On a warm afternoon in late August of 1986, a long stretch of East Oakland shut down completely. Traffic stopped. People left work, left their porches, left their kitchens, and walked out to the sidewalks to watch a funeral go by. At the center of it was a glass carriage pulled by horses carrying a $6,000 bronze casket.
And inside that casket was a 31-year-old man. His name was Felix Mitchell. A few years before that day, he was moving so much heroin through the housing projects of East Oakland that the federal government had to build a whole new kind of case just to put him away. And the same man who once ran hundreds of thousands of dollars through these streets every single week, died in a prison cell, stabbed to death, reportedly over a debt of $10.
Most of America has never heard his name. East Oakland never forgot it. To understand how a city stops for a man like that, you have to start at the beginning. And the beginning is a set of low brick buildings on 69th Avenue. Felix Wayne Mitchell was born on August 23rd, 1954 in East Oakland. He came up in a housing project on 69th Avenue called San Antonio Village.
Nobody in the neighborhood called it that. They called it the 69 or just a buildings are gone now. The city tore him down years ago, but in the 1960s and 70s, that block was its own world, and it was the world that made him. This was Oakland at a hard time. The shipyards and the caneries and the factories that had pulled black families west during the war years were closing down or moving out.
The jobs that built those neighborhoods were leaving faster than anything was coming in to replace them. Whole families that had moved across the country for steady work found themselves a generation later with no work at all. And into that gap, like it always does, came a different kind of economy. The money you could not earn at a plant you could earn on a corner.
Felix was a small, quiet kid, sharp. People who knew him then described somebody who watched everything and said little, who could read a room and read a person. The nickname came from the cartoon Felix the Cat. Later, people would say it fit because he seemed to have nine lives. The way he kept slipping out of cases that should have buried him, but the cartoon came first.
By his teens, he was already in the streets, not as a worker for somebody else, as somebody building his own thing. And what he built would change the way the drug trade worked in America. This is the part that gets glossed over when people tell this story. Felix Mitchell did not just sell drugs, he organized them. Before him, dealing in a place like East Oakland was mostly scattered.
A guy here, a guy there, everybody handtoh hand, everybody on their own. What Felix did was take that chaos and run it like a company. He turned a housing project into a storefront that never closed. His organization went by a few names. People called it the 69 mob after the avenue. Inside the letters Mob stood for different things to different people, but the idea was the same.
It was a structure with him at the top, lieutenants under him and below them an army of workers who never knew much more than their own small job. The people at the bottom handled the product. The people at the top stayed clean. If a worker got arrested, the case died with him cuz he had nothing to give up. He did not know enough to give up.
And then there were the kids. This is one of the things Felix is genuinely credited with pioneering and it is one of the ugliest. He put neighborhood children to work as lookouts and runners and spotters. A 10-year-old on a bike was not breaking any law you could easily charge. A 10-year-old could stand on a corner all day and whistle when the police rolled through.
And the police could do almost nothing about it. Felix paid those kids real money. To a child in the vil in 1978, the man handing out cash and candy was not a villain. He was the most successful person they had ever seen with their own eyes. The heroin itself moved in little glassine envelopes and the envelopes were stamped.
They carried a 69 on them, a brand, so a buyer knew whose product they were getting. Think about that for a second. He branded it. Addicts from all over the Bay Area would get on public transit and ride into the projects to buy because they knew the 69 stamp meant the real thing. By some police accounts, the gang would clear residents out of their own apartments for hours at a time to run the business out of them.
The neighborhood was the warehouse. When the heat came down in one spot, he moved. A crackdown in the mid70s pushed the operation over to Berkeley for a while, then to West Oakland, then to another project, then back. He was always one step to the side, always slippery, nine lives, and he was connected. A man at his level does not get heroin out of thin air.
Felix built supply lines that reached down into Los Angeles and out across the country. Working with established players who could keep the product flowing no matter how many corners the Oakland police shut down. That is the part of the business the lookouts and the runners never saw. The kid on the bike knew his block.
