Queen Elizabeth And Prince Philip’s Love Story Wasn’t What You Thought – Hw

On paper, it’s a storybook romance, but not every story is true. The marriage of Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip may not have been an ideal one, but the true story was way more interesting than the version you might know. It may be surprising to some, but the Queen is actually distantly related to her husband.

The two are third cousins through their shared great grandparents, Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, who themselves were first cousins. Elizabeth was just 13 years old when she first met Philip. But despite her young age and the fact that they share some of the same blood lineage, she fell for him pretty quickly.

But even though they share some family members, Elizabeth grew up on the posher side of the spectrum. While Philip had a different experience, he had a more normal childhood, washing dishes and playing sports through local organizations. And when she fell in love with him, he was a naval cadet while she was destined to take the crown.

In the beginning, George V 6th didn’t exactly approve of his daughter’s choice of groom. The king was concerned about British opinion when it came to the idea of his daughter marrying a Greek prince. And it wasn’t just Philip’s family heritage that affected the king’s opinion. Philip’s voluminous laugh and wild manners also reportedly got under the king’s skin.

But in the end, Elizabeth was allowed to marry the man she loved at the age of 21. In order to marry Elizabeth, Philip had to make some changes to his own life. He had to become a naturalized British citizen and none of his German family members were allowed to come to the wedding which included Philip’s three sisters who had married German men.

On top of that, the king did not want to officially announce his daughter’s engagement until she was 21. So, Princess Elizabeth and Philip had to keep their relationship quiet for some time until it could be announced. When one thinks of a royal wedding, words like glamorous, elegant, and extravagant come to mind.

That’s certainly been the case in recent generations. However, there were certain budgetary constraints on Elizabeth and Philip’s wedding due to the tough times of their union. Great Britain was still recovering from World War II when the couple were wed. So, the Queen to be actually had to use rationing coupons to pay for her wedding dress materials.

Of course, the government allowed their princess 200 extra coupons for the dress. But still, she shared in the nation struggles in her own little way. Naturally, the resulting dress was still very beautiful and luxurious. It included a 13- foot long train and was embroidered with crystals, so she wasn’t exactly roughing it with those ration coupons.

One thing many people might not know about Prince Philip, however, is that he actually moved out of Buckingham Palace late in his life, taking up residence in a farm manager’s cottage called Wood Farm, located on the grounds of the royal residence of Sandringham. He had reportedly stopped living with the queen after retiring from public life at the age of 96.

In 2020, as CO 19 swept through the UK, the press reported that Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip had reunited to live together at Windsor Castle for the first time in 2 years. In truth, Prince Philip was most likely at his happiest when not living with the Queen. When he retired, Gossip Columns even ran a story suggesting that the move had been in part the Queen’s idea.

At the time, an anonymous source told one tabloid, “She knows him too well. If he was still at the center of royal life, he’d feel he had to be involved. Being at Wood Farm means he’s not too far away, but far enough to be able to relax. Prince Philip’s dislike of Buckingham Palace is well documented, with reports claiming that he once compared the palace’s architecture to that of a hospital.

Certainly, the palace was never a place where the Duke of Edinburgh could actually relax. According to Charlie Proctor, editor of Royal Central, it was viewed as a workplace by the Duke. It is in the middle of noisy central London and perhaps doesn’t offer the same peaceful tranquility as Windsor Castle or Sandringham House.

But moving out of Buckingham and into a farmhouse didn’t mean that Prince Philip gave up the luxuries of royal life. In fact, the Daily Star reported that the prince had a house of staff to attend to his needs, including two pages, a footman, a chef, a housekeeper, a valet, and a security detail.

While Prince Philip may not have lived with the Queen during his retirement, however, that doesn’t mean they ever lost touch. In 2019, The Express reported that the Duke of Edinburgh and his wife spoke daily via telephone. And if the news that Prince Philip and Queen Elizabeth technically lived separately might surprise some, royal followers will know that the pair have often spoken of wanting to live a life that’s less formal than that of a monarch and her consort.

In fact, the Queen joined Prince Philip at his cottage pretty much whenever she could. Before Philip’s death, royal biographer Penny Jr. told the Daily Beast that the couple had always been this way, saying, “They are very modest. They like being in a smaller, cozier house and not having to have all the staff. We may dream of living in a palace surrounded by flunkies, but they dream of being like us.

