Queen Elizabeth thought Megan was a narcissist. At least that’s what royal insiders told Robert Hardman who joins me now to discuss his new book. I’m Jack Royston, Newsweek’s chief royal correspondent, and this is Newsweek’s royal report. >> >> Hello and welcome to the show to Robert Hardman who has a fantastic new royal biography out.
It’s called Elizabeth II and it of course charts the life of our late monarch. Um it is a fantastic read. Robert, thank you for joining me. Of course, it does also have some material in it, particularly headline-grabbing material about other members of the royal family, and it may not come as a surprise to you that I do of course want to ask about some of that.
You have a I think probably the most detailed account I’ve seen of a major scandal from the Harry and Meghan years, which is known as tiara gate. And for me, it is actually one of the sort of most important moments in the unraveling of royal relations. So, do you want to start by just talking us through that and what you’ve actually found out about it? >> >> Well, I’m pleasure to [clears throat] be on, Jack. Thank you for asking me.
And yes, I I had all sorts of um revelations and unearthed in the course of writing this book. And one of these same involved a very well-trodden story about Harry and Meghan at the time of their wedding. It’s gone down in in in media folklore as tiara gate. Um and it’s alluded to in a number of books, not least in Harry’s own book, Spare, um where he talks about the fact that in the run-up to the wedding, the late Queen offered Meghan a tiara to wear at the white wedding, and that was gratefully received.
And then in the days before the wedding, um they needed to get a hold of that tiara because Meghan’s hairdresser was flying into London. Let’s say they’re all coming in um for a hair rehearsal, as they call it, um and obviously needed the tiara for this. Uh and Harry writes writes in his book about how difficult it was to get a hold of it because the Queen’s dresser was being very hard to contact, wasn’t wasn’t being helpful at all.
And he was sort of implying that the royal establishment was somehow trying to block Meghan from getting her tiara. Um and and he talked about how, you know, when eventually it was handed over that the Queen’s dresser, Angela Kelly, >> >> had quotes, in his words, had a go at him.
Um and and anyway, the the thrust of it was um >> >> poor Harry, poor Meghan, evil palace establishment being difficult about a tiara. Well, that’s >> >> one version of events. Um and in the course of writing my book, I discovered actually it’s a very different story. Uh the late Queen used to love ahead of a royal wedding inviting the bride around to to choose a a a tiara.
It was a sort of bonding moment. It used to just be the bride and the Queen, and they’d sort of, you know, it brought them close together, and then it’d be a sort of >> >> pleasant sort of chat. In this instance, Meghan turned up, but brought Harry with her, which is not normal. So, that that already had sort of slightly changed the atmosphere.
Um anyway, Meghan chose the opportunity for a for a moment of bonding, I suppose, with the Queen and Meghan. Yeah. I mean, obviously the Queen loved Harry. I mean, there’s no problem having Harry around, but this is supposed to be a sort of special moment between Queen and bride. Um Harry turned up, and and and and that sort of slightly changed the atmosphere.
But anyway, Meghan chose her particular tiara, Queen Mary diamond bandeau, a little-known piece that had very seldom been seen in public. But it it everyone was happy. That was that. Um and then near the time, suddenly the Meghan’s hairdresser is flying in. They want to get a hold of the tiara. Um and it’s Harry, rather than Meghan, who is sort of ringing up saying, “Where’s this tiara? We need this tiara.
We need it ready urgently.” And um the reason that the tiara was was not just handed over on a plate there and then Well, there were two reasons. First, these things are in sort of very secure units. You don’t this is not like a jewelry box that you just go, “Here it is.” Um it was Easter court at the time, um and all the royal family and all the staff and everything would have Windsor.
Um um but the principal reason was that um the history of this piece was still being checked out um by I mean, the Queen’s dresser, Angela Kelly, is is a sort of curator of the of the private jewels, but there are others, too. And they would just wanted to check that this thing didn’t have any awkward backstory because it was it was meticulous research, wasn’t it? Like dime jewel by jewel, working out where every single component part of the tiara had come from.
No, not quite where every component part. I mean, it wasn’t quite I mean, but but you know, this this was a a selection of diamonds that were given to Queen Mary about 100 years earlier by a small group of aristocrats from Lincolnshire. No one really gave much thought at the time to where they were from. But you know, in recent years, all sorts of different parts of the royal jewelry collection have come under attack.
And what they don’t want is on wedding day someone to go, “Oh, look, Meghan’s wearing colonial loot.” Um so, this this needed checking out. Um and also, it wasn’t a sort of tip-top priority because when Catherine Middleton was marrying Prince William, the same thing happened and the hairdresser wanted to have a trial run.
Um they used a five-quid um plastic tiara from Claire’s Accessories, available to all good children. I I I loved that detail. And it would include my daughters. Um so, you know, that was the issue. Harry was ringing around going, “Where is this tiara? We need it now.” Um and in his book, he he he says that that Angela Kelly was making life difficult.
