In this episode, we’re going to take a look at the fascinating world of official royal protocol through the lens of Meghan Markle’s brief encounters with accepted etiquette as a working royal. I think people sometimes forget how brief Megan’s tenure was given the sheer volume of headlines created, but her marriage in May 2018 and her departure from the firm in March 2020 spanned a mere 22 months.
By comparison, the Queen’s first official public engagement was in April 1942, meaning she served for more than 960 months compared with Megan’s 22. In that time, there were more than a dozen instances of Megan breaking the rules, about one every two months. Meaning, what we’re really delving into today is the psychology behind her very conscious, committed rebellion.
But what was Megan trying to say? Who was she trying to say it to? And were all the signs there that Megit was in the making from the beginning? I think it’s important to remember that Meghan Markle was an actress for more than two decades before she married Prince Harry. This would have given her a very acute sense of the power of costumes in storytelling.
I think this is especially pertinent when you consider the vast majority of her protocol breaches involve clothing. what royals are supposed to wear or not wear given the event they’re attending or the time of day the engagement occurs. The phrase, “You are what you wear,” would have been baked into Megan’s professional DNA, meaning that when she broke royal protocol, it really feels conscious and intentional, that these weren’t mistakes, almost as if each breach of etiquette was an individual scene in a larger play that she was not
only acting in, but also authoring. Megan’s intent aside, I believe every parent out there would agree with me that the line between a spirited child and a full fat brat is often razor thin. So whether you think Megan is a free spirit who felt suffocated by the tight constraints of royal protocol or was simply a spoiled brat, the evidence is there either way of a long list of protocol breaches beginning when she barely had her foot in the door.
The occasion was none other than her official engagement photograph by wearing a sheer gown, which is a real no for day attire. This was of course a gift to pum writers at several publications who referred to Megan’s breach of protocol as sheer audacity. This was Megan declaring right out of the gate that she would be treating royal protocol as guidance only.
Eyebrows were also raised when the price of the Hope Couture outfit was revealed. An eyewatering £56,000. In contrast, Catherine bought the dress for her official engagement photo in a high street store for £385. While that’s certainly expensive for some, Katherine purchased her dress in Fenix on Bond Street in London, meaning anyone could have bought it.
Unlike Megan’s catwalk couture ultra exclusive £56,000 outfit. Indeed, Katherine’s late mother-in-law, Princess Diana, took the same route for her engagement photo by choosing an offthe- peg suit from Kahana, which she picked out in Harrods. I think it’s also worth noting the body language here.
Again, something an actress would be hyper vigilant of in storytelling. If you look at Charles and Diana and William and Catherine, it’s essentially the same pose. Now, compare that to Harry and Megan’s clear PDA presentation. They’re saying, “We’re different. We won’t be boxed in. You do things your way, we’ll do things ours.
” What’s interesting to me here on the question of free spirits versus spoiled bratz is that free spirits by definition do not manipulate their own image. They simply are who they are. And this engagement photograph is clearly curated, not least in the declaration that Harry and Megan will be making up their own rules.
Wow, I remember this photograph. If we take a look at this image taken a month before the official engagement photograph, we see Megan and Harry announcing their engagement at the sunken gardens at Kensington Palace in November 2017. It was so different from what we were used to. Royal protocol clearly dictates that anytime you wear a skirt or dress, tights are a must.
Eagle-eyed observers noted Megan’s bare legs and wondered what the queen would have made of this breach, and for that matter, Princess Catherine, both of whom have always observed this rule when at work. Someone else who always observed this rule was Harry’s mother, Princess Diana, who whether whimsically visiting her old school, as we see here at Riddlesworth Hall in 1997, or on serious business in this image from 1993 when she visited the missing person’s bureau in London.
While this kind of observance of protocol might seem quaint or perhaps overly traditional, the purpose of these rules is in part to ensure that the event the royal is attending or the charity they’re supporting remains front and center. That the press coverage doesn’t become about what the royal was wearing or wasn’t wearing.
Doesn’t become about where they did or didn’t sit at a formal event. Which brings us to our next image of Katherine and Megan attending Wimbledon in 2018. And this one is very easy. Spot the difference. That’s right. Megan is wearing trousers. That’s the clear protocol breach. But what’s more, they’re Ralph Lauren trousers.
