December 3rd, 1958. Just after 7:00 in the morning, West Montevista Road, Phoenix, Arizona. Pearl Ray parks her car outside the Greenbaum residence the same way she has done hundreds of times before. She is the household help. She knows this home. She knows its routines. The white Cadillac that Bess Greenbaum uses every evening to drop Pearl off.
It’s sitting right there in the driveway, exactly where it should be. But, something’s off. She steps inside and notices it immediately. Frozen groceries left out on the kitchen counter overnight. Bess Greenbaum doesn’t do that. Bess is orderly, careful, precise in the way she runs her home. Pearl calls out. Silence.
She moves deeper into the house. Bess Greenbaum is lying face down on the living room sofa. Her wrists are tied behind her back with a cheap necktie. Someone had crushed her skull using a decorative bottle taken right off a nearby shelf. Then, they had drawn a 9-in butcher knife across her throat. Before doing so, they had wrapped her head in newspaper and a towel.
Not out of mercy, but to keep the blood off the furniture. Pearl runs. She doesn’t see the bedroom. When investigators later tell her what was found in there, she collapses and is admitted to hospital for shock. In the bedroom, Gus Greenbaum is in bed. His heating pad is still running. The television is still on. He’s wearing beige silk pajamas.
The same knife that killed his wife had been dragged so violently across his throat that the medical examiner’s report noted he came within millimeters of being fully decapitated. He was 65 years old. He had spent three decades building the casino infrastructure that turned Las Vegas from a desert nowhere into the most lucrative city in America.
He had rescued the mob’s most important investment, not once, but twice. He had been the most powerful criminal operator in the American Southwest for 30 years. A man who moved in the highest political circles of Arizona while running illegal gambling beneath the surface without so much as a serious arrest.
And he died in his own bed because of one sentence, seven words, “This goddamn town is in my blood.” The crime scene photo lands on the front page of newspapers from coast to coast. The case is never solved. Nobody is ever charged. To this day, it remains officially open. This is the story of Gus Greenbaum.
February 26th, 1893. Chicago, Illinois. Gustav Greenbaum is born to Herman Greenbaum, an immigrant tailor from the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The family drifts between Chicago, New York, and Nebraska through the early years. It is on New York’s Lower East Side, sometime in the mid-1910s, that the course of his entire life gets set.
Because that’s where he meets Meyer Lansky. They are practically the same age, same background, same neighborhood, and crucially, the same specific kind of mathematical mind. The ability to watch money moving in real time, identify where it’s leaking, redirect it somewhere useful, and build systems that generate cash without generating paperwork. Lansky was the architect.
Greenbaum was the guy who could take those blueprints and actually construct the building in someone else’s city. Their names would remain linked for the next four decades. In 1928, Al Capone sends Greenbaum to Phoenix, Arizona. He’s 35 years old. His job, manage the Southwest arm of the Trans-America Race Wire Service out out an office in the Luhrs Tower in downtown Phoenix.
The wire service was the lifeblood of the bookmaking industry. It carried real-time horse racing results to every bookie and gambling operation in the region. You can’t pay out a bet until you know who won. Greenbaum controlled that information, which meant every bookmaker between New Mexico and California was paying him for the privilege.
Over the next 15 years, he builds the Chicago Outfit’s Southwest division into one of its most profitable regional operations. He cultivates friendships with businessmen, politicians, law enforcement, and civic figures across the state. One of those relationships, allegedly, is with a young rising politician named Barry Goldwater, future US Senator, future Republican presidential candidate in 1964.
Greenbaum donates to his campaigns. They’re photographed together at events. Whether Goldwater fully understood the nature of his associate’s business dealings has never been definitively settled. What is settled is this: For 30 years, Gus Greenbaum operated illegal gambling enterprises in Phoenix while living openly as a respected member of its elite social class.
One contemporary account described him as a man who wore silk on the outside and steel underneath. Then Las Vegas changes everything. By the early 1940s, smart money in organized crime is starting to understand that this dusty Nevada city could become the most important criminal investment in American history. Greenbaum, together with Moe Sedway, takes control of the El Cortez casino in downtown Las Vegas in 1945.
The following year, through his connections to Benjamin Bugsy Siegel, he becomes involved in the Flamingo project. Siegel’s Flamingo was the most ambitious construction undertaking in mob history and by early 1947 it had become its biggest financial catastrophe. Siegel had burned through $6 million over budget. His girlfriend Virginia Hill had been making regular runs to Zurich to deposit cash in Swiss accounts.
