In 1969, three black actors quietly broke into major Hollywood films at a time when most studios weren’t even giving them auditions. None of them thanked the studio. None thanked a producer. Years later, one of them finally revealed the truth. The man who helped launch their careers was John Wayne and he had ordered everyone involved to keep it secret. Here’s how it started.
October 1965, Paramount casting offices. A 23-year-old actor named William Foster is midway through an audition for a minor Western role when the casting director suddenly stops him. “We don’t have anything for your type right now.” Foster gathers his script and walks out. In the next room, John Wayne hears everything through a thin wall.
He doesn’t step in, doesn’t argue, doesn’t say a word. He simply puts on his hat and leaves. But that night, Wayne makes three phone calls. Over the next four years, he quietly funds an unofficial audition program, paying black actors to screen test when studios wouldn’t. 31 actors go through the program.
Three launch major careers and decades later, a single memo would reveal that Wayne had one condition from the beginning. “Don’t use my name.” By the end of this story, you’ll see the document that proves it. Stay with me. By 1965, John Wayne wasn’t just a movie star. He was Hollywood’s most powerful Western icon.
For nearly two decades, Wayne had built his reputation playing lawmen, soldiers, and cowboys. Films like Stagecoach, The Searchers, and Rio Bravo had turned him into more than an actor. He was a symbol of strength, tradition, and the old American West. But behind the scenes, Wayne had quietly built something else, influence. By the mid-1960s, Wayne wasn’t just acting.
He was producing through his company, Batjac Productions. That man wasn’t only choosing roles anymore. He was helping decide who got hired, who got auditions, and who got their first break. And in Hollywood at the time, that kind of power mattered. Because in 1965, the industry still operated under unwritten rules.
Black actors were rarely cast in Westerns. When they were, the roles were small, background characters, side roles, or one-scene appearances. Leading roles were almost non-existent. Even auditions were limited. Many casting directors didn’t say it publicly, but the message was understood. Opportunities weren’t equal. Wayne had spent years inside the system.
He knew how it worked. He knew who got called in and who didn’t. But until October 1965, the reality of it hadn’t unfolded directly within earshot. At the time, Wayne was preparing meetings at Paramount Pictures. Westerns were still strong at the box office, and Wayne remained one of the studio’s most reliable stars.
His presence alone could greenlight projects. To many executives, Wayne represented stability, bankability, predictability. His routine was simple. Morning meetings, script reviews, casting conversations, lunch with producers, afternoon discussions about upcoming Western projects. It was a system Wayne had lived inside for years, one that worked in his favor.
And then, on one quiet October afternoon in 1965, something changed. Wayne was waiting in an adjacent office for a scheduled meeting. Nothing unusual, just another day at Paramount. Through the wall, he could hear an audition taking place in the next room. A young actor, nervous but confident, reading lines for a small Western role.
Then, mid-scene, the audition stopped. A voice, calm, matter-of-fact, “We don’t have anything for your type right now.” There was a pause. Papers rustled. A chair moved. Footsteps toward the door. Wayne didn’t see what happened next, but he heard it. The quiet sound of someone leaving the room. And then silence. Wayne sat there for a moment.
He didn’t interrupt. He didn’t ask questions. He didn’t reveal he had heard anything at all. But according to later accounts, those few seconds stuck with him. Because in Hollywood, moments like that rarely left a record. No memo. No complaint. No headline. Just another actor walking out of another audition. But this time, someone powerful had heard it.
And before the day was over, John Wayne would leave Paramount and start making calls that would quietly change the course of several careers. If you’re enjoying stories like this, the ones Hollywood rarely talks about, consider subscribing. These are the moments that changed history quietly. Because what happened next, no one at Paramount saw coming. October 1965.
Late afternoon. The Paramount offices had already begun to quiet down. Meetings were ending. Assistants were gathering scripts. Another ordinary Hollywood day was winding to a close. But inside his car, John Wayne wasn’t heading home just yet. According to accounts that surfaced years later, Wayne sat for several minutes before starting the engine.
