1989, a military proving ground in the red dust of northern Australia, a vehicle rolls out of a transport aircraft and drops onto the dirt. It is not a tank. It has no tracks. It rides on eight fat rubber tires, sits low to the ground, and moves with an ease that looks wrong for something armored.
Officers standing at the perimeter are skeptical. The thing looks like an armored personnel carrier somebody dressed up in a reconnaissance uniform. It is too light. It swims. It drives. It does everything. They call it the ASLAV. The Australian Light Armoured Vehicle. The critics said it was underpowered. They said it was too lightly protected for sustained combat.
They said wheels had no place doing a tracked vehicle’s job in a serious fight. They said Australia was making a mistake. Over the next two decades, this vehicle would deploy to East Timor, Baghdad, southern Iraq, and the mountains of Uruzgan Province in Afghanistan. It would survive vehicle-borne bombs, improvised explosive devices, rocket-propelled grenades, and deliberate ambushes across two wars and two decades of continuous operational service.
Only one ASLAV crewman was killed inside his vehicle. Every other crew walked away. This is the ASLAV, and for 30 years, it was the most capable light armored vehicle Australia ever put in harm’s way. To understand why Australia chose the ASLAV, you need to understand the problem the Australian Army faced in the 1980s. Australia’s strategic geography is unlike any other country’s.
The continent’s northern approaches stretch across thousands of kilometers of open coastline and sparse terrain. Defending them required a vehicle that could screen enormous distances at speed, operate without a heavy logistics train, and arrive in a distant theater fast enough to matter. A tracked vehicle could do the fighting. Only a wheeled vehicle could do the moving.
The vehicle that answered those requirements came from a Swiss drawing board. The Mowag Piranha, designed in the 1960s by the Swiss firm Mowag Motorwagen Fabrik, was an 8×8 armored hull built around a simple proposition: mobility first, everything else arranged around it. The United States Marine Corps adopted a development of it in the early 1980s as the LAV 25, a reconnaissance and fire support vehicle that proved itself in Grenada and Panama.
Canada built its own version, and in April 1989, Australia bought 15 ex-Marine Corps examples to run trials. The trials were conducted by the 2nd Cavalry Regiment in Northern Australia through 1990 and 1991. The verdict was clear. The wheeled concept worked. The distances were covered. The vehicle performed. The cavalry doctrine held up.
What followed was a three-phase acquisition program that eventually delivered 257 vehicles. The first full production contract was signed in December 1992. By 1997, the 2nd Cavalry Regiment at Darwin was fully equipped. The vehicle that entered service was not simply a copy of the American original.
It was an Australian product in the ways that mattered. The Australian Army took the base LAV 25 hull and reworked it for the environment their crews would actually fight in. The interior of a vehicle operating in Northern Australia can reach 55° C. The ASLAV received air conditioning. The tires were widened, changed to Michelin XML low-pressure cross-country pattern, capable of operating even after puncture on solid run-flat inserts.
The radios were Australian-made Raven systems. The exhaust was rerouted. Storage was expanded. A fridge was fitted. These were not frivolities. In temperatures that incapacitate soldiers within hours, they were operational necessities. The variant structure was built around a concept called the mission role installation kit, a uniquely Australian engineering solution that allowed a single turretless hull to be reconfigured in the field into multiple roles without returning the vehicle to a depot. The reconnaissance variant, the
ASLAV 25, carried the 25-mm M242 Bushmaster chain gun in a two-man stabilized turret with a coaxial 7.62-mm machine gun. This was the fighting vehicle. The ASLAV PC was as personnel carrier, moving up to seven soldiers under armor. The ASLAV carried a hydraulically raised surveillance mast mounting a thermal imager, a laser rangefinder, a day camera, and a battlefield surveillance radar capable of detecting targets at 35,000 m.
The command variant was a mobile headquarters. The ambulance carried three lying casualties or six seated. The fitter and recovery variants kept the fleet running. The vehicle’s hull was all welded aluminum with ceramic composite applique armor, providing protection against small arms fire and shell splinters. With the frontal arc hardened against 30-mm projectiles at combat distances, combat weight was approximately 13,000 kg.
The Detroit Diesel 6V-53T turbocharged engine produced 275 horsepower, enough to drive the vehicle to a road speed of 100 km/h. Range was 660 km. The vehicle was originally fully amphibious, propelled through water at 10 km/h by two propellers, and steered by four rudders. It could be carried by a C-130 Hercules.
Bushmaster gun itself was the vehicle’s principal lethality. It fired at selectable rate of 100 or 200 rounds per minute, and its dual feed system allowed the gunner to switch between armor-piercing discarding sabot rounds, accurate to 2,200 m, and high-explosive incendiary rounds effective out to 3,000 m. A trained gunner could shift between ammunition natures in under a second.
