All the planning and patience is about to pay off. You've experienced the excitement and anticipation of preparing for a concert, and should now direct your energy toward the next leg of the experience: the social scene. If you are reading this book, you're a rock music fan. And if you're a rock music fan, you know that along with sternum-vibrating sound electrifying ambience, certain givens come with the rock-gig terrain.
For example, you will, at some point in your concert-going career, have beer spilled on you by a shirtless and incoherent man. You will discard your hygienic scruples and enter the sinister zone that is the porta-potty. And you will be instructed to turn your head and cough during a pre-concert security check.
Make no mistake: The act of sweltering for two days at a music festival, or of driving to another state to catch your favorite band, is a journey full of spiritual profundity and a million pitfalls. "No Air Guitar Allowed" is intended as a guidebook for that journey. If rock music has no rules, it poses a thousand questions. How can you answer nature's call without missing the encore? How can you ditch your parents at a show without, well, ditching your parents at a show? Is it possible to help make it a kinder, gentler mosh pit? And what are the rock faux pas that have the potential to make an entire stadium consider you the most obnoxious human being on the face of the planet?
I feel uniquely qualified to field these questions because I am one of you! I have made every concert foul in the book. I have made out at a Bruce Springsteen concert and worn his sleeveless half-shirt while doing so. I have kicked over a 6-foot-7 guy's beer. I have haggled with a scalper in front of a first date. I have sung out loud at a Wilco show. I have yacked in a porta-potty at an Iron Maiden show. I have fake-vomited my way back to the front of the pit. I have "whooed" through a parking lot in a limo at a Madonna concert. Worst of all, I have closed my eyes tight at a show on numerous occasions, unaware of the thousands of eyes around me as I played air guitar.
Which brings us to the title of our book. Playing air guitar at a concert tops every concert foul that you will see listed. What leads a person to play air guitar at a show? Maybe it's the feelings evoked by the live concert experience. Or maybe it's just that this low-budget musician has consumed fourteen 12-ounce drafts, filled with air and running $12 a pop. Either way, it's a dicey business. If you don't really know how to play the axe, you make a flailing spectacle of yourself and illustrate how far you really are from your rock-star dreams. If you do know enough leads and chorus to do a passable imitation of the guitarist, you're halfway to becoming one of the most hated entities on the planet:a mime. If you think air guitar-ing is just a myth, or that the impulse to rock the air has gone extinct, think again. You can encounter this timeworn gesture of musical worship at any show where men out number women 5 to 1.
Air guitar has gained a sort of kitsch among modern rock fans, which explains the popularity of fake-it-'til-you-rock it games like "Guitar Hero." In the non-virtual world, there is a great forum for air guitar and that is the increasingly popular sanctioned air guitar competitions springing up throughout the world. But if your competitive spirit is "strong like bull," confine your practicing to the bedroom.
Writing about air guitar, and all of the fun and funny minutiae to be encountered at rock shows, has brought back so many embarrassing, emotional, ridiculous, expensive, noteworthy, fond memories. We all have a story or two about this show or that show and I hope reading this book brings back the same feelings writing this has given me.