The audition he had overheard replayed in his mind. The calm dismissal. The quiet footsteps. The silence. He had spent years in Hollywood. He knew that what he heard wasn’t unusual. That was exactly the problem. That evening, Wayne made his first phone call. He reached out to Andrew McLaglen, a director Wayne trusted and had worked with on multiple Westerns.
McLaglen later described Wayne as unusually direct. Wayne asked a simple question. How many black actors are getting auditions right now? McLaglen didn’t know the exact number, but the answer wasn’t encouraging. So, Wayne made a second call, this time to Michael Wayne, who was working with Batjac Productions.
Wayne asked him to quietly check with casting contacts, not publicly, not formally, just to find out what was happening. Then came the third call. Wayne contacted Charlton Heston, who at the time was serving as president of the Screen Actors Guild. Again, Wayne didn’t mention the audition. He didn’t mention William Foster.
He asked only about access. How many black actors were getting called in? According to later accounts, the numbers were striking. Across the five major studios, fewer than eight black actors were receiving auditions in a typical month, and most were for minor or background roles. Wayne now faced a decision. He could ignore what he had heard, like countless others had before, or he could step into something complicated, controversial, and potentially damaging to his own career.
Because in 1965, Hollywood was cautious about change. Studios avoided risks. Producers worried about audiences. Executives guarded their formulas carefully. And Wayne, more than anyone, represented that formula. He was the face of traditional westerns, films that studios believed depended on familiar casting and predictable expectations.
If Wayne pushed too hard, studios could resist. If he challenged casting practices, projects could stall. There was also the personal risk. Wayne’s influence came from relationships, producers, directors, studio executives. Quietly challenging industry norms could strain those relationships. But doing nothing meant accepting what he had heard.
The pressure built quickly. Over the next few days, Wayne gathered more information, quiet conversations, informal questions, no official meetings, no public statements. Then, according to accounts revealed years later, Wayne made a decision not to confront the studios, not to give interviews, not to make speeches.
Instead, he chose something far quieter and far more unexpected. He would create opportunities himself. What Wayne did next wasn’t announced. There was no press release, no formal program, no public acknowledgement. But within weeks, a small number of actors began receiving unusual phone calls. Paid screen tests, private auditions, opportunities that didn’t officially exist.
And behind it all, quietly funding the effort through Batjac Productions, was John Wayne. What no one realized at the time was how far he was willing to go or how long he would keep it going. Because over the next four years, the quiet decision Wayne made in his car that October afternoon would ripple through Hollywood in ways no one expected.
And when the truth finally surfaced decades later, it revealed that Wayne had taken a risk few stars of his stature ever would. But first, someone needed to make the first call. And that moment came sooner than anyone realized. What happened next was the move that changed everything. The first call came just days later.
Inside the offices of Batjac Productions, Michael Wayne received instructions that were unusually specific and unusually quiet. His father didn’t want announcements. He didn’t want formal meetings. He didn’t want studio involvement. He wanted screen tests, paid ones. Actors would be invited privately. They would read scenes. Cameras would roll.
And regardless of whether they were cast immediately, they would leave with something rare in Hollywood at the time, professional footage and a paid opportunity. It was simple and almost no one was doing it. Within the first week, a small list of names began forming. Casting contacts quietly passed along recommendations.
Agents shared overlooked clients. A few actors were invited without even knowing who was behind it. One of them was 23-year-old William Foster. According to later interviews, Foster received a call offering a paid screen test. No studio name, no major project attached, just an opportunity to read for Western roles. He accepted immediately.
When Foster arrived, the setup was modest but professional. A camera, a script, a small crew, no publicity, no executives watching, just an audition, the kind he had struggled to get. Foster later recalled that the environment felt different, less rushed, more deliberate. He was given time to run the scene multiple times. Direction was offered.
Adjustments were made. For the first time, he wasn’t being dismissed mid-audition. Behind the scenes, Wayne was monitoring the program quietly. He wasn’t always present, but he reviewed footage, asked questions, and encouraged the team to keep inviting new actors. According to accounts shared years later, Wayne gave one consistent instruction, “Make sure they’re paid.
