Arab Billionaire Told a Street Kid Playing “Iron Man” to Shut Up — But Ozzy Osbourne Was Watching – Hw

Thursday evening, September 17th, 2015, on the corner of Canon Drive in Beverly Hills, a 19-year-old kid was playing guitar. And 11 minutes later, a man whose fortune nobody had ever managed to count properly would turn to him and tell him to stop that noise. If you think this is a story about a rich man silencing a poor kid, you’re wrong.

Because that man knew the song the boy was playing. He knew it very well, and that was exactly why he silenced him. But there was a third man on that sidewalk, a tired Englishman in a black cap standing outside a restaurant door getting some air, Ozzy Osbourne. The boy’s name was Micah Rannick. His blond hair had grown down past his shoulders because a haircut costs money, too, and every dollar in Micah’s pocket was already spoken for.

He’d come from Bakersfield 11 weeks earlier, 2 years after his father died. He had thrown a guitar, a sleeping bag, and four cassette tapes into a 2001 Honda and driven south. He still slept in that Honda at night, four blocks away, parked on the one street where he’d learned through trial and error that he wouldn’t get a ticket.

During the day, he played on the sidewalk. And the guitar in his hands that evening wasn’t actually his. It had belonged to his father, Ray Rannick. Ray had fixed diesel engines his whole life. No soap had ever gotten his hands completely clean, and he had carried exactly four cassette tapes in his truck. One of them was Black Sabbath’s Paranoid.

Micah learned the riff to Iron Man off that album before he ever learned to hold a chord because every morning at a quarter past four, his father would start the truck, and the tape would pick up right where it left off. And in Micah’s childhood, that riff was morning itself. Now, there was a thin crack in the body of the guitar covered over with tape, but the crack wasn’t the real problem.

The neck had started to bow, and an old luthier on Pico Boulevard had run a finger along it and said one single sentence, “$600 within 3 weeks. After that, this guitar’s finished.” Canon Drive was gold that evening. The sun hadn’t fully gone down yet. The vent of one of the restaurants was pushing out the smell of butter and toasted bread.

Valets jogged past with keys clinking against each other. Car door shut. Somebody laughed. Micah crouched down behind his tin and turned the little amp down one more notch, because playing on the street here required a permit from the city, and he didn’t have one. He’d been warned twice, and twice he’d turned it down.

He didn’t know what would happen the third time, and he preferred not to find out. At that same moment, 50 ft back down the sidewalk, a 58-year-old man was walking. His name was Faisal Al-Zahrani. In 30 years, he had taken the shipping group he inherited from his father and spread it across three continents.

And that week, he was in Los Angeles for the final meeting on a hotel portfolio. His dark gray suit was cut to measure. The gray at his temples was trimmed to the millimeter, and walking beside him was Layla Haddad, who had been his assistant for 4 years. Layla was surprised by two things that evening.

The first was that instead of getting into the car, her boss had said, “Let’s walk a bit.” Faisal Al-Zahrani never walked in Los Angeles. The second one she wouldn’t understand until a week later, looking back. When the riff started, Faisal was 50 ft away, and he stopped. Not the way a man stops to check for traffic. He stopped like a sentence cut off in the middle of a word.

His right hand went to the inside pocket of his jacket without him thinking about it. Whatever he was reaching for hadn’t been there in 37 years. 1 second, 2 seconds, then he lowered his hand, his jaw tightened, and he kept walking, faster this time. Not like a man trying to get somewhere, but like a man getting away from something.

Leila didn’t see it cuz she was looking at her phone. The man standing outside the restaurant door did. Faisal took five more steps and stopped. Then he turned on his heel. He walked back toward Micah, fast and decisive. The kind of walk that makes people on a sidewalk step out of the way without realizing they’re doing it.

Micah was in the middle of the riff when he saw him coming. He pulled his hand off the strings, the sound cut out, and a strange emptiness was left on the sidewalk. Faisal stopped directly in front of the guitar case and spoke without looking at the boy at all, looking instead at the shop window behind him.

