During a dinner in Jamaica, Dustin Hoffman challenged Paul McCartney to prove he could write a song on the spot. Hoffman handed him a Time magazine article about Picasso's death that same day, which quoted Picasso's last words to his dinner guests: "Drink to me, drink to my health. You know I can't drink anymore." McCartney immediately started singing a melody, prompting Hoffman to run to his wife shouting "He's doing it!" The song became "Picasso's Last Words" on the Band on the Run album.
In 1912, Theodore Roosevelt was about to give a campaign speech in Milwaukee when a man shot him in the chest. The bullet passed through his steel eyeglass case and a folded 50-page speech in his coat pocket, which slowed it enough to lodge in his chest muscle rather than pierce his lung. Roosevelt checked that he wasn't coughing blood, stepped up to the podium, and delivered his 90-minute speech anyway, opening with: "Ladies and gentlemen, I don't know whether you fully understand that I have just been shot, but it takes more than that to kill a Bull Moose." The bullet remained in his chest for the rest of his life.
When a young Julius Caesar was kidnapped by pirates, he scoffed at their ransom demand of 20 talents and insisted they ask for 50, because he was worth more. While waiting for payment, he joked that he would come back and crucify every one of them. They laughed. After the ransom was paid and he was freed, he raised a fleet, captured the pirates, and crucified them all.
The studio did not want Marlon Brando for The Godfather. He was considered washed up and box-office poison. Director Francis Ford Coppola arranged a secret screen test disguised as a 'makeup test' so executives wouldn't object. Brando, alone in his home, stuffed his cheeks with cotton balls, slicked his hair back with shoe polish, and shuffled around mumbling in a raspy voice. The studio watched the tape and didn't recognize him. 'That's incredible,' they said. 'Who is that?' During filming, a stray cat wandered onto set during the opening scene. Brando picked it up and started petting it. Coppola kept rolling. The image of the Don stroking a cat while discussing murder became one of the most iconic shots in cinema.
When Marlon Brando won Best Actor for The Godfather in 1973, he sent 26-year-old Apache activist Sacheen Littlefeather in his place. She was told she had 60 seconds. She declined the Oscar on Brando's behalf, citing Hollywood's treatment of Native Americans and the ongoing standoff at Wounded Knee. The audience booed and applauded in equal measure. Backstage, John Wayne reportedly had to be physically restrained by six security guards from storming the stage. The Academy issued a formal apology 49 years later.
Brian Wilson was so struck by the Beatles' Rubber Soul that he went into the studio and made Pet Sounds. Paul McCartney then heard Pet Sounds and was so blown away that he pushed the Beatles to create Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. Two of the greatest albums ever made exist because of mutual one-upmanship.
On August 13, 1990, Curtis Mayfield stepped onto an outdoor stage at Wingate Field in Brooklyn as a 54 mph gust of wind swept through the event. The lighting rig over the stage collapsed. A steel bar struck Mayfield on the back of the neck, breaking three vertebrae and leaving him paralyzed from the neck down. He went on to record his final album in 1996 by lying flat on his back in the studio and singing one line at a time between breaths.
In October 2002, Kanye West crashed his car in Los Angeles and shattered his jaw in three places. Lying in the hospital with his mouth wired shut, he heard Chaka Khan's "Through the Fire" playing through a speaker and caught the line "right down to the wire." Two weeks later, still unable to open his mouth, he went into the studio and rapped "Through the Wire" through clenched teeth. The song became his first single and launched his solo career.
In August 1990, Kurt Cobain and Kathleen Hanna of Bikini Kill got drunk and spray-painted "God is gay" on the walls of a fake abortion clinic in Olympia, Washington. Back at Cobain's place, Hanna scrawled "Kurt smells like teen spirit" on his bedroom wall in marker. She'd been at the grocery store earlier with Cobain's ex-girlfriend Tobi Vail, whose brand of deodorant was Teen Spirit, and the line was stuck in her head. Six months later, Cobain called Hanna and asked if he could use it. He had no idea Teen Spirit was a deodorant.
