It’s hard to explain what I’m looking for so let me give a few examples.
Astrud Gilberto: When her husband Joao Gilberto and Stan Getz and Antonio Carlos Jobim were recording an original song in Portuguese they decided to make an English version. Astrud was the only one who spoke English so she became famous as the singer of The Girl from Ipanema.
Al Michaels: An up-and-coming sports announcer, when it came time to pick someone to call the 1980 Winter Olympics hockey game between the USSR and the US he was the only one with any experience with calling hockey - a single game 8 years prior. As a result he got to call the Miracle on Ice.
I am NOT looking for “right place/right time” like John Wayne being discovered. Nor am I looking for someone famous because of the attribute, but rather that attribute directly gave them an opportunity and that opportunity launched them to fame.
Al Kooper was a guitar player who was scraping by on studio gigs. Through connections, he was able to show up to the studio where Bob Dylan was going electric and recording Like a Rolling Stone.
Kooper knew that guitarist Mike Bloomfield was far better than he was and had the guitar part nailed down. But he really, really, really wanted to be on Dylan’s first electric track. So he looked around. The only instrument he saw not being used that was set up in the studio was an organ, so without thinking he said to the music director “hey, I have a great organ part!!” For some reason they shrugged and let him in.
So he sat in, faking his way through - he didn’t know the chords so there were slight delays as he looked at what the other players where doing then hit the chord on the organ. The othe studio musicians were like"who is this guy?!"
They finish and play back that take. Dylan is listening and says “hey, turn up the organ” so they do. “Turn it up more.” By the end, it is max’d and the featured sound of Dylan’s new sound, slight delays as Kooper found the chords late and all.
Kooper got some great work as a studio organist. Hilarious.
William “Officer Obie” Obanhein from Alice’s Restaurant. He was just doing his job as a cop catching someone doing illegal dumping. That someone wrote a song about it. Then, when they made a movie from the song, he played himself – to critical raves. He then went back to being a cop, but he’s still famous today.
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Word man** was just an ordinary poster, but then he made up a story about a musician just obscure enough that it wouldn’t be suspicious if nobody could find a cite. Well, Bob Dylan was reading this board, and said “Heeeeeey, great story. Get this guy to make up more and he can come on tour and write a biography of meeeeee…” [/dylan accent]
Associates of Pink Floyd say that both Syd Barrett and Roger Waters HATED organist Richard Wright and wanted to fire him for ages… But they kept him around in large part because Wright knew how to tune their instruments. Barrett was clueless and Waters was close to tone deaf, so Wright kept the gig.
Young George Herman Ruth (not yet known as Babe) was the catcher for the baseball team at the Catholic orphanage/industrial school where he grew up. He was a wise guy with a big mouth who liked to needle and insult his pitchers.
His big mouth inspired a priest at the school to tell him, “You think pitching is easy? Let’s see YOU do it.” Turned out he was a GREAT pitcher, and made it to the major leagues as a pitcher.
This may be the inverse of the question but Jennifer Grey was a fairly well known 1980’s actress that starred in Dirty Dancing and had a prominent role in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. She was very distinctive because of her stereotypical “Jewish nose” that wasn’t typical for a Hollywood actress. She hated her nose so she decided to get it “fixed”. That minor change in appearance destroyed her career because it took away her most notable feature. She was and still is very attractive but people didn’t recognize her anymore.
“In the early 1990s, Grey underwent two rhinoplasty procedures—the second of which was necessary to correct problems stemming from the first—that resulted in a nose that caused even close friends to fail to recognize her, and the major change in her appearance negatively affected her career. Of the experience she said, “I went in the operating room a celebrity—and came out anonymous. It was like being in a witness protection program or being invisible.”[20][21] She briefly considered changing her name in order to start her career anew, but ultimately decided against this.”
Young Clint Eastwood was “discovered” by Hollywood when he was stationed at Fort Ord, an Army base in California.
But WHY was he stationed there? He was supposed to have been shipped to Korea with all his buddies. But right before he WOULD have shipped out, his sergeant called out, “Eastwood, you a certified lifeguard?” He said, “Yes, Sarge.” And he was reassigned to be a swim instructor at Fort Ord.
There were a lolt of them in Riplsy’s Believe it or Not. Like the guy who engraved the entire New Testament in a grain of rice, of the one who spent half his live with a crowbar sticking out of his skull, or I. Etta Hamburger, who was in a Pennsylvania phone book.
Although Phineas Gage is normally depicted with a crowbar though his skull, and his skull is normally shown with the crowbar through it, he didn’t spend half his life with it in that position. It was removed (along with the frontal lobe) when he was treated.
I heard Poland’s Lech Walesa ended up becoming famous because he was the one who just happened to be picked to go brief the press each day during the Solidarity strike. But I think that was on a Paul Harvey broadcast, so consider the source.