“Would you stop that noise?” he said. It wasn’t a question. Leila watched the color climb all the way up to Micah’s ears. “I’m sorry, sir.” the boy said, his voice rising a little. “I can turn it down. I’ll turn it down right now. I” Faisal cut him off. “I don’t want you to turn it down.” he said. “I want you to stop.” Then for the first time, he looked at the boy’s face, and he said it.

“People on this street pay more for one dinner than you make in a year. The least you can do is let them eat it in peace.” The security guard from the building across the sidewalk heard the raised voices, smelled an opportunity, and came over. He asked Micah for his permit. Of course, there wasn’t one. “Pack it up.” the guard said, resting a hand on his belt.

“You’ve got 5 minutes.” Micah didn’t say anything. 11 weeks had taught him that saying something on this street never worked. He bent down and pulled the cable out of the amp. His hands were shaking, not from anger, from shame. The two look alike, but they are not the same thing. As he wound the cable, his elbow caught the tin can.

It went over and the loose change out of $212 spilled across the sidewalk. A quarter rolled out and came to rest beside Faysal Alzahrani’s polished shoe. Faysal didn’t look at it. He turned and started walking and as Layla caught up behind him, she noticed that her boss’s ears had gone red. That evening, she still didn’t know what that meant.

The man standing outside the restaurant door watched that quarter roll the whole way. 45 minutes earlier, he’d been inside sitting at a table with Sharon and two people from the tour organization. What they were talking about was Black Sabbath’s farewell tour. It had been announced two weeks before and everyone at that table was discussing it like it was good news.

Then somebody, meaning absolutely nothing by it, said the final show. Two words. Ozzy Osbourne had been walking onto stages for 47 years and that was the first time he had ever heard those two words come out of another person’s mouth. He’d gotten up in the middle of dinner, said he was going to get some air, stepped outside the door and stood there without moving for 10 minutes.

He was 66 years old, black cap, long black coat, a few silver rings on his fingers. He’d pushed his round glasses up onto his forehead because the light was starting to go. Nobody on the sidewalk was looking at him because a man standing like that looked like nothing more than a tired old Englishman. His ears hadn’t worked properly in years.

Not after 47 years of amplifier walls. Sharon told him the same thing at least once a day. You don’t hear me and every single time she was right. But that riff cut straight through the noise of the street and reached him because that riff was filed somewhere else inside his head and right at that moment, 50 feet away, he saw a man in a gray suit stop like a sentence cut off in the middle.

Ozzie pushed off from the doorway. His walk was slow and his knees hurt. Nothing had been quite the same since that accident back in 2003. He passed right by the security guard and the guard didn’t even look at him. He came up in front of Micah, bent down with some difficulty, and started picking the scattered coins up off the sidewalk one by one.

Micah froze with no idea what to do. “Sir, you don’t have to. I can get them myself.” He started. The man looked up and answered in a low voice in that hoarse Birmingham accent. “You do the cable.” He said, “I’ll get the money.” He gathered the coins in his palm and dropped them into the tin and the sound they made came out strangely loud on that sidewalk.

Then he straightened up, looked at the neck of the guitar, narrowed his eyes and caught that slight bow in it and said nothing about it. Instead, he asked one question. “That thing you were playing just now, would you play it again from the top?” Micah let go of the cable in his hand and stared at him. “Sir, they just told me to stop. Security gave me 5 minutes.

” Ozzie shrugged. It was the shrug that for 40 years had made Sharon think, “Oh no.” the second she saw it. “I know.” He said, “Play it.” Micah made his decision in 3 seconds and he had no idea those 3 seconds were going to change his life. He put his hand back on the strings and that heavy slow iron-footed riff rolled out over Canon Drive for the second time.

60 ft down the sidewalk, Faisal Alzahrani, who had almost reached the end of the block, stopped again. Not for 1 second this time. Layla stopped beside him and looked at her boss’s face and what she saw wasn’t anger. It didn’t look like anything she had seen on that face in 4 years. Faisal didn’t turn around. He just stood there with his back to them, not moving.

