In January 2025, the United States government designated MS-13 a foreign terrorist organization. It is on the same list as the Sinaloa Cartel. It has the same legal classification as Hezbollah. >> >> The designation put MS-13 alongside organizations that generate billions of dollars a year, maintain private armies, and wage war against nation-states.
But here is a number >> >> that does not fit. The average MS-13 member in El Salvador earned approximately $34 a month. The Sinaloa Cartel pulls in an estimated $3 billion a year. MS-13, MS-13, the entire organization, all 50,000 to 70,000 members >> >> spread across 10 countries, generates roughly $60 million.
That is not even a rounding error on the Sinaloa balance sheet. A 3-year study funded by the National Institute of Justice concluded that MS-13 has the features of a social organization more than a criminal organization. The researchers called it a social club, not a lucrative criminal enterprise.
That raises a question most coverage of MS-13 never bothers to ask. If it is not money holding this thing together across 42 US states, across Central America, across four decades of federal crackdowns, and the largest gang incarceration program in human history, then what is? The mainstream version treats MS-13 a cartel, a foreign import running on drug money that can be dismantled through prosecution and deportation.
Almost [snorts] every part of that is wrong. MS-13 was made in the United States. was transformed into a transnational organization by American immigration policy. It is governed from Salvadoran prison cells via smuggled cell phones. And its members do not stay for the paycheck. They stay because the organization functions as a violent religion with initiation rights, >> >> mandatory worship, and a code enforced by death.
This is the story of how a group of heavy metal stoners became the most structurally resilient criminal organization on the planet, and why the people fighting it still do not understand what it actually is. Late 1970s, a 7-Eleven at the corner of Westmoreland Avenue and James M. Wood Street in the MacArthur Park area of Los Angeles, a dozen Salvadoran teenagers gathered there most nights smoking marijuana, drinking, and listening to Black Sabbath >> >> and Ozzy Osbourne.
They wore ripped jeans and long black hair. They called themselves Mara Salvatrucha Stoners. UCLA gang researcher Tom Ward traces the group’s formation to around 1978. LAPD intelligence identifies members as early as 1975. They were not drug traffickers. They were not killers. They were kids who liked heavy metal and had nowhere else to go.
That’s the origin story most people never hear. The gang that the FBI now classifies alongside terrorist organizations started as a stoner crew at a convenience store. El Salvador’s civil war from 1979 to 1992 killed about 75,000 people and displaced over 1 million. The Salvadoran population in the United States quintupled during the 1980s from 94,000 to over 465,000, and most of them landed in the Pico-Union and Westlake neighborhoods of Los Angeles.
Territory was already carved up by the 18th Street gang, by Mexican Mafia affiliates, and by established Chicano and black gangs. Salvadorans were the last to arrive, and nobody was welcoming them. Only about 2% of Salvadoran asylum applications were approved during the 1980s because the Reagan administration could not grant refugee status without contradicting its own military support for El Salvador’s government.
These were war survivors trapped in a bureaucratic lie. The stoners formed for self-protection. Mara is Central American slang for gang. Salva is El Salvador. Trucha means street smart. They fought back against 18th Street, and for a while the two gangs maintained an uneasy coexistence, both accepting Salvadoran members. The definitive split came around 1989, reportedly triggered by a fight over a girl that escalated into a murder, and then into a cycle of retaliation that has never stopped.
But the real transformation happened somewhere else. Inside the California prison system, MS members were forced to pledge allegiance to the Mexican Mafia, La Eme, in exchange for protection. M is the 13th letter of the alphabet. The number that would define the gang wasn’t chosen. It was imposed. The same prison walls that were supposed to contain the gang gave it a corporate parent, a brand identity, and a structure it had never possessed.
The stoners came out as cholos with shaved heads and baggy pants, speaking a different language. And the 13 that marked them as property of the Mexican Mafia would eventually travel 2,500 miles south to mean something La Eme never intended. By 1990, a man named Ernesto Deras, alias Satan, had arrived in Los Angeles from El Salvador.