Felix knew the whole map. Then there was the way he carried himself because the money was only half of it. The other half was the show. Felix Mitchell understood something that every great gangster figure has understood, which is that power you cannot see does not mean anything in the street. So he made sure you could see it. He wore the jewelry.
He drove the cars. There were Rolls-Royces and there was a Ferrari. And he drove them slow through the same projects where people were lucky to own a working television. He bought a mansion outside Los Angeles valued by some accounts at $300,000 to $500,000 which in the early 1980s was a fortune most Americans of any color would never touch.
When agents finally searched him, they hauled off around $40,000 in jewelry and used it as evidence at his trial. To the city, that was obscene. to a kid standing in the breezeway of the vil watching it roll past. It was the only proof he had ever been given that there was a way out of where he was standing. That image the local boy who came back through the old block draped in gold would outlive Felix by decades.
It is the image the rappers kept. It is the image the movies copied. And it started right here on 69th Avenue with a man who made sure his neighborhood watched him win. How much money are we talking about? This is where you have to be honest because the numbers people throw around are all over the place.
Some accounts say the operation did around $400,000 a week. Others say up to a million a month. Federal estimates later put the whole enterprise at as much as $5 million a year. Pick whichever number you want. They are all estimates and the truth is probably that nobody, including Felix, ever knew the exact figure. What matters is the scale.
We are talking about a teenager from the projects who built something that moved more cash than most legal businesses in the city. But you do not get to that level in a place like East Oakland without other people wanting the same thing, and Felix had rivals. For more than a decade, three organizations fought over the East Bay heroin market.
Felix and the 69 mob were one. The second was a gang called The Family, run by a man named Milton Moore, who everybody knew as Mickey Mo. Before the streets, Mickey Moore had actually been a rhythm and blues singer. The third was a crew called Funktown USA, led by Harvey Wizzington, who went by Big Whiz. Three Kingpins, One City.
It went exactly how you think it went. By 1980, the fight between Felix’s people and Mickey Moore’s family had turned into something the newspapers were calling a drug war. Firebombings, driveby shootings, bodies turning up in the hills. Authorities later tied at least seven killings to that period. The one that shook the city happened on the 6th of August 1980.
Three members of the family, two brothers and a sister-in-law, were gunned down up in the Oakland Hills. One of the brothers went by the rocket. Their death became the case that police would eventually try to pin on Felix Mitchell himself. And here is the first place where the legend and the record split apart. So pay attention because a lot of channels get this wrong.
In December of 1981, federal and local agents arrested Felix near a mansion he owned outside Los Angeles. They hit him with four counts of murder, including those killings in the hills, and they stacked special circumstances on top that could have put him in line for a death sentence. The headlines made it sound finished. The kingpin was going down for murder.
Then, within days, it fell apart. On December 17th, 1981, prosecutors dropped three of the four murder charges. Not enough evidence. The men arrested alongside him walked out. And while the story you hear in the streets is that Felix Mitchell beat a bunch of murder raps, the cleaner way to say it is this.
He was never convicted of killing anyone. Not once. Whatever he ordered or did not order, the state could never prove a single homicide on him in a courtroom. That is a fact. And it is worth saying out loud because a lot of the men in this story were stone cold killers. And the thing that actually brought Felix down was not murder at all. It was math.
While Felix was slipping out of murder charges, a different group of people had been watching him for years. Not homicide detectives, federal agents, the kind who do not care who you shot. They care what you earn and whether you paid taxes on it and whether you ran what the law calls an enterprise. In February of 1983, a federal grand jury handed up an indictment against Felix Mitchell and eight other people.
The charges were conspiracy to distribute heroin, income tax evasion, and the big one, operating what the federal government calls a continuing criminal enterprise. That is the Kingpin statute. It is a law designed for exactly one purpose, to take down the person at the top of a drug organization even when they never touch the product themselves.
You do not have to prove he sold a single bag. You have to prove he ran the machine. The first trial in the summer of 1983 ended in a mistrial. Nine lives again, but the government does not walk away from a kingpin case. They tried him again and this time in 1985 is stuck. Felix Mitchell was convicted. Six of his co-fendants went down with him with lighter sentences.
