{air app aren t }


air is no fun. I feel like I’ve missed some- thing, like taking a shower.”


While Kasten was building his life, air guitar was taking off as a pop culture phenomenon. In August 2001, Man- hattan branding consultant Kriston Rucker read a Wall Street Journal ar- ticle about the annual Air Guitar World Championships in Oulu, Finland. The following August, he and friend Cedric Devitt headed there to see what the fan- fare was about. They discovered what resembled an Olympic village of air gui- tarists, with competitors hailing from Australia to Belgium. But the United States, birthplace of rock, wasn’t repre- sented on the world stage. Upon returning to New York, the


friends decided to create the U.S. Air Guitar league. They scheduled its in- augural event at Manhattan’s Pussycat Lounge in June 2003 with no idea of what to expect or whether anyone would even show. That quickly changed, how- ever, when two days before the contest, Howard Stern spent a half-hour joking about it on his radio show. “There were throngs of people try-


ing to get in who couldn’t,” Rucker says. “Lines around the block. It made ev- erybody feel like they were rock stars in some strange alternate universe.” A wide-eyed, 41-year-old Kasten was


among them. By then also the father of 10-month-


old Lexi and 2-year-old Jenna, Kasten had recently revived his interest in the air guitar circuit. “Every year, I was Googling ‘air guitar contests,’ and all of a sudden that ‘U.S. Air Guitar’ link popped up,” he recalls. Assuming he’d be a ringer, Kas-


ten and Tina drove the 206 miles from Severna Park to New York. “I remember him backstage talk-


ing about how he was the geriatric competitor because he was older than everybody,” says Dan Crane, 39, a.k.a. Bjorn Turoque. Kasten, billed as The Shred, came in third that day. Yet he was inspired. Never before had he met like-minded souls who took air guitar seriously. With the release of the 2006 docu-


mentary “Air Guitar Nation” — which briefly features a giddy Kasten — the


My life is high performance, running


around like an idiot.”


“


U.S. Air Guitar league continued to grow in mainstream popularity. Today, there are 16 regional competitions in cities from San Francisco to Philadel- phia. The local competition has sold out the 1,200-person-capacity 9:30 Club three times. Kasten is one of the league’s perennial performers. Although he’s captured the


14 The WashingTon PosT Magazine | July 18, 2010


2007 and 2009 D.C. regional titles, the national one continues to elude him. “Bottom line: I’ll keep going until I


win the United States championship,” he says. “I’m not quitting until they pry this freakin’ air guitar from my cold, dead hands.”


after driving Lexi, now 7, and Jenna, 9, the 30-second distance to the bus stop at the end of the street, Kasten puts his Chevy Suburban in park. Then, without warning, he jumps out of the driver side window “Dukes of Hazzard”- style. Lexi giggles. No one on the sidewalk is fazed by the


acrobatic entrance; clearly, they’ve seen it before. Although Kasten — dressed in jeans and a long-sleeved surf-shop shirt — is the only dad on the sidewalk, he mingles easily with the moms wait- ing to send their kids to nearby Oak Hill Elementary. As the bus leaves, Kasten waves goodbye; then, it’s off to work.


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