He wasn’t a refugee teenager. He was a former member of El Salvador’s Ramon Belloso Rapid Deployment Infantry Battalion, trained by US Green Berets in Panama. He took command of the Fulton clique and imposed military discipline, ambush tactics, withdrawal protocols, small unit operations. The stoner crew was becoming something else entirely.
But the force that would truly make MS-13 transnational wasn’t a soldier or a street fight. It was a piece of legislation signed by a president who’d never heard of Mara Salvatrucha. Between 1997 and 2015, the United States deported 244,000 people to El Salvador. It was the most consequential gang recruitment program in history, and the US government ran it.
The Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996, signed by President Bill Clinton, expanded the definition of aggravated felony and reduced the qualifying prison sentence from 5 years to 1 year. It was applied retroactively. Gang members with legal permanent resident status who had been convicted of qualifying offenses, sometimes minor ones, now faced mandatory deportation.
Between 1998 and 2005, nearly 46,000 convicted criminals were deported to Central America alongside 160,000 unauthorized immigrants. >> >> The exact number who were MS-13 is unknown. The Congressional Research Service has noted that deportation records did not consistently track gang affiliation. They arrived in a country that had just ended a civil war.
The civilian police force, the PNC, established only in 1993, was 3 years old. Weapons left over from 12 years of conflict were everywhere. Jobs were nowhere. An estimated 84% of accused gang members held in Salvadoran jails in the early 2000s were released due to lack of proof, swelling gang ranks on the outside. Employers asked returning deportees to roll up their sleeves and checked for tattoos before turning them away.
Academic research by Sviatchy found that in municipalities receiving deportees, extortion and drug trafficking doubled, and violence increased by 40% between 1985 and 2011. An FBI official, Stanley Stoy, later acknowledged what should have been obvious. When they came out of American prisons and went back, that’s when they became more formalized.
El Salvador’s response made everything worse. The Mano Dura laws of 2003 and 2004 produced 30,000 arrests. The prisons filled. But because the government separated gangs into different facilities, it created safe spaces where gang leaders could organize, communicate via smuggled cell phones, and develop the hierarchical command structure that would govern MS-13 for the next two decades.
The policy designed to crush the gang gave it a government. The most powerful MS-13 leaders in the world don’t carry weapons. They carry contraband cell phones. Around 2002, gang leaders incarcerated at San Francisco Gotera prison in El Salvador established a governing council they called the 12 apostles of the devil. It evolved into the Ranfla Nacional, the board of directors.
Its most powerful member was Borromeo Enrique Enriques, alias Diablito de Hollywood, little devil of Hollywood. He had gotten his start in a Los Angeles clique before being deported to El Salvador, where he assumed command of the entire organization from a prison cell. The structure beneath the Ranfla operates in three tiers. The Ranfla Nacional sits at the top, prison-based and issuing orders through smuggled phones.
Below them, the Ranfla on las calles, senior leaders on the streets executing directives. Below that, the Ranfla on los penales, prison-based leaders at individual facilities. Beneath all of this sit the programas, regional umbrella structures grouping multiple cliques under a single coordinator.
The Ranfla Nacional is >> >> centralized in form, even when its reach is uneven in practice. The East Coast program alone, run by Armando Eliu Melgar Diaz, alias Blue, oversaw 21 cliques across 13 states in Washington, D.C. On December 13th, 2015, federal wiretaps captured MS-13 leader Edwin Manica Flores, >> >> alias Sugar, calling from a Salvadoran prison to Jose Martinez Castro, alias Chucky, head of the East Coast program in Richmond, Virginia.
Chucky had assembled MS-13 leaders from Massachusetts, Maryland, Ohio, Texas, and Virginia at his home. Sugar spoke to the room via speakerphone. The transcript reads, “We are here as representatives of the program. One of the points that was discussed there, I believe, was unity in brotherhood that we all must share.
” Within each clique, the hierarchy descends from the primera palabra, the first word, the shot-caller, through the segunda palabra, down to homeboys, and then three levels of probationary members, paro, observacion, and chukiao. Promotions require escalating acts of violence. In some cliques, each promotion brings another 13-second beat.