” During his retirement, Philip spent his days reading and watercolor painting, but he also likely enjoyed spending time at the grill. As Robert Hardman wrote in his biography on Queen Elizabeth, the Duke of Edinburgh was a brilliant and innovative cook. Hardman wrote, “Prince Philip would relish the prospect of setting up his barbecue in the unlikeliest spots and cooking anything that took his fancy.

All in all, it sounds like Prince Philip’s final years weren’t too bad at all. Prince Philip was described in life as being a real foodie. In contrast to the tastes of his more traditional wife, the royal consort to Queen Elizabeth II was a garlic lover, a curry enthusiast, and a spice buff who was no stranger to cooking both his family and his staff a hot dinner on the grill.

The Duke of Edinburgh not only knew his way around a kitchen, he was also not afraid to get a little bit contentious about food. Take for example the time that Philip ate a meal prepared by Chef Rey’s creppy, bacon, eggs, smoked salmon, kedgery, croissants, and pano chocolatot. Afterward, he declared, quote, “The French don’t know how to cook breakfast.

” Or consider the time when visiting the Scottish Women’s Institute that the prince rebelliously quipped, “British women can’t cook.” The prince was so intent on having things his way. Royal footman Charles Oliver once wrote in the book Dinner at Buckingham Palace that Philip used to travel with an electric glass litted frying pan.

He cooked up his own morning meals, including bacon, smoked hatock, omelets, and sausages. Once he even shot, cleaned, and cooked a snipe bird on his own. And it was exactly because Philip liked food so much that he may have preferred to dine without his wife. Royal chef Darren McGrady explained to Delish, “Prince Philip has a much broader palette than her majesty when it comes to food.

The queen eats to live, whereas Prince Philip loves to eat. >> Prince Phillip not only loved to eat, but he loved to cook as well.” Of course, Queen Elizabeth’s much more subdued dietary preferences always won out when the married couple dined together. It was always down to the queen is hosting the meal, so you have everything how she likes it.

So, I think sometimes Prince Philip actually enjoyed eating on his own. Just ask Women’s Day journalist Alyssa Sansi, who tried eating like Queen Elizabeth for a week. If you like a lot of flavor, it’s hard. The writer described the queen’s diet as painfully monotonous and bland, noting her majesty’s affinity for breakfast cereals, grilled chicken, steamed veggies, and cucumber sandwiches.

Not exactly the diet filled with spicy curries that Prince Philip is said to have enjoyed. Then there’s the fact that royals were generally told to stay away from Philip’s favorite ingredients in order to keep their breaths smelling unobjectionable for public appearances. That means no garlic or onions, much to the outrage of many a gourmand.

When Prince Philip retired from royal life in 2017, he moved permanently to the royals Sandringham estate in Norfol, England. Queen Elizabeth, meanwhile, stayed at Buckingham Palace. It’s safe to bet that at Sandringham, the Duke of Edinburgh’s culinary preferences ruled the roost. At least that is until the winter holidays when his wife joined him to celebrate Christmas.

Another point of disagreement between her majesty and his royal highness drinks. Queen Elizabeth may be faithful to her gin, German sweet wines, and champagnes. But her husband, like his grandson, Prince William, was a beer person. When dining with the prime minister of Italy, Philip once turned down every single one of the wines offered to him, reportedly saying, “Get me a beer.

I don’t care what kind it is, just get me a beer.” It wasn’t all stormy weather when it came to the meals that the queen and her consort shared together. As in any happy marriage, sometimes Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip met in the middle. Darren McGrady told Delish that the two royals both had a soft spot for fresh salmon. And on more than one occasion, the Duke of Edinburgh was known to cook a meal for both him and his wife.

Oliver wrote, “The prince is also adept at producing quick, light supper snacks, which he and the queen often enjoy after they have dismissed the servants for the night. After hours, Philip would reportedly make his wife dishes such as scrambled eggs and smoked hatock, mushrooms sauteed in butter with bacon and scotch woodcock.