I mentioned this because according to Tom Bower in his book Revenge, Megan had attended Wimbledon two years previously, but on that occasion, she had been hired to wear Ralph Lauren across the Fortnite. And as luck would have it, Ralph Lauren’s newly appointed publicist was Harry’s childhood friend, Violet von Weston Holtz, seen here at Wimbledon in 2008.
But this was the occasion in 2016 that according to Bower, Megan persuaded Violet, a sensitive soul, to arrange a blind date with Harry before agreeing, Western Halt sent Harry photos of Megan. This account can now be seen in a new light given the recently revealed alleged remarks of the late Lady Elizabeth Anson.
Lady Elizabeth, a confidant of Queen Elizabeth for many years, reportedly said before Harry and Megan’s wedding, “We hope, but don’t quite think she is in love. We think she engineered it all.” Nonetheless, in a section of Prince Harry’s memoir, Spare entitled The Captain of My Soul, Harry recalls the first moment he saw Megan on Violet’s Instagram page and how he was instantly drawn to her angelic face, despite Megan appearing behind a funny dog filter.
“I’d never seen anyone so beautiful,” Harry said, claiming the image felt like a punch in the throat because of Megan’s wild joy. Whether or not the blind date setup was, in Lady Elizabeth Anson’s words, engineered, it’s clear that when Megan wore Ralph Lauren trousers to Wimbledon two years later, she was not only breaking protocol, but was also satorily reenacting the moment she purportedly solicited a date with Harry.
In a sense, revisiting the scene of the first seduction, wearing the same designer, only this time as a duchess. We can only imagine how triumphant this must have felt. However, being a duchess, she was now expected to keep to the usual code for the royal box for official appearances, namely skirts and dresses, which is what Catherine opted to wear alongside Megan, just as Queen Elizabeth did, seen here in 1977.
and Katherine, Duchess of Kent, in this iconic image from 1993 when she embraced the women’s finalist runner up Jana Natner. And just in case you might be thinking, Megan’s P protocol in 2018 was a simple mistake. The very next year, after doubtless seeing the attendant headlines about her trouncing tradition, Megan attended SW19 wearing jeans again, which was actually fine as she wasn’t seated in the royal box.
Another rule that didn’t wash with Megan was that royals should either wear no nail polish or neutral colors. While attending the British Fashion Awards in 2018, a pregnant Megan broke precedence again by wearing a dark burgundy polish with her Gvanchi gown. However, on this occasion, it wasn’t her break with royal tradition that grabbed the headlines.
In an address to the audience at the Royal Albert Hall, Megan said, “It’s such an honor to be here celebrating British fashion and British fashion designers in my new home of the UK.” However, the problem was she was wearing French fashion house Givoni. At the time, Megan had neglected to wear a British designer to the British Fashion Awards.
Shortly after the event, Megan’s photo on the British Fashion Council’s Instagram account was deleted. In this image here, we see how it’s done properly. Princess Diana wears the British Moroccan designer Jack Azaguri to a gala evening in Aid of Cancer in 1995 with a muted red nail. Then again, if you’re a royal who wants to avoid any nail related rulebreaking, you could always go full Queen Elizabeth and wear gloves.
Frank Sinatra certainly seemed to approve. Again, if there’s anyone left watching who thinks these are examples of Megan inadvertently breaking protocol, you would have thought not wearing a British designer to the British Fashion Awards would have clued her into behaving in a manner, to put it politely, that perhaps occasionally considered her audience.
Yet here we are again, one year later after all the headlines about wearing give on sheets to a British fashion event. We find Megan wearing French fashion house Dior for her official family christristening photograph for her son Archie. Traditionally, a royal mother wears a piece by a British designer for every christristening.
However, Megan chose a French designer. In the same photograph, we see her sister-in-law, Catherine, wearing British designer Stella McCartney. Indeed, Catherine has worn British designer Alexander McQueen to all three of her children’s christenings. Yet, Megan opted for Maria Gratzia Curi at Dior.