The judge, Marilyn Hall Patel, called the 69 mob the most violent organization she had ever come across. She sentenced Felix to life in prison without the possibility of parole. He was sent to the United States Penitentiary at Levvenworth in Kansas, the old maximum security fortress that the men inside it called the hot house.
For the first time in his life, Felix Mitchell could not move to a different project when the heat came. There was nowhere to slide to. The cat was in a cage. He was 30 years old. For about a year, that is where the story sat. The Kingpin was off the streets doing life a thousand miles from Oakland. The federal government had won. As far as the law was concerned, the case was closed.
And then on the 21st of August, 1986, around 3:00 in the afternoon, guards found Felix Mitchell in his cell, stabbed. He was rushed to a hospital. He died early the next morning, the 22nd of August. He was 31 years old, 2 days short of his 32nd birthday. The detail that has followed this story for almost 40 years is the reason.
The reported motive was a debt, not a drug shipment, not a war for control of the prison. A debt of $10. Sit with that. A man who on the outside ran hundreds of thousands of dollars a week, who owned a mansion in a fleet of cars, killed in a federal cell over $10. Now, the honest version, even the wire report that gave us that figure said the killing was apparently over a $10 debt.
That word is doing a lot of work, and you should keep it. Inside a place like Levvenworth, a $10 debt is almost never really about $10. It is about respect and standing. And whether the man at the top of an empire on the outside is still anybody on the inside, some accounts say he was stabbed around 10 times in the chest chest.
What is not in dispute, and this is the part that should bother you, is that no one was ever publicly named as his killer. No one was charged. No one stood trial. The man who took down one of the most documented drug bosses in California history was never identified to the public. So, the empire ended the way it had run.
Quietly, with the man at the top staying out of it, and the people at the bottom never knowing who did what. Only this time, Felix was the one at the bottom. His body came home to Oakland and Oakland did something nobody in city government was ready for. The funeral was set for the end of August. His family put his body in that $6,000 bronze casket and loaded it into a glass-sided carriage drawn by horses.
The procession ran roughly 8 miles through East Oakland. It started at the San Antonio Vas. The project on 69th Avenue where he was born and where it all began. And it ended at the Star Bethl Baptist Church. Some of the flower arrangements were shaped like dollar signs. There is another one to get right because you will hear it told wrong constantly.
People say 14 Rolls-Royces rolled behind that carriage. That is not quite what the reporters who were actually there wrote down. The contemporary count was 14 Cadillacs and Rolls-Royces together. A mix, not 14 of one. One careful account puts it at four Rolls-Royces in a string of limousines. Either way, it was a parade of money moving slowly through some of the poorest blocks in the city, and the people came out.
More than 1,800 packed into the church. Along the 8 mile route, by one estimate, around 8,000 people lined the streets to watch him pass. Among the mourers, by several accounts, was Huey Newton, the co-founder of the Black Panther Party, an organization that had its own deep roots in Oakland. The police were everywhere watching, filming, by some accounts, even using one of Felix’s own confiscated cars to run surveillance on his own funeral.
Nothing kicked off. The family had pulled the permits. It was on paper a legal event. It lasted about 2 hours, and for those two hours, a piece of Oakland belonged to a dead drug dealer. You can imagine how that landed downtown. City officials were horrified. To them, the turnout was proof of how deep the rot went, that thousands of people would come out to honor a man who flooded their own neighborhood with heroin.
One local radio voice said it felt like the city was burying Martin Luther King, and that the coverage went out across the whole country and that he hated his city being known for honoring a drug lord. But that is the easy read. And the people who lived it will tell you it is too easy. Because to a lot of folks in East Oakland, Felix Mitchell was not only the man who sold the heroin.
He was the man who handed kids cash and candy when nobody else was handing them anything. He gave to churches. He gave to charities. He showed up. He was the proof sitting right there in a Rolls-Royce that somebody from the could become somebody. The same neighborhood that buried his children because of what he sold turned out by the thousands to bury him.