The syndicate’s money was vanishing into a building that wouldn’t open on time and a woman’s foreign banking arrangements. The mob made a decision. On June 20th, 1947 nine bullets came through the front window of Virginia Hill’s Beverly Hills home while Siegel sat reading the paper. He was dead before anyone reached him and before the Los Angeles police had even finished photographing the scene while the sofa was still wet.
Moe Sedway and Gus Greenbaum walked through the front doors of the Flamingo Hotel in Las Vegas and took over. No announcement, no ceremony. They simply walked in and began running it. The most brazen corporate succession in the history of Las Vegas. What Greenbaum did next cemented his legend.
The Flamingo was hemorrhaging money, staff morale was in the basement, operations were a disaster. Greenbaum came in and did what he had always done, brought order, precision and a financial mind sharp enough to see exactly where the machine was broken. He secured financing through Valley National Bank, reportedly the first institution in American history to lend money to a mob controlled casino.
He restructured the entire operation floor by floor. Within months the Flamingo was out of debt. Within a year it was generating $4 million in annual profit. The mob’s most embarrassing asset had become its most profitable one and Gus Greenbaum was why. He earns a title that nobody officially bestows but everyone uses, the mayor of Paradise.
Paradise Township is the unincorporated strip of Clark County that contains the Las Vegas Strip, technically outside the city limits. The man running it wasn’t elected. He was a bookmaker from Chicago who’d been dispatched by Al Capone to Arizona three decades earlier. But there’s one hire during this period that investigators later argue may have shortened his life considerably.
Greenbaum brings on an entertainment director the Riviera named William Nelson. Except William Nelson doesn’t exist. The real name is Willie Bioff, a former Chicago Outfit labor racketeer who had spent years extorting Hollywood studios in the 1930s, skimming millions before he was caught, convicted, and then made a decision that the Outfit never forgave.
He testified against his former bosses. Four senior Chicago mob figures went to federal prison, partly because of what Bioff said under oath. Hiring the man who burned your bosses to the feds, from Tony Accardo’s perspective, that was not a neutral act. Early 1955, Gus Greenbaum decides he’s done. He’s 62 years old, chronic back pain, ulcers, recurring asthma.
His closest partner, Moe Sedway, died of a heart attack in 1952 and left a gap in his daily life that never got filled. He has been running criminal operations since Capone was at the height of his power. He wants to go back to Phoenix permanently, play golf with Goldwater at the Arizona Club, and let someone younger deal with the chaos of Las Vegas.
April 20th, 1955, the Riviera Hotel opens on the Strip. It’s the first high-rise on the Las Vegas Strip, nine stories tall, more glamorous than anything that came before it. Liberace plays opening night for $50,000 a week, the most expensive entertainment contract in Las Vegas history at that point.
Three months later, the Riviera is effectively broke, over $2 million in debt. Tony Accardo, the Chicago Outfit’s boss, a man who had operated at the highest levels of American organized crime for three decades without spending a single night in prison, wants Greenbaum to take it. Greenbaum says no. Accardo asks again. Greenbaum says no again. Then the message arrives.
April 1955. Charlie Greenbaum, Gus’s brother, comes home to his Phoenix house to find his wife Leone on the floor. She is 75 years old. The medical examiner’s report is precise. Death by manual suffocation, human hand over nose and mouth. Nothing was stolen, no sign of forced entry, no robbery motive, no ordinary explanation.
Leone had been telling her friends, her neighbors, and her domestic help for months that she was frightened, that she feared men connected to her brother-in-law. Nobody had taken her seriously, nobody had acted. There are no arrests, there are no suspects. There is only the body of a 75-year-old woman and a message delivered with a clarity that requires no translation.
You are not retired. You never were. And if you keep saying no, the next body will be someone even closer to you. Gus Greenbaum accepts the Riviera. He takes his team, he does the work. He rebuilds the hotel’s finances with the same cold competence he applied to the Flamingo. Within three years, the Riviera is turning a profit.
Accardo gets what he wanted, and Greenbaum gets what he’s always had, a job he can’t walk away from, working for people who will murder his family if he tries. Then, November 4th, 1955, Willie Bioff walks out of his home on Bethany Home Road in Phoenix, climbs into his pickup truck, and turns the key.
A bomb wired to the ignition detonates. The blast shatters windows three blocks away. Barry Goldwater, who had been friendly with Bioff and had gone on vacation with him just weeks before, attends the funeral and tells the press he had no idea who his friend really was. Greenbaum loses the man he considered his closest friend to a car bomb 30 ft from his front door, and something changes in him.
It’s no longer abstract. These aren’t just business decisions made in rooms he’s not invited to. His people are dying. His family has been killed. His friend has been disassembled by a car bomb in a suburban Phoenix driveway. He starts using heroin to manage the back pain, not occasionally, daily. He drinks heavily. He gambles recklessly.
