It looks like Jack White recently applied to be inducted into the Guiness Book of World Records by holding the shortest concert ever, with only one note being "struck". Apparently he isn't too fond of the people behind the Guiness Book after they denied him the entry. People can hold the record for the largest salt & pepper shakers, but not shortest concert; wow. Who's decision is this?! White explained the situation in a recent interview with 'Interview Magazine' (go figure...). Here's an excerpt:

Interviewer: "I understand that back in the White Stripes days, you and Meg played a concert that was just one note. Is that right?"

WHITE: "Well, we’d done this whole tour of Canada where we played in every province, and almost every day we would do a free show. I would decide each morning what kind of show we would do. For example, in Winnipeg, I said, “Let’s play on a city bus today. We’ll get on a bus and play a couple songs.” So 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 and see if we could get the record for shortest concert of all time. So we did it, but ultimately they turned us down. They would not give us the record for the shortest concert."

Interviewer: "Why? Did someone else have a shorter concert than that? John Cage might have for his four minutes and 33 seconds of silence."

WHITE: "I like that — just don’t show up. [laughs] The thing is, though, that 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. So with something like the shortest concert of all time, they didn’t think whatever 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 … Maybe this will help us get the word out."

Update: Apparently NME reached out to the Guiness Book of World Records about the incident. Here's their nerdy explanation basically saying the Stripes were acknowledged in the 2009 edition, but were later scrapped after copy cat bands attempted to "out-short" them:

“The White Stripes were in fact recognized in the 2009 Edition of the Guinness World Records book for the shortest music concert ever when, on July 16 2007, they played just one note at St John’s in Newfoundland, Canada. Subsequent to this appearance we received a large volume of applications from bands and performers seeking to beat this record. The ultimate results of this was individuals claiming that simply appearing on stage was enough to qualify them for this record.”

They added: “The results were difficult to objectively measure (for example, how many members of the crowd need to be able to see the performer before they disappear off stage?) and as such it’s difficult to justify an appearance as a concert by any reasonable definition of the word.”

They then went on to explain:

“The nature of competing to make something the ‘shortest’ by its very nature trivializes the activity being carried out, and Guinness World Records has been forced to reject many claims of this kind. As such, we have been forced to cease listing records for the shortest song, shortest poem, and indeed the shortest concert.”

And now here's video of the actual one-note show!