But as I discovered writing about, you know, there were lots of people getting phone calls, angry phone calls from Harry going, “Where is this tiara?” And it put people’s backs up. And when word got back to the Queen, um and and it depends which book you read. Um Harry says he didn’t want to bother bother the Queen.
The book Finding Freedom says that he did. But word, like word always does, word got back to the Queen, and her reply, according to a member of the team, was, “It’s not a toy.” And the Queen couldn’t understand why this was such an issue. But in the end, the tiara was produced. Um and and and Harry had a had a real go at Angela Kelly.
Who I think it’s it’s it’s worth stating, I mean, she, you know, Angela Kelly is from a very working-class background. Her father was a Liverpool docker. To those who have a sense of UK geography, obviously to US to US viewers, you know, it’s it’s a very like classic working-class you know, upbringing for her, isn’t it? And Harry, as a prince, you would think would have you would hope, anyway, that he would have some awareness of the fact that you don’t just pile in on on someone like Angela Kelly, who was also incredibly close to the Queen.
Was incredibly close to the Queen and and and was was you know, a very you know, was was was not going to just take it. I mean, I think she she responded in kind. In in Harry’s book, he talks about how Angela went for me, and he talks about how so how how it was rather scary. Um well, what I heard the other way around and and and to coin the Queen’s immortal line, recollections may vary.
Um you know, Harry Harry sort of gave her both barrels, as it were, and and and but she was a she, you know, Angela was a force to be reckoned with. Um she was very close to the Queen. She’d been a very key presence in the um Queen’s life really since joining the Queen in 1992. Um and as dresser, curator of the jewels, also had the title of personal assistant.
I mean, she was a very central figure to the in the in the Queen’s life in those later years. And and um and and the Queen was devoted to her as she was devoted to the Queen. So, I mean, I think Harry picked the wrong person to have a fight with there. And I think it’s I think it’s probably fair to say that Meghan probably caught the thick end of the stick when it came to people’s when it came to the backlash against them against them as a couple when this first emerged in the press in 2018.
But do you it sort of feels reading your book like maybe you almost feel that actually Harry might have been a bigger instigator behind some of these problems than was perhaps first realized. I I I think in all these cases, it’s yeah, you’re right. There’s there’s often a sort of pile on to on to Meghan as though she’s the sort of instigator and that sort of Harry’s a sort of just a sort of bit part actor in this.
I think in most cases, it’s a bit of both. I mean, it’s interesting that in all the the the the the the calls going around the royal household demanding this tiara, it’s always Harry doing the calling. It’s never Meghan. And even when when when Angela Kelly finally arrived at Kensington Palace with this thing, Meghan’s nowhere to be seen.
You just thought, you know, if it’s so urgent and the hairdresser is on standby and everyone’s waiting, that at least Meghan might come out and go, “Thank you very much.” She just doesn’t appear. It’s it’s very much Harry. Um so, what the private dynamics are there, I don’t know who’s telling who to do what.
But I I I think, as you say, Jack, um in in so many of these things, it’s it’s it’s like 50/50. There there you know, who to to to to blame everything on Meghan would be unfair. And there’s another um sort of well, equally extraordinary situation that arises after Prince Archie’s born. You know, a year later, 2019, there’s this whole question of the media being informed that the birth had happened.
And again, that played out publicly at the time, and there was this big hoo-ha about why they had not, you know, told the media that the birth had taken place until after Meghan was already home. But what you have in your book is that actually it wasn’t just the media who were upset and annoyed by this because the police have been given a plan by Kensington Palace for what was going to happen.
Um and they had operationally, you know, taken various decisions about what to do based around that. And then also suddenly got told that Megan was already home um and felt that they’d been lied to by Kensington Palace. Yeah, I mean there there were a lot of unhappy people that morning and what should have been a joyous happy event behind the scenes it was a sort of awful lot of charging and head scratching.
What the hell’s going on? Um because yeah, as you say Jack, there had been as I say in the book there’d been uh these things are a plan very carefully. I mean quite a lot of police time had been had been spent on devising a sort of media strategy because we’ve seen what happened and what happened outside the the Lindo Wing at Paddington when when when for example when the Princess of Wales cuz if when you have a royal baby there’s a huge media interest.
It’s quite a lot of public interest as well. So you’ve got a sort of plan um putting up um police barriers, manning entrances and exits, ensuring the hospital can go about its business, all that sort of stuff. And so a lot of time was spent planning all this. And then on the day in question um the uh the couple uh went in had the they had the baby and came out again um and uh the the the announcement was put out that the the princess had gone into hospital by which time she’d been gone and gone home.