Right at that moment, from the other end of the street, a voice came over the top of the guitar. It wasn’t shouting. It wasn’t that kind of voice, but everybody standing on Cannon Drive heard it. “You reached into your pocket,” Ozzy Osbourne said. Faisal’s shoulders went rigid. “Nobody saw it. I did.” There was a short silence.

The guitar kept going, and the voice came once more. “What was in that pocket 30 odd years ago, mate?” And Faisal Alzahrani turned around. He walked back from the end of the block. He wasn’t fast this time. Every step was a little heavier than the one before it, as if he were walking not toward a place, but toward a year. Micah wanted to stop playing, but Ozzy lifted a hand slightly, and the boy understood, and kept the riff going quietly underneath.

Faisal stopped 6 ft short and looked properly at the man in front of him for the first time. The round glasses pushed up onto the forehead, the black cap, that jawline. The face he had seen a thousand times on a cassette sleeve kept in a shoebox for 37 years. When his voice came out, it was almost a whisper.

“You’re,” he said. Ozzy didn’t answer. He just repeated his question softer this time. “What was in that pocket?” Faisal didn’t speak for a long time. Then he said one word, “Cassette.” He put his hands in his pockets, looked down at the sidewalk, and started to talk. And as he talked, his voice stopped being the voice of a man who knew his business and became the voice of a 19-year-old.

He had landed in Manchester in the autumn of 1976. His father had sent him there to study mechanical engineering, and for the first 3 months, Faisal cried every single night. His English was bad. It rained constantly, and nobody in the dorm asked him anything. Then one night, a kid from Salford who lived in the room at the end of the corridor, his name was Barry, heard that he couldn’t sleep, knocked on his door, and pushed a cassette into his hand.

Paranoid, Ozzy didn’t say anything. Faisal kept going, and that was where he told the real part. He never let that tape out of his hands again, but the reason wasn’t rebellion. He was studying mechanical engineering, and that was how his head worked. One evening, Barry told him something about the guitarist, and that was the thing that really got him.

When the man was 17, working in a sheet metal factory on his very last day on the job, he caught the tips of two fingers of his right hand in a machine, and he didn’t quit. He melted down a bottle of dish soap and made himself a pair of thimbles, covered them with leather, slackened the strings, and dropped the tuning so there would be less pull on his fingers.

“I was 19 years old,” Faisal said, “and it was the first time I’d ever heard of a man solving a problem with whatever he had in his hands. I wasn’t listening to that sound. I was listening to how that sound was even possible.” Something changed in Ozzy’s face. “Tony’s thimbles,” he said and laughed a little. “40 years on, he still makes them himself.

Won’t let anyone else near it.” Then he pushed his hands into the pockets of his coat and carried on, looking down at the sidewalk. “I was sat in the studio the first time he played that riff. Only one thing came into my head when I heard it. A great big iron bloke walking about. That’s what I said, and that’s how the song got its name.

” Faisal lifted his head. For 37 years, he had thought of that song as a piece of engineering, and now he was finding out that its name had come from a picture that popped into one man’s head. “Did you ever see us then?” Ozzy asked. It was an ordinary question, the kind he’d been asking people for 40 years. Live, I mean, back in those days.

Faisal’s jaw tightened. “No,” he said. And the few seconds of silence that followed told Aussie he had stepped somewhere he shouldn’t have. In the spring of ’78, he had bought a ticket, the first concert ticket he had ever bought in his life, and he had kept it in the drawer of his desk at the dorm for 2 weeks.

4 days before the show, his father arrived in Manchester without any warning. He wanted to see with his own eyes how his son was living. While Faisal was out, he tidied the room, opened the drawer, and found the ticket. He didn’t say a word about it. He simply laid the ticket on the desk next to the grade report and left it there.

When Faisal walked into that room and saw those two pieces of paper lying side by side, his father had made his point without ever opening his mouth. The next morning, he sat down across from his father, put the grade report on the table, and said, “When I graduate, I’ll come home and take over the company.” And he did come home.