In the early 1980s, Australian doctor Barry Marshall was convinced that stomach ulcers were caused by bacteria, not stress, as the entire medical establishment believed. Nobody took him seriously. So in 1984, he had an endoscopy to confirm his stomach was healthy, then drank a broth of cultured H. pylori bacteria. Within days he was vomiting, bloated, and had rancid breath. A biopsy confirmed his stomach was now riddled with the bacteria. He took antibiotics and cured himself. The medical establishment still dragged its feet for years, but in 2005 Marshall won the Nobel Prize for a discovery he'd had to prove on his own body.
In 2005, during an English amateur match in the Andover and District Sunday League, referee Andy Wain awarded a penalty. The players surrounded him, furious. He argued back, got increasingly heated, and headbutted one of them. Wain immediately pulled out a red card, showed it to himself, and walked off the pitch. The match was abandoned. He later told the press he 'just lost it' and that sending himself off 'seemed like the right thing to do.'
When Philip II of Macedon sent a message to Sparta threatening "If I bring my army into your land, I will destroy your farms, slay your people, and raze your city," the Spartans sent back a one-word reply: "If." Philip left Sparta alone.
The day Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band was released, Jimi Hendrix got his hands on a copy just hours before a show that Lennon and McCartney were attending. He learned the title track that afternoon, then opened his set with it that evening. He was the first person to ever play it live.
At the 1976 Montreal Olympics, 14-year-old Romanian gymnast Nadia Comaneci performed a routine so flawless that the judges awarded the first perfect 10.0 in Olympic history. There was just one problem: the scoreboard manufacturer had been told before the Games that a perfect 10 was impossible, so they never programmed the board to display it. When her score came through, it read '1.00.' The crowd sat confused for a moment before erupting. Comaneci went on to score six more perfect 10s during those Games. By the end, everyone knew what 1.00 really meant.
In February 1977, Fela Kuti released "Zombie," a song mocking the Nigerian military as mindless. A thousand soldiers responded by storming his Lagos commune, the Kalakuta Republic. They beat the residents, burned the compound to the ground, and threw Fela's 77-year-old mother out of a second-floor window. She died of her injuries a year later. Fela delivered a replica of her coffin to the military barracks, then recorded an album called "Coffin for Head of State." The government's official explanation for the raid was that it had been carried out by "unknown soldiers."
In the late 1880s, an unidentified young woman was pulled from the River Seine in Paris. A pathologist at the morgue was so struck by her peaceful expression that he made a plaster death mask of her face. The mask became a fashionable decoration in Parisian homes for decades. Then in 1958, when a Norwegian toymaker was asked to create the first CPR training mannequin, he used her face as the model. She became Resusci Anne, the most kissed face in history, pressed to the lips of hundreds of millions of people learning to save lives.
In September 2010, Bahrain's football federation announced a friendly match against Togo. A team turned up wearing Togo kits, played the match, lost 3-0, and everyone went home. There was just one problem: the Togolese Football Federation had no idea the match had happened. A fraudster had assembled a group of random players, claimed they were Togo's national team, and arranged the entire fixture. Not a single player who took the field that day was actually a member of Togo's squad. An entirely fake national team had played an official international friendly against a real country, and nobody noticed until after the final whistle.
Lieutenant General Adrian Carton de Wiart served in three wars spanning five decades. He was shot in the face, head, stomach, ankle, leg, hip, and ear. He lost his left eye, his left hand, and part of his ear. When a doctor refused to amputate his mangled fingers, he bit them off himself. He survived two plane crashes and tunnelled out of a prisoner-of-war camp. His summary of World War I: "Frankly, I had enjoyed the war." He lived to 83.
When King Crimson needed a spoken word segment about urban danger for a track, singer Adrian Belew wasn't sounding convincing in the studio. He stepped outside to walk around the block and get into character. He was immediately confronted by a gang. His panicked, breathless account when he burst back into the studio was secretly recorded by his bandmates and used as the final take.
Japanese soldier Hiroo Onoda was deployed to a Philippine island in 1944. He refused to believe the war was over for 29 years, dismissing leaflets, newspapers, and family photos airdropped over the jungle as Allied propaganda. He finally surrendered in 1974, but only after his former commanding officer, by then a retired bookseller, was located and flown to the island to formally relieve him of duty.
