Crib Notes

Judging the Atlanta regional air guitar competition at the Earl on Monday night (June 1) turned out to be a lot more fun than I could have ever imagined. After all, the entire thing was sponsored by Boone’s Farm, a name that many of us have trusted since childhood.

But even though the tour manager repeatedly delivered ice cold bottles of the pink, diabetic coma-inducing wine-like substance to the judges table, I stuck with PBR — for the most part.

I was a bit out of my element having never judged an air guitar competition before, but that made it all the more exciting.

Before the show started, me and another judge, who goes by the name ODM and works for Project 96.1, were taken outside where the third judge, named Django briefed us on the criteria by which we were to judge the contestants.

1.) Technical merit
The performers don’t have to know what notes they’re playing, but keep an eye on their invisible fretwork and if it jives with the music.

2.) Stage Presence
Anyone can do it in the privacy of their bedroom. Few have what it takes to rock a crowd of hundreds, even thousands — all without an instrument.

3.) Airness
The last criteria is the most difficult to define, yet often the most decisive one of all. It’s a feeling that you get when you know you’re watching something magical. It’s like gleaming the cube … transcending to an intangible time and place… You can’t really put airness into words, but like pornography, you know it when you see it.

All of these things were judged on an Olympic figure skating scale of 4.0-6.0.

After being briefed I entered the club again to find a young lady friend cowering in the corner, draped in the shadow of a tall man dressed in a unitard and Afro wig, calling himself the Fro and explaining that air guitar is indeed a sport worthy of the Olympics.

View a gallery of photos from the Atlanta regional air guitar championchips

Siren-like Boone’s Farm ladies navigated the ever-growing crowd with trays of little plastic shot cups filled with various shades of pink and red. No thanks. …

To make a long story short, 12 competitors shredded the ether with balls and viscera. Lot’s of dick jokes were passed between the judges and the competitors.

Here’s the gist of it. U.S. Air Guitar 2009 is a tour of 25 cities, where Air Guitarists get on stage for 2 minutes and play their hearts out to their favorite guitar rock anthems. Many of them were in costumes, one even tried to intimidate me before his show by making me hold his cigarettes while he was on stage.

After the first few performances, it didn’t even feel ironic anymore. Rather, it had become a battle of wits, fits and invisible licks that can be described as nothing short of Biblical in their epic stature.

In the end it was neck and neck between the Fro and a fellow in leather pants who went by the name Rint Treznor.

Rent wrapped up his performance with a beautifully performed stage dive that was absolutely brilliant.

The Fro followed by barreling through the audience and climbing the center pole in the room, kicking over drinks and throttling the cold red metal pole to uproarious applause.

A couple of off duty bar tendors, including my girlfriend, where in the crowd, and they took offense to the mess of spilled drinks that littered the floor in his wake. My girlfriend even went so far as to claim that the Fro was “all hair and no air!” and that Rent Treznor had been robbed. But in the end it was the Fro’s first round score of 6, 6 and 6 that earned him a spot in the national competition going down in Washington D.C. in August. He beat Rent Treznor out by only one-tenth of a point. I was desperatly hoping for a sudden death air-off round, but the Fro carried that one-tenth of a point over from the first round, thus making him victor.

When the smoke cleared there were no hard feelings. At the end there everyone who performed and judged and the judges mobbed the stage for a group jam of “Free Bird.”

in all seriousness, the 2008 U.S. Air Guitar Champion Hot Licks Houlihan, who was serving as the Master of Airimonies thanked me for judging the competition and invited me to come up on to the stage and jam with them.

Could I graceful jam alongside the contestants whose hopes and dreams of air greatness had just been smashed to pieces by yours truly? I’m sure that somewhere in the pages of the Art of War, Sun Tzu says something about jamming on the elements with your enemy, but I couldn’t remember what it was, so I just took photos instead.

(Top photo by Chad Radford)
(Bottom photo by Susannah Conroy)

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Tags: Atlanta, the Fro., The-Earl, US Air Guitar Regional Championchips.