Against light vehicles, crew-served weapons, walls, light fortifications, and personnel, it was devastating. According to Lieutenant Colonel Roger Noble, writing in the Australian Army Journal in 2004, the ASLAV represented, in his words, “arguably the best light armored vehicle in the world.” Noble commanded the first Australian cavalry force to take the vehicle into sustained ground combat, and documented what the platform could and could not do against a real enemy.
His assessment was not promotional literature. It was operational experience. The ASLAV’s first operational deployment was East Timor in September 1999, when C Squadron of the 2nd Cavalry Regiment landed vehicles in a burning Dili from the tank landing ship HMAS Tobruk. The vehicles provided mobility and armored presence in the streets, while the International Force for East Timor stabilized a collapsing capital.
They patrolled the border, they escorted convoys, they were the most capable armored assets on the ground in the first critical weeks of the operation. No vehicle was lost. Iraq was different. When Australia’s Security Detachment reached Baghdad in 2003, the city was already fragmenting. The invasion had succeeded, the peace was failing.
The ASLAV crews of the 2nd Cavalry Regiment found themselves conducting armored patrols through one of the most dangerous urban environments on Earth, protecting Australian diplomatic and intelligence personnel in and around the International Zone. On April 13, 2004, a CCDETASLAV engaged an insurgent mortar base plate that was firing into the Green Zone.
It was the first time an Australian vehicle fired 25 mm rounds in anger since Vietnam. Six months later, on October 25, 2004, Lieutenant Garth Callender’s patrol was moving through Baghdad toward the International Zone checkpoint when an insurgent detonated a car packed with artillery shells.
The blast destroyed much of the vehicle. Four soldiers were wounded. Callender himself sustained injuries severe enough that he was listed as Australia’s first serious casualty of the war. He survived. He went back. He wrote about it in his memoir after the blast, published by Black Ink in 2015. Callender describes the moment before the explosion with a kind of clarity that only survivors carry.
Of the blast itself, he writes that he has no recollection, nothing. The vehicle absorbed the explosion. The crew were wounded but breathing. Trooper Matthew Millhouse was knocked unconscious in the same blast. He came to and ran to Callender’s aid. He was awarded a commendation for his actions that day. He suffered a traumatic brain injury that he carried silently for years.
He died on August 28, 2015 of young onset dementia caused by the blast. He is now listed on the Australian War Memorial Honour Roll as a casualty of the Iraq War. Callender became patron of the Matthew Millhouse Salute charity in his memory. The vehicle that absorbed that bomb was still fighting. Now, before we get into the Overwatch deployments and what happened on Route Bismark in 2007, if you are watching this and finding value in this deep dive into military hardware and the soldiers who operate it, hit subscribe. It costs nothing and it keeps
this channel going. In July 2006, Australia’s commitment in Iraq expanded. The Overwatch Battle Group West deployed to Tallil Airbase in Dhi Qar province with over 500 personnel, roughly 40 ASLAVs and 19 Bushmaster Protected Mobility Vehicles. Their adversary was Muqtada al-Sadr’s Jaish al-Mahdi militia.
The operating environment was southern Iraq in summer, a landscape of irrigated farmland, tribal towns, and roads that insurgents had been mining for 3 years. On April 23rd, 2007, an ASLAV patrol struck an improvised explosive device on Route Bismark near An Nasiriyah. Three soldiers were wounded. Vehicles were damaged. One ASLAV was destroyed.
During the recovery operation, its hulk was struck again by a rocket-propelled grenade. The crews were alive. Defense writer Ian McPhedran reported in the Daily Telegraph on Anzac Day, 25 April 2007, that the bomb which hit the Australian patrol would have destroyed the Humvees used by American forces. That is a journalist’s assessment, not a controlled trial, but it was grounded in something real.
By that point in the war, the American Humvee had become a symbol of inadequate protection. 67 American soldiers were killed inside Humvees in just the first 4 months of 2006. A casualty rate so severe, it forced a crash program to procure mine-resistant vehicles. British Snatch Land Land Rovers in Iraq earned an equally grim reputation.
The ASLAV was not invulnerable. But across every patrol the Overwatch forces conducted, no Australian soldier was killed in action in Iraq, not one. The Australian National Audit Office assessed the ASLAV fleet in those years and recorded that defense had been very satisfied with the vehicle’s performance, describing the 50 ASLAVs deployed to Iraq at that time as the best equipped and most capable light armored vehicles in their class.
Afghanistan was a different kind of test. The mountains of Uruzgan province were nothing like the flat roads of Di Car. The Tangy Valley and Chora Valley offered tight terrain, steep gradients, and road surfaces that destroyed lesser vehicles. The Taliban had been watching how improvised explosive devices worked in Iraq. They adapted quickly.
From 2006 onward, Australian ASLAV squadrons deployed in rotating mentoring task forces and reconstruction task forces, protecting convoys, conducting route clearance, mentoring Afghan National Army units, and supporting special forces operations. The vehicle’s wheels, which critics had always cited as a weakness, proved an asset in this environment.