In 1942, German pilot Armin Faber got disoriented after a dogfight over the English Channel and mistook Wales for France. He waggled his wings in celebration, lowered his landing gear, and touched down at an RAF airbase. The duty sergeant took him prisoner with a flare gun. His aircraft was the only intact Focke-Wulf 190 captured by the Allies in the entire war.
Jack Churchill fought the entirety of World War II armed with a Scottish broadsword, a longbow, and a set of bagpipes. He played the pipes while his commandos stormed a beach in Norway, captured 42 prisoners in Sicily with just a sword and one corporal, and was eventually taken prisoner while playing "Will Ye No Come Back Again?" on his bagpipes. He reportedly complained that the Americans ended the war too soon with the atomic bomb.
Prince was supposed to appear on Kendrick Lamar's To Pimp a Butterfly. When the two finally met in the studio, they spent the entire session talking and never recorded a single note.
The 1904 Olympic marathon in St. Louis was run in 90-degree heat with one water station. The first man to cross the finish line had secretly hitched a car ride for 11 miles. The actual winner was fed strychnine and brandy by his trainers and had to be carried across the line. A Cuban mailman who lost his travel money gambling cut his trousers into shorts, ate rotten apples mid-race, took a nap, and still finished fourth.
In 1975, physicist Jack Hetherington wrote an entire paper using "we" instead of "I." When told the journal would reject a single-author paper written in the plural, he added his Siamese cat Chester as co-author rather than retype the manuscript. The cat, published under the pen name F.D.C. Willard, went on to be listed as sole author of a French physics paper five years later.
In the pre-anesthesia era, Scottish surgeon Robert Liston was famous for his speed, once amputating a leg in two and a half minutes. During one operation, he cut so fast that he accidentally severed his assistant's fingers and slashed a spectator's coat. The patient died of gangrene, the assistant died of gangrene from his wounded fingers, and the spectator died of fright. It remains the only known surgery with a 300% mortality rate.
In 1911, a Louvre handyman named Vincenzo Peruggia hid in a supply closet after hours, lifted the Mona Lisa off the wall, and walked out with it under his smock. He kept it in a trunk in his Paris apartment for two years before trying to sell it to a gallery in Florence. The dealer agreed to the price, took possession, and immediately called the police. The worldwide media frenzy caused by the theft is the reason the Mona Lisa became the most famous painting in the world.
In 1929, a 25-year-old German surgical intern named Werner Forssmann wanted to prove you could thread a catheter into a living human heart. His boss forbade it. So Forssmann tricked a nurse into helping by telling her he'd do the experiment on her. When she lay down on the table, he strapped her arms down, then anesthetized his own arm and threaded the catheter into his own vein instead. He released the furious nurse, walked down to the basement X-ray room with the tube dangling from his arm, positioned a mirror so he could watch the fluoroscope, and pushed the catheter the rest of the way into his heart. He was fired. Twenty-seven years later, he won the Nobel Prize.
In 1979, Phil Collins was drumming on Peter Gabriel's third solo album when engineer Hugh Padgham's talkback mic, fed through an aggressive compressor and noise gate, caught the kit with a huge explosive crunch. Gabriel told Collins to keep drumming for ten minutes. Padgham then dismantled the console to rewire the circuit so the sound could be recorded properly. Two years later, Collins used it for the drum break on "In the Air Tonight," and the accidental "gated reverb" became the defining drum sound of the 1980s.
Carlos Kaiser had a professional football career in Brazil from the mid-1980s to the late 1990s, playing for clubs including Flamengo, Botafogo, and Fluminense. The twist: he almost never actually played. Kaiser was a con artist. He was handsome, charismatic, and a fixture of Rio's nightlife. He would get signed to clubs through connections and smooth talking, then fake injuries during training so he'd never have to appear in a match and reveal that he was terrible. When one manager finally forced him to come on as a substitute, Kaiser ran to the stands and started a fight with a fan so he'd be sent off before he had to touch the ball. He survived for over a decade this way.
From 1963 to 1965, the FBI spent 31 months investigating "Louie Louie" by The Kingsmen for suspected hidden obscenities. They concluded the lyrics were "unintelligible at any speed" and closed the case. They somehow missed the drummer clearly shouting an expletive less than a minute into the song.