The degree of centralization is genuinely disputed among experts. The Department of Justice portrays MS-13 as a well-organized hierarchy. The Washington Office on Latin America found no evidence that Salvadoran leadership has systematic control over US operations. The most accurate assessment comes from the Orion Policy Institute in 2025.
MS-13 is, and I quote, “Hierarchical in form, but fragmented in practice. Think of it as the franchise paradox. The brand is centralized, the rules are centralized, the identity is centralized, but every individual franchise runs its own books. That’s precisely why RICO prosecutions can take down a clique, a single franchise location, without touching the organization.
There’s no headquarters to raid, no central treasury to seize. The franchise model is the armor. MS-13 does not hold its members with money. It holds them with blood. FBI Special Agent Jeffrey E. Wood Jr.’s affidavit from a 2016 Boston investigation lays out the mechanics. To become a full member, a homeboy, a prospective member must first commit at least one murder of a rival gang member.
Once voted in by the clique, leaders slowly count to 13 while existing members beat the prospective member. Afterward, they say, “Welcome to the Mara.” and throw the devil horn hand signs. The horns, la garra, Satan’s claw, came straight from Black Sabbath concerts four decades earlier.
The governance runs through a system called the misa, the mass. These are mandatory weekly meetings held in abandoned buildings, parks, or private homes. Missing a meeting is a punishable offense. At the misa, initiations are conducted, violations are adjudicated, orders from the Ranfla are communicated, murders are planned and sanctioned, and dues are collected.
FBI >> >> agents in Boston were able to record and videotape these meetings, producing critical evidence. The misa is not a gang hangout. It is church. The exit door is welded shut. The blood-out rule, leave and you die, is real. Brenda Paz was 17 years old, a former MS-13 member who had become an FBI informant.
On July 13th, 2003, 4 months pregnant, she was stabbed to death on the banks of the Shenandoah River in Virginia. She had provided information on at least 60 cases. Two gang members received life sentences. In a 2019 Maryland case, a clique leader suspected a 16-year-old member of cooperating with police.
He called a senior leader in El Salvador for authorization, received it, then ordered the boy attacked with a three-bladed weapon called the glove. The victim suffered 144 wounds and died. His body was stuffed in a car trunk, driven to Stafford County, and set on fire. Most people assume MS-13’s brutality is driven by profit, by the logic of a drug cartel protecting its market. Not quite.
Attorney General William Barr himself acknowledged the distinction when he said that MS-13 is somewhat unique. The street savagery is not driven by commercial interests. Members earn $34 a month and commit murder to maintain standing in an organization that provides identity, belonging, and a structure more cohesive than anything else their lives have offered.
The initiation creates mutual criminal liability. The misa enables constant surveillance. The satanic imagery separates members from mainstream society. The blood-out rule makes leaving a death sentence. It is a machine that manufactures loyalty in an environment where money cannot buy it, and that is why traditional law enforcement tools built for profit-driven organizations keep failing against it.
Before I show you what the 2012 truce revealed, and it is the single most important piece of evidence in this entire story, pause for a moment. What do you think actually holds MS-13 together when the money is not there? Drop your answer below. Here’s a number that explains the gap between MS-13’s reputation and its reality. $32. That is what a bus company in San Salvador paid MS-13 per week per vehicle in extortion, the renta.
Street vendors paid $1 a day. Schoolchildren paid 10 to 25 cents, collected by gang-affiliated classmates. Global Financial [snorts] Integrity estimated MS-13 has has extorted over $1.1 billion from the Northern Triangle. But divided among tens of thousands of members, the per capita take is negligible. Operation Choke, the first large-scale Salvadoran investigation into MS-13’s >> >> finances, intercepted communications showing the Ranfla Nacional collected nearly $600,000 from cliques in just 2 months,
suggesting annual extortion revenue of $3 to $4 million from the surveilled cliques alone. Drug distribution exists, but stays at street level. The Congressional Research Service confirmed MS-13 has mostly been involved in local drug peddling, cocaine, marijuana, methamphetamine. When member Nelson Comandari tried in the early 2000s to build a wholesale distribution network, MS-13 members were, according to Insight Crime, inept at drug smuggling and resistant to the whole idea.