Their time matters.” Word began spreading quietly among agents. Actors who had struggled to secure auditions were suddenly being invited to screen tests. No guarantees, no headlines, just opportunities. Within months, the list grew. Five actors, then 12, then more. But Wayne’s decision came with a cost.
Each screen test required crew time, equipment, and compensation. None of it was reimbursed by studios. The program was being funded quietly through Batjac’s internal budgets. By early 1966, the expenses had already begun to add up. And then, something else happened. Studios started noticing. Casting offices began receiving inquiries.
Agents started referencing new footage. Producers began hearing about actors who suddenly had professional screen tests available. Wayne hadn’t announced anything, but the ripple had started, and within a year, the quiet program Wayne began after overhearing one audition was expanding beyond what anyone expected.
But what no one knew, not even most of the actors involved, was that Wayne intended to keep it going. Not for weeks, not for months, for years. High voltage, and by the time the fourth year ended, 31 actors had passed through the program. Three would go on to major careers, and one would later describe it simply, “A cowboy opened a door and never told anyone he did it.
” But the real impact of Wayne’s decision wouldn’t be seen immediately, because the years that followed would quietly reshape more than just a few careers. They would begin changing how auditions themselves were offered, and that’s where the story takes its biggest turn. For years, almost no one knew the program even existed.
Actors attended the screen tests, agents received the footage, casting directors began seeing new faces, but the connection to John Wayne remained hidden. Then, decades later, something surfaced. In 2004, during research for a documentary about Wayne’s production company, members of the Wayne family reviewed internal files from Batjac Productions.
Inside were a series of memos dated between 1965 and 1969. Lists of actors, screen test schedules, budget allocations, and one repeated note attached to multiple entries, “Do not publicize. Do not attach Duke’s name.” The discovery changed how historians viewed the period, because it revealed that Wayne hadn’t just supported a few actors informally.
He had overseen a structured, multi-year effort and deliberately kept his involvement hidden. And suddenly, those quiet auditions from the late 1960s took on a very different meaning. What looked like coincidence was actually intention and the full impact was only beginning to show. By 1966, the effects of the quiet program were becoming visible even if no one knew why.
Casting directors began seeing new audition reels. Agents started submitting actors with fresh screen footage. Producers were introduced to performers they hadn’t seen before. The change was subtle but noticeable. Actors who once struggled to get in the room were now arriving with professional material and in Hollywood that made a difference.
Over the next four years, the list continued to grow. By 1969, 31 actors had gone to the quiet screen test program funded through Batjac. Some landed small roles. Others built steady careers. A few broke through into larger productions. Among them, William Foster began booking character roles, small at first but consistent.
One appearance led to another, then recurring roles, then steady work. By 1980, Foster had accumulated more than 40 screen credits, something that might never have happened without that First Page screen test and he wasn’t alone. Several actors from the program began appearing in Westerns, television dramas and supporting film roles throughout the late 1960s and early 1970s.
Meanwhile, Wayne never spoke publicly about the effort. There were no interviews, no press mentions, no public credit but the cost continued quietly. Each screen test required crew time, studio space, equipment, actor compensation. Over four years, the expenses added up. According to estimates shared in later interviews, Wayne personally funded dozens of paid additions all without studio reimbursement.
At the same time, Wayne’s career remained busy. He starred in major films like True Grit, which earned him an Academy Award. He continued producing projects, meeting with studios, and maintaining his status as one of Hollywood’s biggest stars. But behind the scenes, the quiet program continued. Agents later recalled receiving occasional calls.
Can you send someone in? No publicity. Paid screen test. The pattern stayed consistent. No fanfare. No announcements. Just opportunities. Over time, something else began happening. Casting directors grew more comfortable bringing in new talent. Producers began considering actors they might not have before. Slowly, the number of auditions expanded beyond Wayne’s program.
It wasn’t a sudden shift, but a gradual one. And Wayne kept showing up behind the scenes. For four years, 31 actors, dozens of paid opportunities, no public recognition. Then, in 1969, the program quietly ended. There was no announcement, no closing memo. The screen test simply slowed, then stopped. By then, the ripple had already spread.
