Pakistan, a country of contrast, of plains and rich farmlands, of great waterways and of desert, with rugged mountains on the fringes of the Himalayas. One of the oldest civilizations with a history going back over 4,000 years is a country where tradition is strong despite the urge for change. But there’s power to speed the change and to irrigate a thirsty land.
Likewise, universities and schools to satisfy another thirst. To this independent country of the Commonwealth in February 1961 came her majesty Queen Elizabeth as a guest. To this welcome from the people of Karach who cheered her as she drove with President Aayup Khan on the start of one of the most memorable phases in her recent tour of the subcontinent.
accompanied by Prince Philillip. It was fitting that the Queen’s first engagement should be to visit the site of the memorial to Muhammad Ali Jina, the founder of this country which became a republic 5 years ago. At a reception held in the Freyer Gardens, the Queen was able to meet personally some of Karach’s citizens.
You can look forward to a great future. Industry and commerce are expanding rapidly while the university, technical colleges and schools are growing daily. My husband has already seen the new township of Kurangi where so much has been done for the people who had been living and struggling to bring up their children in pitiful surroundings.
This is only a part of the great development schemes which are as impressive as that of any city in the world. The young people of Korangi Township danced their welcome for Prince Phillip. Karachi is the principal seapport of West Pakistan and it was here that the queen went aboard a mind sweeper to review ships of the Pakistan Navy.
Another The British Royal Navy submarine tactician was there. The president’s palace was illuminated with a galaxy of lights when the field marshall was hosted a banquet for his royal guest. From Karachi, the journey led northwest
to Peshawar. For some 2,000 years, Pashar has been a focal point on the main trade route from Central Asia. While in Pashar, it was natural that the queen should want to visit the Kaiba pass. At Jamroot, at the beginning of the pass, she met some of the Maliks, the local leaders. A friendly welcome from men whose way of life is as tough and uncompromising as the rocky aspect of their country.
Historically, no pass can claim such importance as the Kyber. It’s still the gateway to the subcontinent, whether you travel the modern or the ancient way. The invading army of Alexander the Great marched down from the mountains over 2,000 years ago. Through succeeding centuries, it has been a route of invasion, a frontier to defend.
In the past, Britain has played a part in defense of the Northwest Frontier, but today men of the Pakistan army stand on guard. Now history is being made here once again as the queen comes to survey the bleak forbidding landscape where so many of her countrymen have served. The governor of West Pakistan accompanied the royal party.
From the past to the future, a promise of plenty in the waters contained by the Wasak Dam on the Kabul River. The queen came to see one of the most dramatic results of Pakistan’s first 5-year plan. This dam built with assistance from Canada under the Colombo plan has been described as a monument to the friendship between the two countries.
It’s also a monument to Pakistan’s determination in tackling her problems. Besides power for the new industries, it’ll bring water to many thousands of baron acres. And to illustrate these changing times, 8,000 tribesmen born into traditions of frontier fighting helped to build it. A two-day holiday in the beautiful valley of Swat was next on the program.
At the Wallally’s Palace, the Queen met some of Swat’s leading citizens. A love of horses and horsemanship is firmly established in Pakistan and the queen is always happy to attend the races or a show. In Lahore, she was to see both. Here it was the famous annual horse show. The president and the governor of West Pakistan escorted her majesty.
There was a charming tribute from a young Pakistani before the program began. The parade which included foreign and Pakistan thoroughbred horses took took half an hour to pass. Prize Pakistan cattle made a fine show.
This traditional sport of tent pegging demands tremendous skill and provides a thrilling display of daring horsemanship. Prizes to winners of the many events and classes were distributed by her majesty. Something which reflects the dramatic
developments which are changing the face of Pakistan is This site on which will rise a great new city. In 5 years time, secretariat buildings, a presidential palace and thousands of houses will transform this empty vista into Islamabad, the future capital of Pakistan. This was a torch light to two performed in Lahore by the West Pakistan Rangers.
Heat. Heat. A service at Lahore’s Cathedral of the Resurrection was attended by the Queen. She was accompanied by the Bishop of Lahore who conducted the service. One of the great shrines of Islam is the
Bad Shai Mosque. Nearly 90% of Pakistan’s 80 million people are Muslims and this mosque is said to be the largest in the world. Her majesty paid a tribute here at the tomb of the poet Ikbal who conceived the idea of an independent Islamic state of Pakistan. The beautiful Shalimar Gardens where the Queen and Prince Philip attended a reception given in their honor by the citizen.
the queen had the chance to express her appreciation. It’s a very great pleasure for me, she said to see Lahore for myself and especially this famous and lovely garden. and she went on many men and women of the United Kingdom have spent their lives in Lahore in the service of your university and other institutions of learning and research.
This fruitful connection goes back many years. I am glad we are still able to help in the training of Pakistani doctors, scientists and technicians whether in the United Kingdom or here in Pakistan. Our commonwealth is based on the principle of mutual help and trust. At the city’s red fort, the queen attended a rally by girl guides.
This was a chance for the young people to give her an ovation. The queen then accepted the gift of some beautifully made dolls before her young hosts began a display of dancing. To commemorate her visit to the Lahore races, her majesty had presented a trophy, the Queen Elizabeth Challenge Cup. Caesar II won her challenge cup in an exciting finish.
Always a keen spectator, the queen is an enthusiastic horsewoman herself. The delightful Gulistani Fatima Gardens made an ideal setting for a reception given by the ladies of Lahore. The gardens were named after Fatima Jina, sister of the country’s founder. The queen saw some of Pakistan’s national costumes.
Then a performance of village dances. In the words of the program, the graceful village girls come forth to draw water from the well, to churn butter, to grind corn, or merely to eat sugar cane and braid each other’s hair. A folk song and a dance when work is done. Happy birthday. Happy birthday.
And now to another great experience to East Pakistan where cheering crowds at Dhaka’s airport echo the abation of the west. With typical warmth and enthusiasm, the people were determined to equal and if possible to surpass the welcome given by their countrymen a thousand miles away. That evening, there was a firework display in her honor.
An unforgettable day. Unforgettable too is the impact on the traveler of the growth of industry. In recent years, Pakistan’s chief export is duped and 14 new mills have been built by the development corporation. Good living conditions underline the advantages which a growing economy can provide.
There was a great welcome for the queen when she came to see for herself this great industry and the people concerned in it. This incidentally is considered to be the largest jute mill in the world. With a far-seeing program of industrialization, Pakistan can look to the future with confidence.
Chitter gone and more crowds to cheer her majesty on her journey. A vast gathering at the citizens reception heard the queen’s address. My husband and I have been most touched by the welcome you have given us since we arrived at Chittagong this morning. Particularly because your hearts and minds must still be full of the disasters which struck you last October.
I am so glad that the contributions we have been able to make from both government and private sources have been of some help to you. East Pakistan is a land of waterways around the Ganges Delta and this delightful riverboat, the Mary Anderson, gave the queen some vivid memories to take home. Well over half the population lives in East Pakistan and many millions of villagers use these waterways as their main highway.
To round off the trip, a pathway of rose petals, a final tribute to a queen whose personality had created such a deep impression on all those who had seen and talked with her. a queen who had been welcomed with spontaneous warmth and affection by millions of Pakistanis. This has been a most memorable fortnight.
I should like to say how much we have been impressed by all that we have seen during our visit. We have also been able to meet many citizens of every kind in all these places. We shall take away with us a rich store of memories of the beauty of Pakistan and of the warm friendship of her men and women. 
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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