While on the subject of thoughtfulness, according to Hello magazine, the Collingwood pearl earrings that Catherine wore to Archie’s christening belonged to the late Princess Diana, her husband William and Harry’s mother. This was clearly a heartfelt, conscious tribute, showing how new traditions can be introduced subtly and sincerely.
According to the same source, the earrings were in fact worn by Diana at Harry’s christening in 1984. So, it’s especially moving that Katherine chose to wear them when Harry’s first child was baptized. This isn’t a strict rule, but royals tend to always use a clutch bag on walkabouts, as well-wishers aren’t strictly allowed to offer a handshake without the royal offering first.
This meant that spectators had never seen a royal in a walkabout with a crossover bag before. So, this was certainly a first. While this break might be seen as refreshing, a royal who leaves herself hands-free to engage with the public, the problem is precedent. that people might demand or expect this from all royals in the future.
Basically, it would have been common courtesy to ask fellow royals at the time, the Queen, Catherine, Camila, if they would object to her mixing things up. However, there are no reports that any such overtures were made in advance of Megan’s Edinburgh walkabout. Indeed, the list of those she might have, out of politeness, considered asking, is far longer than even she could have imagined.
had she given it any thought at all? This was a really typical photograph, I’d say, of of Harry and Megan. You know, look at the handholding. It’s something they almost always did in public, and it was almost a statement, a statement of their difference. There’s not an official rule about public displays of affection, but royals usually keep it to a strict minimum.
Harry and Megan started as they meant to go on with the handholding in their engagement pictures and continued all the way through to the reception of Queen Elizabeth’s coffin at Westminster Hall. Meghgan and Harry stood in stark contrast to the typically restrained behavior expected of royal couples. Instead, almost always holding hands when attending engagements together.
I mean, think of all the years we saw Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philillip. Not once were they ever seen holding hands. They were usually at a distance. Prince William and Catherine occasionally, but it’s rare and it’s just not something that we were accustomed to from royals. Now, this one might seem a bit odd.
During a visit to a local surfing community group on Bondai Beach, Megan broke protocol regarding keeping your shoes on without exception. Members of the family from Catherine who kept her shoes on at Manley Beach in 2014 to Princess Diana who did the same at a New South Wales beach in Teragal in 1983 have always adhered to the royal rule but not Megan who ditched her castire espadril wedges to let her feet slide through the sand.
Clearly they’ve thought about this. They made a point of taking their shoes off. Members of the royal family have always kept their shoes on while going on the beach. And this is because, you know, they’re not on the beach on holiday. They’re not building sand castles, but they’re there for an engagement.
And it’s a sign that they’re working. It’s highly symbolic. Going barefoot on the beach to show that they’re a different type of royal. Royals are expected to wear skirts or dresses that are around knee length and never more than 3 or 4 in above the knee to keep hemlines conservative and appropriate for the occasion.
A rule flaunted by Megan, who appeared wearing black, no tights again, and an eye-catching short mini dress while attending a gala performance of Hamilton in 2018 in support of Harry’s Centerballet charity, an organization which has since become engulfed in scandal, accusations, and counter accusation.
Whatever the truth of what happened at Santa Barali, there can be no doubt that Megan would certainly have been aware of the kinds of headlines her hemline would attract. This article from 2007 is interesting because it highlights that Catherine observed royal protocol while she was simply William’s girlfriend. Even before she joined the firm, she understood at the very least out of respect the strictures governing the life of a royal.
So much so that when she and William separated, she immediately expressed herself in her own dress style in a way that felt authentic and natural to her, proving that Catherine always appreciated the fact that being a royal comes with benefits certainly. But there’s also attacks. Namely, you must completely dedicate your life to public service. Period.
You have to stay out of politics, no matter your personal convictions. You must commit to being a public figure who represents a family, a country, and a commonwealth. Your individual brand and personality must always come second to the brand and reputation of the firm. And without doubt, the least egregious of all compared to those other solemn duties.
You must observe accepted royal protocol around how you dress and present yourself to the world. Any person who comes into the royal family believing they can have all the benefits and not pay the tax or they simply haven’t understood the contract of the crown. Megan said she didn’t Google Harry before they met.
Frankly, I wish she had. At Trooping the Color in 2018, which was Megan’s second official appearance after her royal wedding, she completely tore up the royal rule book. Megan ignored established protocol by wearing an off-the-shoulder dress on the Buckingham Palace balcony at the official ceremony to mark the Queen’s 92nd birthday.
