the remaining 42 minutes was described by everyone who watched it as fundamentally different from the first 8 minutes.
The host, Patricia Wells, who had been conducting music interviews for 12 years and understood the difference between the performance of conversation and actual conversation, said that at approximately the 9-minute mark, something shifted in the studio. That the formal interview, architecture dissolved, and what replaced it was something less structured and more genuine.
Bob Dylan and Keith Richards talked about influence and originality and the blues and what it meant to build on a tradition without being consumed by it. They talked about specific recordings and specific musicians with the specificity of two people who had spent their entire adult lives thinking about these things and rarely found another person who had thought about them with equivalent care.
They talked about where music came from and where music was going and whether those two questions were actually one question or two. Patricia Wells said afterward that she had asked approximately four questions in the remaining 42 minutes because Bob Dylan and Keith Richards did not require questions. They required only a room and a camera and the shared understanding that what they were saying together was worth recording carefully.
She said it was the best interview she had ever conducted and that she had conducted the smallest part of it. After the program, Bob Dylan and Keith Richards were in the corridor outside the studio when the host Patricia Wells passed them. Patricia Wells said she did not stop because she did not want to interrupt.
She observed them for approximately 30 seconds from a distance. She said they were talking with the ease of people who had known each other for years rather than people who had met for the first time 2 hours earlier. She said that something had shifted between them during the broadcast that the broadcast had made permanent rather than temporary.
She continued down the corridor and did not look back. She said in her account of that evening that she had decided in that moment not to interrupt the conversation because some conversations are more valuable than any question a journalist might ask and that the conversation she had observed for 30 seconds in the corridor outside the studio was one of them.
She had been a music journalist for 12 years. She recognized the difference. Bob Dylan and Keith Richards have maintained their friendship across four decades. They have appeared together at various events, most significantly at the concert for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1995, where people who were present described them as inseparable for most of the evening, occupying the same corner of the backstage area and talking with the concentrated attention of people who only have a limited amount of time together and intend to use it
well. Bob Dylan has spoken about Keith Richards in interviews with the specific thoughtful care that Bob Dylan reserves for musicians whose work Bob Dylan considers genuinely important rather than merely culturally prominent. Keith Richards has spoken about Bob Dylan in similar terms with the specific respect of someone who recognizes in another person a commitment to music that goes deeper than career.
Neither Bob Dylan nor Keith Richards has made a public statement specifically about how the friendship began or about the November 1986 interview. Bob Dylan has not mentioned the 11 seconds. Keith Richards has not mentioned the sentence. The interview exists in the archive. The 11 seconds are there. The laugh is there. The two words are there.
What is also there for anyone who watches the interview from its beginning and pays attention to the shift that happens at the 9-minute mark is the specific moment when two people who thought they were appearing on a television program discovered they were actually talking to each other. What Keith Richards said in that one sentence has never been officially reported.
The people who were in the studio that evening, Gerald Sherman, Patricia Wells, the floor crew, the two camera operators, the makeup artist who was watching from the side of the set, have described the sentence in consistent terms. They have described its effect. They have described Bob Dylan’s laugh and Bob Dylan’s silence and Bob Dylan’s two words.
They have not repeated the sentence itself in the specific understanding that the sentence was said between two musicians on a television program and that its power resided in the specific context of that exchange and would not survive removal from it intact. What can be said is this. Keith Richards said something to Bob Dylan about Bob Dylan’s music that used Bob Dylan’s own observation about Keith Richards as its starting point and arrived somewhere that Bob Dylan had not anticipated.
Keith Richards turned Bob Dylan’s assessment 90° and showed Bob Dylan something about the music they had both spent their lives making that Bob Dylan recognized immediately as true. And Bob Dylan said, “You’re right.” Two words said by Bob Dylan in public on live television in 1986 to Keith Richards in response to a single sentence Keith Richards had said about music.
Two words that Gerald Sherman, who had worked with Bob Dylan on two previous occasions, said he had never heard Bob Dylan say in a public forum. Two words that Patricia Wells, who had been interviewing musicians for 12 years, said were the most significant two words she had heard in those 12 years. Not because of their content, but because of who said them and what it cost to say them and what it meant that Keith Richards had produced them in 11 seconds from a conversation that began with Bob Dylan calling Keith Richards’s music derivative. And Keith Richards and
Bob Dylan have been close friends for nearly 40 years. The sentence did its work in 11 seconds on the evening of November 3rd, 1986. The work has been ongoing ever since. If this story moved you, subscribe and leave a comment below. Have you ever said something to someone that turned a potential disagreement into an unexpected and lasting connection? Tell us about it in the comments below.
Share this with someone who needs to be reminded that the right sentence said at the right moment can completely change the entire direction of a relationship. Ring the notification bell for more untold stories about the extraordinary human beings behind music’s greatest legends.
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