Actors who had entered the industry through those early opportunities were now working steadily. New faces were appearing in casting offices more frequently. And Wayne moved on, never mentioning the effort publicly. Years passed. The story remained largely unknown until 1992, when William Foster was asked a simple question during an interview.
Who gave you your first real break? Foster paused. Then he answered, “A cowboy who never took credit.” And suddenly, the quiet effort from decades earlier began to surface. But the most powerful proof of what Wayne had done was still waiting to be discovered. And when it finally appeared, it confirmed everything.
For decades, the story existed mostly as quiet recollections. Actors remembered the screen tests. Agents recalled the unexpected calls. A few industry insiders suspected Wayne’s involvement, but there was no hard evidence until 2004. While reviewing archive materials for retrospective documentary on John Wayne, the Wayne family granted researchers access to internal files from Batjac Productions.
Inside the archive were folders labeled simply screen tests 1965 to 1969. The contents were revealing. Typed memos, budget approvals, casting notes, actor lists. Over multiple documents, the same pattern appeared. Scheduled screen tests for actors not attached to any specific film project. Each test included compensation details and crew assignments.
Then on several memos, a handwritten instruction appeared. Short, direct, do not publicize. Keep internal. And most notably, do not attach Duke’s name. Duke was Wayne’s widely known nickname across Hollywood. The documents confirmed what many had only suspected. Wayne hadn’t just supported a few actors casually.
He had quietly funded and organized a structured program over 4 years. Researchers also found internal budget summaries showing repeated allocations for paid screen tests, all routed through Batjac. One memo dated 1967 listed multiple scheduled additions across several weeks. Further confirming the program wasn’t a one-time effort, but an ongoing initiative.
When historians and family members reviewed the documents, the timeline aligned with what actors like William Foster had described years earlier. The quiet additions, the paid opportunities, the absence of publicity. It all matched. Later, members of Wayne’s family reflected on the discovery. According to interviews conducted during the documentary research, some family members themselves had not been aware of the full extent of the program.
Wayne had never spoken publicly about it. Not during interviews, not in speeches, not in memoirs. By the end of the four-year period, 31 actors had gone through the program, dozens of paid screen tests had been funded, multiple careers had quietly begun, and Wayne had never taken credit.
Today, those archived memos remain one of the clearest pieces of evidence of the quiet effort. A behind-the-scenes reminder that one decision made in a Paramount office in 1965 had ripple effects for years. But perhaps the most powerful part of the story wasn’t the documents themselves. It was the silence that followed. Because even after the discovery, Wayne still never claimed it.
And that may have been the point all along. John Wayne built his career playing heroes on screen, lawmen, soldiers, cowboys who stepped in when something wasn’t right. But in 1965, there were no cameras, no script, no audience, no recognition. Just a moment in a hallway and a decision that no one saw. Wayne didn’t hold a press conference.
He didn’t challenge studios publicly. He didn’t try to change Hollywood overnight. Instead, he chose something quieter. He opened doors, one screen test at a time, one actor at a time, over four years, without ever asking for credit. In a world that often rewards visibility, Wayne chose anonymity. And that’s what makes the story endure.
Because the real impact wasn’t measured in headlines, it was measured in careers. Actors who found opportunities, performers who stayed in the industry, doors that slowly opened wider. So here’s the question. If you were in Wayne’s position, would you have done the same? Would you invest years of time, money, and effort knowing no one might ever know? Drop one word in the comments that describes what John Wayne did.
Loyalty, integrity, leadership, courage. I read every single one. And if you enjoy stories like this, the ones Hollywood never advertised, consider subscribing. These are the quiet moments that shaped history because sometimes legends aren’t made on screen. They’re made in the choices no one sees. And somewhere in those Bad Jack archives, those memos still exist.
A reminder that one cowboy heard something in 1965 and decided to do something about it. Next time, the day a Hollywood legend refused a million-dollar role and the quiet reason shocked everyone. See you in the next story.
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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