Both of those things were true at the same time. That is the part that makes people uncomfortable and that is exactly why they came. Here is what almost nobody downtown expected. Taking Felix Mitchell off the street was supposed to make Oakland safer. It did the opposite. The police and the federal government had spent years and millions chasing one man believing that if they cut off the head, the body would die.
What actually happened is that the body broke into a dozen pieces and every piece started fighting. While Felix ran things, his monopoly kept a strange kind of order. He controlled the price. He controlled the territory. He kept the smaller dealers in line because crossing him was suicide. Remove him and all of that control vanished overnight.
Now there was no king. Just a bunch of younger, hungrier men with guns, all reaching for the same crown, all willing to kill for blocks that used to be off limits. The numbers tell it plainly. In 1985, Oakland had 114 homicides. In 1986, the year Felix died. The city finished with a record 146. The violence kept climbing through the rise of crack cocaine until Oakland hit 175 killings in 1992.
Criminologists have a name for what happened. They call it the Felix Mitchell paradox. The idea that a successful takedown can make a neighborhood more dangerous, not less. Because what replaces the kingpin is chaos. There was one last twist, and it is the kind of thing that sounds made up.
In January of 1987, a few months after his murder, a federal appeals court formally threw out Felix Mitchell’s conviction, not because he was innocent, because he was dead. The law says if you die before your appeal is heard, the case becomes moot and the conviction gets wiped clean as if it never happened. So in the eyes of the official record, the kingpinned the government spent years building a case against technically died an innocent man.
The prosecutor who put him away was furious and said the ruling made a hero and a martyr out of a heroin dealer and that it was not right. One of Felix’s own lawyers called it a hollow victory and said the obvious thing, Felix is dead and the game did not stop. It almost never does. One of the young men who came up running for the 69 mob was Felix’s nephew by marriage, a kid they called Little D.
After his uncle fell, Little D built his own operation as the streets shifted from heroin to crack. And for a while, he sat near the top of the same throne. He got caught in a federal sting at the end of 1988 with what was then a record amount of crack. And his fall, just like his uncles, set off another round of wars between the men who used to work for him.
The same story one more time with new names. So what do you do with a story like this? Some people in Oakland will tell you the system did this. That a city stripped of jobs and hope manufactured a man like Felix Mitchell as surely as the caneries used to manufacture anything and then spent millions to destroy what it created.
Other people sometimes at the same dinner table will tell you that none of that takes the choice out of his hands. that he saw what heroin did to the children he handed candy to and he kept selling it anyway and he did it knowing the cost and the cost was paid by the same neighborhood that lined up 8,000 deep to mourn him. This story does not settle that argument.
It is not supposed to. It just lays it on the table. What is not really in dispute is that Felix Mitchell mattered far beyond the 8 miles of streets where they carried his casket. The way he ran a project like a business, the lookouts, the branded product, the never closing storefront became a template that drug organizations across the country would copy for the next two decades.
Oakland rappers from Too Short on down have kept his name alive in their music. The cable network A&E built an entire episode of its crime series around him decades after his death. And to this day, people swear the movie New Jack City was the story of Felix Mitchell, which is not actually true.
That film is set in Harlem and was never his biography. But the reason people make the connection is itself the point. When America finally made a movie about a young black kingpin who turned a neighborhood into an empire and got destroyed by it, audiences took one look and thought of Felix. He had become the template for the myth.
Even when the myth got the city wrong. For seven years, he drove Rollsroyces through housing projects where the people had nothing. branded his poison with the number of the avenue that raised him and turned the children of the vil into his eyes and ears. Then he died on a cell floor over what the report called $10 with no name ever attached to the knife and a week later his city stopped traffic for 8 miles to watch him go by.
They tore down the vil a long time ago. The buildings are gone. But if you talk to the people who came up in deep east Oakland, older ones, the ones who were kids on those corners, they will still tell you about Felix the Cat. They will tell you the version their family passed down. And every one of them will tell it a little differently, which is maybe the truest thing about him.
Felix Mitchell never stayed in one place long enough to get caught. Even now, even gone, the story still moves.
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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