Presumably, the prince was free to add a bit of extra garlic and spices to his midnight meals. Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip had one of the most public marriages out there. According to brides, when they got married in 1947, everyone wanted to know everything about the couple that would one day sit at the head of the royal family.

Then, in the 1950s and60s, the media delighted in whispering about Prince Phillip’s supposed affairs. British actress Patricia Kirkwood took a hit to her career when she was forced to publicly deny romantic involvement with the prince despite the royal family’s refusal to do so. She subsequently became infamous for allegedly declaring, “I would have had a happier and easier life if Prince Philip, instead of coming uninvited to my dressing room, had gone home to his pregnant wife on the night in question.

” If Queen Elizabeth’s silence surrounding the cheating scandals seems surprising to you, well, living like a royal involves a lot of things. things the lay person wouldn’t understand. Some of the customs that are commonplace to them seem out of place to us. A life dedicated to being public symbols naturally makes for a very interesting marriage.

And to have a marriage that’s in the spotlight succeed, it takes unorthodox practices. Some of them more surprising than others. Take for example the fact that per Huff Post, many royal wedding menus are still inexplicably written in French. One of the peculiar things about their royal marriage is that her majesty and the Duke of Edinburgh often spent time apart.

During the last years of their life, after Prince Philip retired, they lived in separate residences. But even when the royal couple lived and spent time together, they didn’t share a bedroom. That’s no indication, however, that the cheating rumors surrounding Prince Philip were true. Instead, it was a question of tradition.

Lady Pamela Mountbatton told Vanity Fair, “In England, the upper class always have had separate bedrooms. You don’t want to be bothered with snoring or someone flinging a leg around. Then when you are feeling cozy, you share your room sometimes. It is lovely to be able to choose. One could certainly make the case that separate bedrooms make for a cold or loveless marriage, but it certainly worked for the royal couple.

Throughout the ups and downs of over seven decades, nothing broke them apart. On the contrary, time spent alone was valuable to the couple. The Duke of Edinburgh himself once told the media that the secret of a happy marriage is to have different interests. As for the Queen, she reflected during her golden anniversary speech in 1997, saying he has quite simply been my strength and stay all these years.

And I and his whole family and this and many other countries owe him a debt greater than he would ever claim or we shall ever know. Not sharing a marital bed doesn’t mean that Prince Philip and Queen Elizabeth didn’t spend time together in bed at all. As Philip Eid wrote in his biography of the prince, during the beginning of their marriage, the couple spent a lot of time in each other’s rooms.

He wrote, “Philip had his own bedroom next door to Elizabeth, an arrangement common to a great many upper class couples at the time. But he claims their sheets weren’t exactly cold. Instead, the royal couple was used to enjoying the visitation rituals which that system involves. In fact, if you believe Eid, one day the Duke of Edinburgh’s valet was mortified to discover the two had slept together all night long upon entering Prince Phillips’s room in the morning.

Per Eid, while she was wearing her usual silk night gown, Prince Philip appeared to be naked. He didn’t care at all. By every account, Prince Philip was always a bit cheeky. The Daily Mirror’s James Whitaker once wrote that after someone complimented the Queen’s blemish-free face, her husband countered, “Yes, she’s like that all over.

” Lucky for Philip, Queen Elizabeth was almost inconceivably patient with him. The prince toasted his wife on his 50th anniversary, saying, “I think the main lesson we have received is that tolerance is the one essential ingredient in any happy marriage. You can take it from me. The queen has the quality of tolerance in abundance.

” Princess Elizabeth and Prince Philip first got to know each other in 1939 when they were both still very young. In fact, Elizabeth was just 13 years old at the time. The meeting occurred during a royal tour of the Royal Navy College in Dartmouth where she and her sister, Princess Margaret, were greeted by Philip, who was 18 years old.

Elizabeth’s governness, Marian Crawford, later recalled that the future queen was intrigued by Philip’s athleticism after seeing him leaping over several tennis nets. According to several biographers, Elizabeth was smitten from the very first meeting and never considered any other man for a partner. >> And she fell desperately, desperately head over heels in love with him at first sight.

>> Of course, the two were also distant cousins, both related to Queen Victoria, though it’s probably fair to say that blood ties aren’t exactly uncommon in the history of royal marriages. After their initial meeting, Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip went their separate ways. They did, however, keep in touch.