Megan’s dress silhouette also lacked traditional modesty considering it was a daytime event. Again, she chose on this occasion a non-British designer, Carolina Herrera. This was clearly Megan making a statement. She obviously wanted to stand out on that balcony to look different to the other royal women. There’s no doubt she was sending a message with this outfit.
Oh, this is really interesting. Queen Elizabeth was a firm believer that ladies should keep their heads covered during official engagements. The hatless Duchess of Sussex caused a stir when she appeared with the Queen in 2018 without a hat at the opening of the Mury Gateway Bridge.
They arrived together on the royal train and she was seated beside the queen who was of course wearing a hat. It was such a big thing that day, a solo engagement for Megan with the queen. And there’s a lot of discussion about why she didn’t wear a hat. There have been various accounts of this, but what seems to be established fact is that a message was sent to Megan via one of Queen Elizabeth’s ladies in waiting that the queen was going to wear a hat.
Now, it’s not clear how Megan interpreted that. That some people have said she then made a decision, right, well, I’m not going to wear one to stand out, to be different. Whereas others have said there may have just been confusion and she may have just thought the lady in waiting was just being kind and sort of letting us know what the queen was wearing.
But what’s clear is it was very significant that the queen was wearing a hat that day and Megan wasn’t. Megan often flouted beauty guidelines during her time as a royal and indeed did so during her final royal engagement. Megan truly looked radiant in bold green Amelia Wixstead for her last official royal engagement at Westminster Abbey in March 2020.
However, protocols dictate that royals should avoid bold makeup in public. Yet, the look created by her personal makeup artist, Daniel Martin, was certainly not subtle. Here perhaps we have an opportunity to discuss the similarities and differences between Megan and her late mother-in-law Diana, Princess of Wales on the subject of royal protocol.
Yes, Diana was iconoclastic. Yes, she sometimes broke the rules. Yes, she sometimes felt stifled by the standards expected of her as a member of the royal family. But Diana’s exit from the firm was because of the irreparable breakdown of her marriage to the heir to the throne. That schism created a force space for Diana outside the family as she couldn’t reasonably be expected to continue with group royal duties pretending her marriage to Charles was whole.
If their relationship hadn’t imploded, it is possible to imagine a timeline where Diana never actually left the firm. And this is the big difference. Harry and Megan were a couple who couldn’t see or find their place within the royal family. It was a conscious, deliberate choice to excommunicate themselves without any bombshell revelation of the magnitude of Charles’s ongoing affair with Camila Parker BS. Diana couldn’t remain.
Meghgan and Harry could have, but they rejected the royal family in absolute terms after just 22 months. I began by asking when Megan broke official protocol, what was she trying to say? Who was she trying to say it to? And were all the signs there that Megit was in the making from the very beginning? I think what is clear is that we weren’t watching Meghan Markle make a series of mistakes.
In my view, she broke protocol on purpose. Whatever she was trying to say and to whom, it’s genuinely hard to know because after only 22 months, she quit trying to say it in the most dramatic fashion. In her own mind, her protocol breaking performances had likely proved pointless. The right people were simply not listening. Clearly, she wasn’t getting the results she wanted, and that just would not do.
In the wake of the tsunami of contradictory accusations delivered by Harry and Megan post departure, there’s one simple possibility that is now essentially impossible to ignore. despite all their noises to the contrary, namely that an American actress in her late 30s may have actually genuinely believed that becoming a British princess would result in a life of parties, private planes, public adoration, who when she realized the deal actually involved becoming a full-time beautiful royal and not some kind of Disney princess, panicked and
ran for the hills of Monteito. If that is indeed true, then of course Mexit was always going to happen. Looking back at the way Megan broke Royal Protocol again and again, maybe that’s exactly what she was trying to tell us from the very start. She was never really here to stay. Well, I hope you enjoyed our look back at the fascinating story of Megan Markle’s somewhat challenging relationship with Royal Protocol.
Do comment, like, and subscribe to the Daily Mail Royals channel to be updated on all our exclusive content. Thanks for watching. I’m Richard Eden. Goodbye.
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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