Wheeled vehicles on good surfaces move faster and range further than tracks. And in Uruzgan, where the Australian mission depended on presence and mobility across a province the size of a small European country, that mattered. American forces operating alongside Australians in the Tangy Valley in March 2011 noted that the ASLAV crossed notoriously rough terrain with ease and that Taliban fighters reduced their rate of fire when the vehicles were present and overwatching from elevated ground.
25-mm rounds at range are a deterrent that has nothing to do with whether your hull is aluminum or steel. The vehicle was upgraded progressively throughout both wars. Bar armor, also called slat armor, was welded to the exterior to detonate rocket-propelled grenades before they could strike the hull. Kevlar spall liners were fitted inside to contain fragmentation.
Kongsberg Protector Remote Weapon Stations were installed on personnel carrier and support variants, allowing crew commanders to fire without exposing themselves above the roofline. 59 of these systems were acquired for the fleet. Much of this work was done in Kuwait or in theater. On October 8th, 2007, Trooper David Pearce of the 2nd/14th Light Horse Regiment was driving an ASLAV on a road about 6 km from Tarin Kowt, returning from an engineering reconnaissance task.
The vehicle triggered an improvised explosive device positioned on top of an anti-tank mine. The combined blast killed Trooper Pearce instantly. His crew commander was wounded. Trooper Pearce was 41 years old. His family called him Poppy. His crew commander, Lance Corporal Michael Crossley, led the pallbearers at the ramp ceremony at Tarin Kowt alongside seven other members of Bravo Squadron of the 2nd/14th Light Horse Regiment.
He was the only ASLAV crewman killed inside his vehicle across both wars. The final Australian ASLAV combat deployment closed in late 2013. Major Patrick Davison, commanding the 2nd Cavalry Regiment Task Force in Uruzgan, reported that the vehicles had flown 58 combat missions between June and early November and covered more than 4,000 km in the province.
They came home. The ASLAV’s rivals tell a story of what the Australian Army chose not to buy. The American Stryker, a later development of the same LAV lineage, entered service in 2002. It was heavier at approximately 19,000 kg, powered by a 350 horsepower Caterpillar engine, and carried a nine-man infantry squad rather than a reconnaissance crew.
It was not amphibious. Its standard armament was a remote mounted heavy machine gun rather than a cannon turret. In pure firepower terms, the ASLAV’s stabilized 25 mm gun was the more capable system for the reconnaissance role. The Stryker was a troop carrier first. The British Scimitar, which served British forces in the same Iraqi battle space, was a tracked light vehicle weighing approximately 8,000 kg with a 30 mm L21A1 RARDEN cannon.
It was low and fast in good conditions. In Basra’s urban environment, its tracks could be damaged by debris. Its range and road speed were significantly lower than the ASLAV’s. Neither was wrong. They reflected different doctrines. The British and Americans needed vehicles suited their own strategic weight and force structure.
Australia needed a vehicle that could range across the top of a continent, embed with special forces, and fight when it had to without a tank regiment behind it. The ASLAV did all of that. Today, the ASLAV is gone. Under Project Land 400 Phase 2, the Rheinmetall Boxer Combat Reconnaissance Vehicle was selected in March 2018 to replace it.
The contract, signed in August 2018, covered 211 vehicles for approximately 4.28 billion Australian dollars. The Boxer is heavier, more heavily armored, and equipped with a Lance 30 mm turret that offers a substantial step beyond the 25 mm Bushmaster. Initial operational capability was declared in June 2022.
The ASLAV was declared non-deployable in its final years because its armor protection no longer met the standards demanded by a threat environment shaped by explosively formed penetrators and larger improvised devices than anything imagined when the vehicle was designed. It served longer than anyone intended. 1989, a dusty proving ground in northern Australia.
A vehicle that looked wrong, too light, too fast, too reliant on rubber. It had no depleted uranium armor. It had no active protection system. Its aluminum hull stopped rifle bullets and shell splinters and nothing else without help. In the years that followed, its crews bolted cage armor to its flanks, lined its interior with Kevlar, mounted remote weapon stations above its hatches, and asked it to survive weapons it was never built to face.
In East Timor, it stabilized a collapsing capital. In Baghdad, it absorbed a car bomb and brought its crew home. On Route Bismarck, it survived a blast that defense correspondents said would have killed its counterparts. In Uruzgan, it climbed mountains that should have stopped a wheeled vehicle cold, and it made the Taliban hesitate to engage.
Only one man died inside it in two decades of combat. His name was David Pearce. His crew called him Poppy. The critics were right that the ASLAV was lightly protected. They were wrong about what lightly protected means when the vehicle is fast, reliable, amphibious, fit for the climate, armed with a gun that reaches to 3,000 m, and crewed by soldiers who know how to use it.
257 vehicles, two wars, 30 years. That is not luck. That is Australian cavalry doing exactly what cavalry has always done, finding a way through when heavier forces could not move at 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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