Philip served in the Navy during the Second World War and Elizabeth completed her schooling. The relationship seemed to be moving along as he spent Christmas of 1943 with her family at Windsor Castle. As the Queen’s governness wrote of the visit, she was animated in a way that none of them had ever seen before. After a brief engagement, Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip married in an extravagant ceremony in November 1947.

Elizabeth was the 10th royal to marry at Westminster Abbey and the ceremony was recorded and broadcast by BBC radio to 200 million listeners. While the wedding itself wasn’t televised, Elizabeth and Philip greeted the public from the balcony of Buckingham Palace. Afterwards, Elizabeth’s dress was designed by Sir Norman Hartnell, who reportedly used a famous Bachelli painting as his inspiration.

The couple also had an elaborate 9-ft tall wedding cake that featured their coats of arms and sugar figures of their favorite activities. while a wedding breakfast was hosted the next morning. The pair spent their wedding night in Hampshire at Philip’s uncle’s estate before traveling to their Balmoral estate in Scotland for their honeymoon.

In the early years of their marriage, Princess Elizabeth and Prince Philip enjoyed a peaceful existence as she had yet to become the Queen of England. Shortly after the wedding, the couple seemed to be perfectly happy. Elizabeth wrote to her parents, “We behave as though we had belonged to each other for years. Philip is an angel. He is so kind and thoughtful.

” Meanwhile, Philip wrote to Elizabeth’s mother, “My ambition is to weld the two of us into a new combined existence that will not only be able to withstand the shocks directed at us, but will also have a positive existence for the good.” The pair spent their first few years living in Malta, where Philip was the commander of a Royal Navy ship.

This blissful honeymoon period came to an abrupt end, however, when Elizabeth’s father, King George V 6th, died in 1952. When King George died, Princess Elizabeth and her husband had to return home where she was expected to take the throne. Philip had to give up his naval career in order to become her consort, too.

As he himself once said, “I thought I was going to have a career in the Navy, but it became obvious there was no hope. You have to make compromises. That’s life. I accepted it. I tried to make the best of it.” The fictionalized drama series The Crown portrayed this era as a time of tension with Philip struggling to adjust to his new duties. And it appears that there is likely to be some truth in this.

As royal biographer Philip Ziegler told the Daily Mail, “It would be surprising if any strong-minded, enterprising man who wants to have his own career wouldn’t have been slightly irritated about having to walk two steps behind someone else.” Eventually, however, Philip became more accustomed to his new role as Royal’s author Clive Irving told NBC News, “Because they have been married for so long, the marriage evolved and it turned out much better than it began.

” Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip had four children. Prince Charles, Princess Anne, Prince Edward, and Prince Andrew. In The Crown, Philip is portrayed as a distant, uncaring father. But both he and the Queen were reportedly heavily involved in their children’s upbringing. According to some tabloid sources, the Queen was actually upset and annoyed about how the show portrayed Philip’s parenting skills.

One senior staff member reportedly told The Express, “She was particularly annoyed at a scene in which Philip has no sympathy for a plainly upset Charles while he is flying him home from Scotland. That simply did not happen.” As Philip recalled at his golden wedding anniversary, “Like all families, we went through the full range of the pleasures and tribulations of bringing up children, I am naturally somewhat biased, but I think our children have all done rather well under very difficult and demanding circumstances, and I hope I can be

forgiven for feeling proud of them.” While the Queen took on her full range of duties as monarch, her husband had a part to play, too. After giving up his career, he became a full-time royal. In addition to appearing at many royal engagements with his wife, Prince Philip also undertook 22,000 solo engagements for the royals.

Of his contribution to her role, Elizabeth once said, >> “He is someone who doesn’t take easily to compliments, but he has quite simply been my strength and stay all these years.” >> Prince Philip retired from his public role in 2017 at the age of 96. While Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip were certainly very busy with royal duties during their marriage, they continued to enjoy spending peaceful time together in more modest surroundings.

For one, Philip was reportedly never a fan of Buckingham Palace and even once compared it to a hospital. The pair apparently had a lifelong dream of moving away from London for a simpler life. As the Daily Beast put it during one article about the couple, the dream of quietly living out their days as normal people in the Shire.

