Following the recent news that the Guinness World Record for ‘longest guitar solo’ had been broken, Blunderbuss maverick Jack White has slammed the record-keeping body as for their ‘elitist policies.’
In the same Interview article that he told Buzz Aldrin he wanted to play the first vinyl record in space, White discussed how back in his White Stripes days, he and Meg attempted to set the record for ‘World’s Shortest Concert’ at a show in Newfoundland, Canada in 2007.
“Well, we’d done this whole tour of Canada,” explains White “when we were in Newfoundland, the idea that I came up with at breakfast was, ‘Let’s play one note today. So we’ll put on a show and tell people it’s a free show, but we’re only going to play one note.’ I told Meg as we were getting out of the car. I said, ‘Make sure you grab your cymbal — when you hit the cymbal, grab it so that the note only lasts a millisecond.’”
“I was thinking that afterwards we could contact the Guinness World Records people,” White says “and see if we could get the record for shortest concert of all time.”
When White contacted Guinness to confirm their achievement however, “they turned us down” confirmed White.
When pressed why, he responded “the thing is… the Guinness book is a very elitist organization. There’s nothing scientific about what they do. They just have an office full of people who decide what is a record and what isn’t. I mean, there is some stuff like Olympic records where they have a committee. But most of the records in there — who has the biggest collection of salt-and-pepper shakers or whatever — are just whatever they want them to be.”
White claims they were stubbed from the Guinness publication purely on a basis of preference. “With something like the shortest concert of all time,” he continues, “they didn’t think what we did was interesting enough to make it a record. I don’t know why they get to decide that, but, you know, they own the book.”
You can view the world’s (unofficial) shortest concert ever below.
