Entertainment, Music - Air Force Times

‘Six String General’ wages air-guitar warfare

Video clips:

The Washington Post: Air Guitar General warms up

BBC: Footage from the Washington round

He may wear an Army uniform — sort of — but the “Six String General” is all about air power.

In civilian life, he’s known as Tim Granlund, but for the U.S. Air Guitar Championships, he’s a self-described “officer in the pantheon of rock.”

The general’s battlefield Wednesday night was the stage at the 9:30 Club in Washington, D.C., where he clashed with the axes of evil from around the nation’s capital.

The fifth annual U.S. Air Guitar Championships, a nationwide competition that recently spawned a book and documentary, began this month with similar competitions in 14 cities nationwide. Fourteen regional winners will compete for the U.S. title in New York in August. The lucky faux shredder who claims top honors in the U.S. will go on to compete for the world championship in Finland in September.

For contestants, the most important rule is this: You have to have a guitar and it must be invisible. Judges score each contestant’s 60-second performance on style, accuracy and “air-ness,” rating them on a figure skating-style 4.0 to 6.0 scale.

This year’s contest marked Granlund’s first tour, but he entered the contest with all the confidence and authority of a commanding officer — minus the “stuffed shirt formality.”

One look at his uniform — a basic Army “Class A” uniform augmented with black leather pants and a belt with a cow-skull buckle — and it becomes clear he’s not actually in the service. But he was more than willing to be the military’s de facto representative in the competition.

“I have all the respect in the world for the military,” Granlund said. “I’m not trying to make fun of anybody; a general is such a powerful figure. Lots of machismo.”

The axe-men cometh

When he is not wielding an air guitar, Granlund is a mild-mannered advertising assistant at the C-Ville Weekly, the alternative paper in Charlottesville, Va. But when he prepares to do battle, he has the hubris to rival Gen. George S. Patton.

But he faced well trained — and well decorated — competition.

In a packed 9:30 Club dressing room, contestants donned leather and gold lamé while cameramen and reporters quizzed them about their training regimens. The answers they give are, like the competition itself, largely non-sequitur.

A reporter for Associated Press Radio was interviewing Vlad DM Shredder, a 300 pound mass of humanity with long hair and an orange tie-dyed T-shirt who would take the stage to perform the theme to the “Transformers” animated movie (not “You’ve Got the Touch” — extra points if you know that one).

With all the clarity of a Pentagon press conference, Shredder told the AP reporter how he prepares for air-guitar warfare: “Meditation mostly. I concentrate on a ball of fire, and that ball of fire goes into my guitar, sets ablaze that guitar and plays it till it burns out. Then I stomp it out which usually ends up being the peanuts on my floor. That’s how I prepare.”

Granlund didn’t take long to size up the crowd. “I see some competition, but I see a lot of guys ... they don’t have the polish that I do,” Grunland said, putting on his aviator sunglasses in the well-lit room. “They don’t look like they have that next level of awesome-ocity.”

Another impressive competitor in the 25-act lineup was Glitzkrieg, a glammed-out sparkle bomb who finger-synced to Queen’s “Stone Cold Crazy,” a performance that earned him an average score of 5.6 and banshee-like howls from the sold-out crowd.

Granlund was the tenth performer to take the stage and he had some tough acts to follow. Right before him, the Rock ‘n’ Roll Soul Man — the night’s only left handed axe man — earned a 5.8 average score.

The general’s secret weapon was the Scorpions hit “Rock You Like a Hurricane,” a track he had re-cut himself to get “maximum rock efficiency.” Granlund rocked through the re-spliced single, jump-humping and fist pumping. The crowd was with him from the first crunches of the opening power chords.

Afterwards Granlund took his place next to host Bjorn Turoque and awaited the judge’s scores, sweating heavy but sunglasses still on. He got a 5.6— pretty good, but not good enough to make it to the second round.

“I got robbed, and everyone agrees,” Granlund said.

Instead, victory went to the night’s eldest air guitarist, 47-year-old ‘Ed Bangin, who advanced through the first round with Van Halen’s “On Fire” and took the second by blistering through the surprise song, Boston’s “Long Time.”

Despite the tough loss, the general is planning a surge for the auxiliary online competition, which he, of course, plans to win strumming-hands down.

More important than winning, though, is the exposure. For some people, competing to be the world’s best air guitarist is like striving to be the best speller on the jumping team. But these audiophiles and metalheads have the world’s attention, and that’s worth its weight in glory. There is no other competition in the world where you can be eliminated in the first round and still get global exposure.

“I even had friends in Greece see me on the BBC,” Granlund said. “I’m an international rock star now!”

He has the world in his hands, it seems. Along with an invisible guitar.