He was marginalized and eventually captured. Sex trafficking provided another income stream. Rances Ulises Amaya, an MS-13 leader leader in Springfield, Virginia, was sentenced to 50 years in 2012 for trafficking girls as young as 14, forcing them to have sex with up to 10 men per day.
The Sinaloa Cartel runs submarines and armored convoys. MS-13’s signature weapon is still the machete. September 13th, 2016, the day before her 16th birthday, Nisa Mickens was found dead on a tree-lined street in Brentwood, Long Island. Her friend, Kayla Cuevas, 16, was found the next day in a wooded backyard nearby.
Both victims had been beaten with baseball bats and attacked with machetes by members of the Sailors Locos Salvatrucha Westside Clique. The killings followed a confrontation at Brentwood High School. Alexi Saenz, alias Blasty, the clique’s leader, ultimately pleaded guilty to racketeering and firearms charges connected to eight murders committed in a single year.
He was sentenced to 68 years. His brother, Cairo Saenz, pleaded guilty in early 2026 to seven murders and faces 40 to 60 years. Those murders, along with at least 30 other MS-13 linked killings on Long Island since 2009, became the centerpiece of the Trump administration’s anti-gang rhetoric. Kayla Cuevas’s mother, Evelyn Rodriguez, became an anti-gang activist and attended President Trump’s 2018 State of the Union address.
She was killed in September 2018, struck by a car during a dispute over a memorial for her daughter. Attorney General Jeff Sessions visited the Central Islip Federal Courthouse in April 2017 and declared that the MS-13 motto is kill, rape, and control, and that he had a message for the gangs that target our young people, we are targeting you.
The federal government responded with force. Operation Community Shield produced over 61,000 gang-related arrests, including more than 8,100 MS-13 members. Operation Matador arrested 475 people on Long Island alone, >> >> 99 of whom had entered the country as unaccompanied minors. Joint Task Force Vulcan, created by Attorney General Barr in 2019, charged 749 MS-13 defendants across the country and secured 37 life sentences.
The arrests were real. The convictions were real. The impact on MS-13’s domestic membership was not. The FBI’s estimate of approximately 10,000 MS-13 members in the United States has not meaningfully changed since 2005. A 2025 Small Wars Journal study using social network analysis found that after federal agents removed a shot-caller from a Los Angeles clique, the network actually became more efficient with fewer connections and shorter distances across the network. Regional leadership simply
reorganized the command structure around the gap. For 18 months, MS-13 leadership proved something law enforcement had spent decades denying. On March 8th, 2012, leaders of M M N MS-13 and Barrio 18 agreed to a truce brokered by Raul Mijango, a former FMLN congressman and ex-guerrilla commander, and Bishop Fabio Reynado Colindres Abarca.
The next day, 30 gang leaders were transferred from the maximum security prison at Zacatecoluca, known as Zacatraz, to lower security facilities with relaxed rules on visitors and communication. Defense Minister David Munguía Payés later acknowledged the truce was planned and designed in his office. The result was immediate.
El Salvador’s murder rate dropped roughly 60% from an average of 14 killings per day to five. On April 14th, 2012, El Salvador recorded its first day with zero homicides in over 3 years. A World Health Organization Bulletin study confirmed the truce was responsible for approximately a 45% reduction in homicides. The truce collapsed by mid-2014.
Gangs used the ceasefire to expand and rearm, and the Rondas Nacionales collected over $600,000 to purchase M-16s, M-60 machine guns, grenades, and rocket launchers. Mass graves were discovered. Extortion never stopped. The new president refused to continue negotiations.