And so yeah, the police were just sort of left going what what’s going on? Uh and and the police actually accused the palace of lying um which is quite a strong accusation to make against the palace. And the palace were just left saying, “Look, we we don’t know. We don’t know what’s going on.” Um and uh as I say in the book those those um closest to the couple would say, “Well, it’s one of those situations where they were calling the shots.
” And this is one moment where um they didn’t have to tell anyone anything. I mean of course having a child is incredibly personal and and then I can’t blame them for wanting to keep that as private as possible. But at the same time um if if you’re going to put out a statement it it should at least be either accurate or or or entirely innocuous.
But actually tell a lie to the to to the to the media is is is going to come back and haunt you. Yeah, for sure. Absolutely. And now I’m I’m really fascinated by what you think the Queen really thought of Megan. And there’s a bit there’s one quote in your book that absolutely leaps off the page for me.
Um and it’s you know, you talk obviously about the Sandringham summit and it was the Queen who wanted to kind of enforce that half in half out as a solution to their royal exit couldn’t happen. Um and there’s a hilarious bit where she says she’s definitely not going to return because of the dogs. But then there’s this phenomenal quote.
I say phenomenal because it’s extraordinary. I mean I’ll let I’ll let viewers decide what they think of it. But um it’s it’s when Harry and Megan have already gone to America and um you have a source saying the Queen had initially been very sympathetic to Megan, but it was now starting to look like the move to California had been a plan all along.
And then and then it says the Queen had seen plenty of narcissists in her life. So do you you obviously got that quote. Do you think that person is saying that’s the Queen thought Megan was a narcissist? Or is it your source who thinks Megan was a narcissist? Uh I I around a lot of people around the Queen thought the Queen thought Megan was um by the end showing narcissistic tendencies.
Now, uh what the Queen I mean the Queen was famously good at concealing her uh her true thoughts. I mean on other issues for example people who were very close to her swore blind to me that she was in favor of Brexit. People who were very close to her swore blind she was against it. So yeah, I’m not going to sit here and say this is what the Queen thought.
But people very close to her um were were very much got the were were in no doubt that as as gradually all these best laid plans to try and bring Harry and Megan into the family to to give Megan um lot of thought given to giving her um patronages that that meant a lot to the Queen and and and rather like with the tiara she’d sort of thought about Lauren Harrell, why don’t we give Megan this cuz this will really work for her.
You know, this this will this is a good platform for those sort of things that were initially embraced by the couple um and then just sort of torn up. Um and uh yeah, that that it was it was at first baffling, then frustrating and then ultimately in the end those around the Queen felt that she uh probably been let down by both of them but um but certainly detected narcissistic behavior on the part of Megan.
Wow, yeah, that’s extraordinary because it I mean she you know, it’s it’s said all the time now. But it sounds almost like the Queen might have been one of the first people to actually >> [laughter and gasps] >> arrive at this conclusion and say this about Megan which is quite an extraordinary thing to think about really. Um so >> Well, this was you know, this this was after things had uh had blown up.
I mean I mean early on she was she was actually delighted. I mean don’t forget the Queen was sort of bending all the rules to to to to welcome Megan into the fold. I mean you you used to be sort of you know, you used to not take your um your your girlfriend or even then fiance to to to sort of stay at royal events until you were married and all this sort of thing.
And they those sort of rules were out of the window. I remember before uh before the Commonwealth summit 2018 um Harry and Megan were engaged, but they weren’t yet married. But already Megan was being sort of you know, welcomed into the sort of fold as as part of the family in a way that wouldn’t have happened a generation earlier. Um you know, that like I said that I think what became particularly wounding later on was quite apart from the um allegations of of racist of racist um conversation in in the the Oprah Winfrey interview. But beyond that
this this sort of idea that somehow a sort of cold-hearted royal establishment had had not welcomed Megan when in fact um as as as I keep saying recollections may vary. The recollections on the other the other side were that everyone had gone out of their way to try and make it work and it hadn’t.
And everyone’s very sad and then when sadness um when when those sort of recriminations started I mean that turned to at that that turned to you know, deep disappointment. Robert, thank you so much for joining me. It’s been fantastic talking to you. And do here’s your moment just to give the book a plug. So it’s Pegasus Books in America? It’s Pegasus Books in America.
It’s called Elizabeth II in private, in public, her story. It’s it’s a beautiful book, beautiful cover which I hope you’ll you’ll flack flash up in a second Jack. Uh and uh it’s it’s uh it’s coming out um in bang on her her centenary. And um I’m going to be in America to uh to launch it. And then they say I then the royals are out too and you know, here come the Brits.
King and Queen [snorts] on their way. Fantastic. [laughter] Thank you very much Robert. And that’s it for this episode of The Royal Report. Be sure to join me every show when I visit the latest royal headlines, embark on some royal deep dives, and riff on all things royal. Until next time, I’m Jack Royston.
Thank you for joining me and a curtsy to you all.
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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