His behavior at the Riviera begins to deteriorate. Erratic management decisions, sloppy operational choices, the kind of performance that makes the men in Chicago start asking uncomfortable questions about the numbers. And then, he starts [clears throat] skimming. Not from official casino revenues, that would have been caught immediately. He skims from the skim.
The outfit’s standard Las Vegas operating procedure was to pull a percentage of gross casino revenues off the top before they were officially counted, keeping them completely invisible to the IRS. It was their most protected income stream. Greenbaum starts reaching into that pool, the already stolen money, to cover heroin, gambling debts, and the lifestyle of a man who has given up on the future.
Las Vegas journalist John Smith would later put it in terms that cut right to the bone. It is acceptable to skim for the mob. It is not acceptable to skim from the mob. Chicago finds out quickly. Accardo is informed. Marshall Caifano, the outfit’s most feared enforcer in Las Vegas, a man whose reputation alone was enough to make seasoned criminals nervous, approaches Greenbaum directly.
The offer is clear. Sell your stake in the Riviera, clear the debt, and walk away breathing. Stay, and you leave in a box. Johnny Roselli, the outfit’s Las Vegas liaison and one of the most sophisticated operators in organized crime, goes to see Greenbaum personally. He urges him to take the deal. Sell, take the money, go home to Phoenix, live your life.
According to Roselli’s own later account, Greenbaum looks at him and says, “I don’t want to leave. This goddamn town is in my blood. I can’t leave.” November 27th, 1958, Thanksgiving Day. Gus Greenbaum sits at the head of his table on West Monte Vista Road and carves the turkey. Family around him and carves the turkey. Family around him.
Bess has been cooking since morning. Pearl Ray is there. The house is warm. For the first time in 30 years of mob work, Greenbaum has hired personal bodyguards, two of them. But, it’s Thanksgiving. It’s family. The bodyguards aren’t at the table. 100 miles south at a ranch outside Tucson owned by Detroit mob boss Pete Licavoli, a meeting is underway.
Tony Accardo is there. Joe Bonanno, the New York family boss who kept his home in Tucson, is there. Other senior organized crime figures whose names have never been fully confirmed. They’re meeting on Thanksgiving Day, 100 miles from the man they are meeting about. What is decided in that room was never committed to any document made public.
Five days later, Bess Greenbaum drives Pearl Ray home as she does every evening. She returns to the house alone. Phoenix police later find cigarette ash and shoe impressions near the garage, evidence that two people lay in wait for hours before she came back through the door. There is no sign of forced entry.
They either had a key or they had something that worked just as well. The rest you already know. Two unidentified men were reported arriving in Phoenix the day of the murders and departing immediately afterward for Miami. The Arizona Republic reported it. No names were ever confirmed. A federal grand jury was convened in Los Angeles to investigate.
Joe Banano was subpoenaed. Several figures connected to the Appalachian summit of the previous year were subpoenaed. Nothing produced an indictment. Johnny Roselli would later tell investigators that according to Jimmy the Weasel Fratiano, Meyer Lansky, a silent financial partner in the Riviera, had personally wanted Greenbaum removed because his erratic management was costing them money.
Whether the order came from Lansky, Accardo, or both has never been established. A $25,000 reward for information about the murders was offered. It was never claimed. Gus and Bess Greenbaum are buried at Beth Israel Cemetery in Phoenix in matching bronze caskets. A few rows away lies Leone Greenbaum, the 75-year-old woman who told everyone who would listen that she was afraid of what her brother-in-law’s world would do to her, who was not believed, and who was murdered in her own home to deliver a message. Three graves, one family, one
man’s 30-year career in the service of people who never let him leave. Greenbaum had tried to retire in 1955. He’d been told no in the only language the mob speaks. He’d been given a clean exit by Marshall Caifano. Sell out, walk away, live? He’d heard Johnny Roselli tell him directly, “Take the money and go.
” Every single time he’d said no, or he’d said something that amounted to the same thing. Some of those weren’t really choices. You don’t say yes to the mob with someone’s body on the floor and pretend you had options. But the last one? “This goddamn town is in my blood. I can’t leave.” That one was his, and it cost him Bess, and it cost him whatever version of life was still waiting for him in Phoenix.
Playing golf, watching the city he built from a safe distance, growing old somewhere the mob wasn’t looking. That’s the thing about working for people like this. You can be brilliant. You can be indispensable. You can make them millions and rescue their investments and run their operations without a single serious legal problem for 30 years.
None of it buys you the one thing you actually want. The door out only opens from their side. If you want more stories like this, the real history behind organized crime in America told the way it actually happened, subscribe. There’s a lot more to cover.
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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