Mock & Roll

There is a rock god on stage at the Triple Rock Social Club bestriding the speakers like a colossus, his Loverboy T-shirt sacrificed to a Dionysian frenzy, his tongue out and waggling, his fingers pulsating. With a quick kick and flip, he’s down in the crowd, then up on the back bar, strutting around the beer bottles and whiskeys as he brings the music directly to the people. The fact that he has no instrument is of no consequence; this is rock ’n’ roll.

At the Minneapolis regional of the Air Guitar World Championship a couple of weeks ago, nine contestants took the stage to see whose mimicry of real rock-star moves would be good enough to win a slot at the L.A. nationals. There, one lucky American would be chosen to represent the red, white, and blue at the world tourney of “airaoke” in August.

Though amateurs have practiced the art of air guitar for generations (you only start feeling stupid doing it sometime in your thirties), the formal World Championship first took place in 1996 in the city of Oulo in northern Finland. Though the annual Finnish event has been a reliable source of silly-season news stories since then, only last year did the nation that invented the electric guitar finally send a competitor. Davie “C. Diddy” Jung swept the title just the way the U.S. dominated Olympic basketball after NBA players were allowed to compete. And there are signs that the world’s newest Sport of Kings is headed straight for the Hollywood machinery that builds American Idols.

The championship is set up in that mode, with the contestants playing to both the crowd and a panel of three local judges (rock critic Melissa Maerz, Cities 97’s Brian Oake, and Andy Lindquist of Willie’s American Guitars) who are hamming it up as much as anyone.

In the first round, contestants freeform for sixty seconds to the song of their choice. Things have been heavily stage-managed; all contestants have outlandish costumes and goofy stage names, and it’s impossible to miss the camera crew filming the proceedings for Ben Affleck and Matt Damon’s production company, Project Greenlight.

All contestants were entertaining, though maybe in spite of themselves. One, who used the nom de guerre “Iron Ranger,” had a peculiar floppy style, as though she were trying to get a handle on a twenty-pound trout instead of teasing power chords from a guitar. And the mullet-wigged “Ax Action,” concentrating with furrowed brow on the riff to AC/DC’s “You Shook Me All Night Long,” almost fatally misjudged the length of the Triple Rock stage. He told me later, “Falling off the stage is a classic guitar thing. I really should have gone down to the ground, played for a second, then come back from the dead.” So that was on purpose, then? “Oh, sure,” he deadpanned, then burst out laughing.

The best was “Bob the Murderer,” an orange-haired Triple Rock employee who enthralled the crowd with a perfect punk pantomime of Sex Pistol Johnny Rotten and The Young Ones’ Vyvyan. Though he did little in the way of actually mimicking a guitarist, he stomped and glowered and spazzed brilliantly. An added plus: That was not technically a costume, since it’s the way he dresses all the time. Even in air guitar, authenticity adds extra weight.

After the second round, in which all contestants performed “Cat Scratch Fever,” the judges declared a tie, leading to an “air-off” between Jon “Jackicaster” Maki, who performed in a painted-on seventies pornstar ’stache and orange jumpsuit emblazoned “Stroke This,” and the clear crowd favorite, Michael “Mother” Rucker, in the Loverboy T.

“It’s a Long Way to the Top (If You Wanna Rock ’n’ Roll)” erupted from the speakers. Jack and Mother strutted homoerotically. Jack flashed his nipple ring, but Mother stripped to his Calvins, and the screaming crowd sealed his win.

Of course, there was one little thing: Mother was a ringer, an L.A. actor and story editor who’s worked on (surprise!) the Project Greenlight TV show. But it seems churlish to complain about fakery in an air-guitar contest, especially when there was no real attempt to hide the setup. Minutes after the closing jam, Mother basked in air fame as he answered questions from two journalists and signed a T-shirt for a besotted female fan, who was greatly saddened when his Sharpie pen turned out to be dry.

In the end, air guitar is all about love. Nick “Swami” Swanson, who took third place, told us: “Air guitar comes from you expressing what you wish you could have done yourself. You want to be like the real thing. It lets you forget for a moment.”—Christopher Bahn