When they could get away from official appearances, the Queen and Philip often spent time at Kagwin Lodge on the Balmoral estate in Scotland. Here they reportedly enjoyed a more downto-earth lifestyle with the Queen doing the washing up and the prince holding barbecues. Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip have welcomed several grandchildren and great-grandchildren into their family over the years, including Prince Charles’s children, Prince William and Prince Harry.

Another of these grandchildren, Princess Eugenie, described her grandfather in the documentary Our Queen at 90, saying, “I think Grandpa is incredible. He really is strong and consistent.” Reportedly, Philip was especially helpful towards William and Harry after their mother, Princess Diana, passed away. The Queen apparently has an equally close relationship with her grandchildren.

As a body language expert once told Good Housekeeping, “There’s a genuine joy in her face when she’s with her grandchildren, and that’s all that matters.” Finally, Prince William himself once said of his grandparents, “I would love to know their secret. They are the most lovely couple.” Due to their busy royal schedules, Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip didn’t exactly have a normal relationship.

In fact, they often had to spend weeks or even months apart. Philip moved into the country after his retirement. But before this, they had often been away from each other, and even when they were together, they reportedly slept in separate bedrooms. Nevertheless, despite their unconventional marital arrangements, the pair remained loving and devoted throughout their lives.

They even made time for a daily catch-up phone call. As royal commentator Richard Fitz Williams said in 2019, “She has always known she could rely on his advice and that it would be valuable.” You might not imagine the Queen and her husband being particularly romantic. However, in private, they were evidently very fond and affectionate with each other.

Most famously, Philip used to call his wife Cabbage. Apparently, this was a joke taken from the French pet name Monetu, which directly translates to my little cabbage. Peter Morgan, who wrote the 2006 film The Queen, told the Times, “I inquired in royal circles and was told on very good authority that that is what the Duke sometimes calls the queen.

” Apparently, Philip also called his wife by her family nickname, Liet, a pet name that developed when she was a child and couldn’t pronounce Elizabeth. Of course, Philip referred to her as simply the queen in public, but things were clearly very different once the cameras disappeared. The royal couple was always fidious about marking their wedding anniversary, as it was usually the only time either expressed any remotely romantic feelings in public.

The pair’s first public celebration was for their sixth anniversary during the year of Queen Elizabeth’s coronation with a dance held at Clarence House. In 1972, Philip and the Queen held a service at Westminster Abbey for their silver anniversary. The year 1997 marked their golden anniversary and it was during this celebration that the queen famously called Philip her strength and stay.

In 2007, Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip celebrated their diamond anniversary, making their relationship the longest marriage in royal history. Finally, in 2020, they celebrated their 73rd anniversary. It would also be their last. Even though Prince Philip and Queen Elizabeth didn’t live together permanently after his retirement in 2017, they did spend an extended period of time together during the 2020 pandemic.

In March of 2020, just before lockdown in the UK, Philip and the Queen settled down in Windsor Castle. They also spent some time at the Balmoral Estate in August of that year. As Chris Ship, a royal correspondent, noted on ITV, “The Queen has been in a so-called HMS bubble.” According to Vanity Fair, their lockdown together actually provided a nice break from their busy royal lives.

Apparently, the pair enjoyed daily walks and quiet dinners together every single day. Unfortunately, these were some of the final days that Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip shared together. Philip began to experience health problems during this time and was rushed to hospital in early 2021. Prince Philip’s death in 2021 marked the end of the longest marriage in royal history.

According to insiders who spoke to the Daily Mail, the prince’s last few days were quiet and calm. Apparently, he was determined to die at home rather than at the hospital. In his last few days, he sat outside in the sun with a rug over his legs and avoided using a wheelchair. As one insider said, “When the wheelchair first appeared in the private rooms, he shouted, “Get that bloody thing out of my sight.

” After Philip died, his son, Prince Andrew, emerged to tell the press that his mother was facing her loss with stoicism. She described it as as as having left a huge void in her life. >> Responding to the numerous tributes paid to Philip following his death, the Queen released a statement saying, “We have been deeply touched and continue to be reminded that Philip had such an extraordinary impact on countless people throughout his life.

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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