At the U.S. Air Guitar Championships, faking it is the only way to win
by Jewly Hight
Most people in Nashville have a fairly practical philosophy as it pertains to guitars: Respect your instrument for the necessary tool that it is, and cherish it for how well it performs. Around here, a guitar case is an emblem of the work musicians do—or aspire to do—in clubs, studios, garages, classrooms, writing appointments and the like.
All of that must have something to do with why U.S. Air Guitar competitions—which trade real live instruments for goofy theatrics—have never come to Nashville, while cities further north and west have had regional championships for years. On the other hand, Bjorn Turoque—a retired air guitarist and a U.S. Air Guitar spokesman whose given name is Dan Crane—suggests the reason might be that the south's hotter climate makes its residents more laidback. (Then again, he's never been here.)
What Nashville has had since 2003—the first year the U.S. Air Guitar Championships were held in New York City—is a larger-than-life sculpture towering over the roundabout at one end of Music Row. The bronze figures' outstretched arms are conspicuously devoid of instruments, except a single tambourine. Maybe in designing "Musica," sculptor Alan LeQuire was anticipating the day when air guitar would arrive in town.
Now it has. Nashville will host its first U.S. Air Guitar Regional Championship June 2. And on this occasion, a debate that's long raged in air guitar circles seems particularly relevant: Is an air guitarist better served by actually knowing how to play what Turoque calls "there guitar," or by having a flair for the dramatic? To put it another way: Do guitarists make good actors?
"You kind of have to know that one arm does the strumming in a certain rhythm and the other one does the chords and the fingering," says Turoque, who was featured in the 2006 documentary Air Guitar Nation and wrote a book called To Air Is Human. (He's also a there guitarist, though he says he's gotten more mileage out of faking it.) "But sometimes you can know too much, which I think was the case for me. I tended to really watch my hands a lot, like, be looking down at my hands to make sure they were in the right place. And nobody knows or cares if they're in the right place, really, when it's air guitar. And it's kind of boring to watch somebody looking at their hands."
The U.S. wasn't exactly an early adopter of air guitar competition, either. Finland inaugurated the world championships in 1996; seven years later Americans joined in. "As is typical, I think, with U.S. history, we waited for other people to kind of figure it out, and then we just kind of came in and dominated," Turoque says. "As has been said, if there's one thing that the United States deserves to dominate, it's air guitar."
All over the world, air guitarists abide by the same rules. They have 60 seconds to do a solo performance with an imaginary guitar-like instrument. ("Basically, that's to try to weed out the air drummers.") Additionally, contestants are judged on technical merit, stage presence and the elusive quality of "airness."
Glam rock and hair bands would seem like logical places to turn for over-the-top stage attire, moves and material. But Turoque—who gave his winning 2005 performance faux-shredding to Sweet's "Set Me Free" in a silver spandex jumpsuit, headband and eyeliner—says that's not necessarily so: "I guess people tend to think of air guitar as a fairly metal-centric art form, but that's not really the case at all. I've seen dueling banjos played by one person....I mean, we've had a guy that was pretty successful doing Brad Paisley."
All of this talk of posturing and pretending begs the question: Have air guitarists elsewhere gotten grief from those who prefer to entertain with instrument in hand? "If you call being called a 'pussy' grief, then, sure, yes, we've gotten grief. It's funny how threatened some musicians get by air guitar. I guess it's because we are packing these clubs and doing such a bang-up job at this that sometimes they're like, 'Wow, you know, I've been [a] fledgling [musician] in my basement, and now you guys come along with your invisible instruments. You guys are destroying rock 'n' roll.' "
Turoque's diplomatic response is, "What we're doing is actually celebrating rock 'n' roll and paying tribute to the rock gods that have influenced us and inspired us. We're not really trying to take anything away from actual musicians—we're celebrating actual musicians. I mean, obviously we would be nowhere if musicians didn't actually record music. I think there's room for both of us on the landscape."
Email music@nashvillescene.com.
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