NightLife: U.S. Air Guitar Championships
By Lavanya Ramanathan
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, August 7, 2009

At 47, Lance "the Shred" Kasten is Keith Richards with an air guitar, sinewy and athletic, revered for his first-rate non-musicianship and -- let's be honest -- for merely lasting this long at a pretty dubious sport.

But when the salt-and-pepper patriarch jumped onto the 9:30 club speakers at last year's U.S. Air Guitar D.C. regionals, the crowd surely suspected it wasn't going to end well.

"You practice what you're going to do," Kasten says now, pragmatically. "It doesn't all go as planned."

The Shred lunged into a stunning aerial split. And then he landed -- and hit the stage hard enough to break his ankle. And just like that, the Severna Park resident's dreams of returning to the nationals were crushed; for his 20-plus years shredding, Kasten has made it to the big leagues once but has yet to clinch the national title.

This just might be his year. On Friday, the U.S. Air Guitar National Championships land in Washington for the first time, bringing the country's best basement rock stars here to compete in our little hotbed of democracy. Among them will be Kasten, who, after his ankle healed, returned to the regionals in May and tied with Chris "Sanjar the Destroyer" Paxton for a spot in the finals.

At this point, you might be asking yourself, "An air-guitar championship? For the love of God, why?"

Air guitar probably should have peaked back in 2006, the year it became the subject of the documentary "Air Guitar Nation." It probably should have remained the secret shower ritual of men everywhere. Instead, the documentary and competition only fueled its growth. Endless takes on Guns N' Roses' "Welcome to the Jungle" now ring out at events in two dozen cities. Its stars make TV appearances, they open for bands who play, you know, real instruments.

The competitions are rowdy, raunchy affairs. Contestants rip through a 60-second segment of a song of their choice (heavy metal and classic rock genres are the most popular in this sport), and if they advance to the next round, they must riff to a surprise song. After each song, a panel of judges brutally dissects the performances. ("It's fun to make fun of nerds," explains frequent judge Jason Jones of "The Daily Show." "It's fun to crush people's dreams.") Beers and expletives fly; finally, a winner is named.

Contestants are judged not on their Guitar Hero-esque ability to "hit" all the notes, but on their panache, the way they rock the crowd, the way they fill out that spandex -- the qualities the U.S. Air Guitar founders refer to as "airness."

"It's the je ne sais quoi factor," explains Kriston Rucker, who co-founded U.S. Air Guitar in 2003. He puts it in Washington terms: "It's like the Supreme Court definition of pornography: You know it when you see it."

A few basement rock stars have emerged as the upholders of airness: Andrew "William Ocean" Litz, Craig "Hot Lixx Hulahan" Billmeier, the totally humble Awesome (Alex Koll).

Litz clinched the U.S. title in 2007 with a prime display of that certain something. "Halfway through, I jumped into the crowd. I set it up with 30 people in the crowd that they would be holding a cup of water, and when I jumped, they threw the water into the air," Litz recalls wistfully. "Like I was jumping into the ocean.

"And then I got back up on stage, and I finished my routine."

Tonight, William Ocean will return to the finals to take on Lance the Shred, Sanjar the Destroyer, Cold Steel Renegade and 20 others vying for the 2009 title.

"You've got to come with your guns blazing," says Kasten. "I think this is going to be the most competitive air guitar championship ever. It's going to be insanity. That crowd is going to go absolutely bonkers."