The aftermath was catastrophic. By 2015, El Salvador had the highest national homicide rate in the world, 106.3 per 100,000, a 70% surge. Funes was sentenced to 14 years. Munguía Payés received 18 years, but the truce proved the Rondas Nacionales possessed genuine command authority. When they ordered violence to stop across an entire country, it stopped.
When they ordered it to resume, it resumed. That was the strongest evidence of centralized control the world had ever seen, and it came not from a prosecution, but from a peace deal. The truce proved the leadership had real control, and that raises a question nobody in power seems willing to answer.
If the Rondas can turn violence on and off like a switch, why has no government used that fact to negotiate a permanent end? What does it tell you about who actually benefits from MS-13’s existence? Leave your answer below. 91,000 arrests, a 98% drop in homicides, and a deal that may have destroyed the best MS-13 prosecution in American history.
On March 27th, 2022, after a gang killing spree left 87 people dead in 72 hours, El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele declared a state of exception, suspending constitutional rights, including the right to be informed of charges, the right to legal counsel, and freedom of assembly. The legislature has renewed it every month since.
As of early 2026, more than 91,000 people have been arrested. The CECOT mega prison, the terrorism confinement center, opened in Tecoluca in January 2023 with capacity for 40,000. Prisoners get 30 minutes outside their cells per day. There are no visits, no phone calls, no mail, and no rehabilitation.
Justice Minister Villatoro said prisoners will never return to their communities. The homicide rate collapsed. It fell from 106.3 per 100,000 in 2015 to 1.9 in 2024. Just 114 total homicides in a country of 6.3 million people. In 2025, there were only 82. By any measure, it is the most dramatic reduction in gang violence any country has achieved in modern history.
But a Salvadoran police intelligence report obtained by Insight Crime in October 2023 showed 53 armed gang groups still active, 43 of them MS-13 cells. Over 42,000 members and collaborators remained at large. The gang had pre-built a resilience mechanism for exactly this scenario, a parallel leadership structure called La Federación, designed before the crackdown to maintain organizational continuity if the Rondas was isolated.
A 2025 study in the British Journal of Criminology confirmed it functioned as intended. The human cost is documented. Amnesty International found systemic use of torture in Salvadoran prisons. Cristosal recorded over 415 deaths in custody by mid-2025 and 66 cases of minors subjected to torture. Human Rights Watch documented 3,319 children detained between March 2022 and December 2023, some as young as 12.
Bukele acknowledged approximately 8,000 innocent people were released after wrongful detention. The most consequential complication sits at the intersection of Washington and San Salvador. In March 2025, the Department of Justice dropped terrorism charges against Rondas Nacionales member César Humberto López Larios, alias Grinnes, and deported him to El Salvador for imprisonment in CECOT.
Prosecutors had amassed 92,903 pages of discovery, 600 pages of phone intercepts, 21 boxes of documents, and 11 GB of audio. A former federal agent called it a historical loss. López Larios and other deported leaders had given testimony about the Bukele government’s own ties to the gang.
Testimony that would now never be heard in a United States courtroom. The deportation deal between Trump and Bukele effectively undercut Joint Task Force Vulcan. The investigation that had spent years and millions pursuing MS-13’s most senior leadership. If the difference between MS-13 and every other criminal organization, the fact that its poverty is its armor, that its rituals are its structure, and that every crackdown in its history has removed members while leaving the template intact, is the kind of thing you came here for. A like tells me to
keep going. The CEE O at Mega Prison sits on 23 hectares of cleared land in Tecoluca, El Salvador. It is surrounded by 111-m concrete walls and a 15,000-V electric fence. 19 guard towers watch over the compound. Approximately 14,500 people are held inside. The prison director told journalists that once an inmate enters, he never leaves.
It is the largest prison on Earth. Built as a monument to the most ambitious attempt to destroy MS-13 >> >> in history. But as of the most recent police intelligence report, over 42,000 MS-13 members and collaborators remained outside those walls. La Federación, the backup leadership structure the gang built before anyone came for them, was functioning as designed.
The building that was supposed to end the story is standing. The organization it was built to hold is standing, too.
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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