And for 37 years, he was exactly the man in that sentence. “Do you know what actually made me angry tonight?” Faisal said, and for the first time his voice cracked. “It wasn’t this boy. This boy did nothing. That riff asked me a question in the middle of the street with no warning at all. And I have worked very hard for 37 years not to hear that question.

” There was a short silence. Michael was still playing quietly, and he didn’t understand half of what was being said, but he could see the man’s shoulders come down. Aussie said one thing. “My old man worked nights on the machines in Aston,” he said. “His hands never came clean.

And when I was 18, he borrowed 250 quid so he could buy me a PA system. Took him years to pay it back. He stopped. Yours took you off the stage, mine put me on it. Both of them came out of the same factory, mate.” Faisal Alzaraani didn’t say anything after that. Instead, he turned, stepped in front of the guitar case, and in his made-to-measure suit, on a Beverly Hills sidewalk, crouched down to Micah’s level. “What’s your name?” he asked.

The boy told him. Faisal went on. “Micah, I apologize for what I said to you a few minutes ago. It was a lie, and a bad one. The most valuable thing on this street tonight was the thing you were playing.” Micah nodded with no idea what to say. Faisal looked at the guitar, at the taped-over crack in the body, and the slight bow in the neck.

“Let me buy you a new guitar,” he said. “Tonight, from the shop on that corner. Whichever one you want.” Micah’s answer was three words. “It’s my dad’s.” Then his voice came up a little, because he wanted to say it. “My dad fixed diesel engines. He passed away 2 years ago, and he left me this guitar. And the neck is bowing.

” “The guy on Pico says $600, and I’ve got 3 weeks.” Faisal looked at the guitar for a while, then he asked the right question. “Can it be repaired?” Micah nodded. “If they take the neck off and reset it, and replace the frets, yes.” Faisal didn’t reach for his wallet. He turned to Layla instead, and told her to write down the name of the luthier on Pico Boulevard.

Then he turned back to the boy. “Should they close up that crack, as well?” Micah didn’t hesitate. “No.” Faisal looked at him for a long moment, and nodded very slowly, because he understood better than anyone else on that sidewalk why a man might not want his crack covered over. Then Ozzy bent down, crouched beside the little amp, and didn’t reach for a microphone.

He just looked at Micah. “From the top,” he said. Micah took the riff from the top, and this time he didn’t turn it down. And Ozzy Osbourne on a sidewalk on Canon Drive to four people sang the first line just a little above speaking volume. By the time it finished, about 30 people had stopped on that sidewalk.

The security guard came over to point out that the 5 minutes were long gone, opened his mouth, then looked at the crowd, thought better of it, and backed away. Right then, the restaurant door opened and Sharon Osbourne stepped out, arms folded and one eyebrow up looking at her husband. “You are getting 15 minutes of air,” she said.

Ozzy shrugged, smiled, and said, “I got it.” But the most important thing about that evening hadn’t happened yet. Three weeks later, the guitar came out of the workshop on Pico Boulevard. The neck had been taken off and reset. Every fret had been replaced, and it held its tuning now.

The crack in the body was still there. They hadn’t even changed the tape. The invoice was paid by the accounting department of a shipping company in Dubai, and the accountant called twice to ask what it was for. Both times Leila gave him the same answer. “It’s approved.” By the end of that year, a small wooden platform had been built outside the hotel his group owned on that same block.

The permit came from the city, the power was run from the building, and every evening between 6:00 and 9:00 a musician played on it. Not with a tip jar, but with a contract and a fee. The musicians who play on that platform today don’t know who had it built. Mike Arrenic played there on Thursday evenings for 2 years, then went to work at a recording studio, and he never sold that guitar.

He tried telling the story a few times, but nobody believed him. So, after a while, he stopped telling it.

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.

Share this with someone who needs to be reminded that the right sentence said at the right moment can completely change the entire direction of a relationship. Ring the notification bell for more untold stories about the extraordinary human beings behind music’s greatest legends.