I mulled around by the stage for a bit wondering how I could find out who won, when I recognized Glen-airy Glen Rock, the winner of the Toronto Open Air Guitar competition.

“How did it go?” I asked.

“Good. I won,” said Mr. Glen Rock.

For this event, he aired to The Cult’s Love Removal Machine. The win means he’ll be representing Toronto at the national competition, which I believe will be held right here in Toronto. If he wins that, it’s off to Finland.

The event is the first of four air guitar competitions that will be held in Toronto in the coming months. The last one, happening sometime in the summer, will draw from regional winners across the country to determine a national champ. The champ will go on to represent Canada at the Air Guitar World Championships in Oulu, Finland, an event near and dear to my heart. Last night’s event got a little boost from Björn Türoque, the perpetual second greatest U.S. air guitarist.

Björn Türoque (Be-yorn Too-rock) was in town to promote Air Guitar Nation, a documentary about the rise of air guitar in the U.S., which opens March 23. Björn Türoque, née Dan Crane, had appeared on The Edge and Much on Demand, and would speak to the CBC crew covering last night’s event. For the Toronto Open competition, he would judge and demonstrate his air guitar skills.

Björn Türoque entered the bar wearing a thin bandanna amid a few “whoos” of recognition from the crowd. He headed towards the table near the stage where he and Barb Seaton from EMI and music writer Karen Bliss would hand out figure skating-style scores for 60-second performances to songs chosen by the competitors.

The first round, with eight air guitarist plus five late entries—some of whom were obviously waiting for the liquid courage to kick in—was far from Oulu’s standards. One stand-out was Glen-airy Glen Rock, who, after announcing that “my business is rock, and business is good!” made a fine performance to British Sea Power’s Apologies to Insect Life. The Quebec air guitar champion, Rad, had the lights dimmed before he came on stage looking like a cross between Dracula and a member of Star Trek’s Borg. His finger lights looked pretty cool as he worked an Ozzy Osborne song. The whole effect was totally satanic.

“You gotta have a look or a gimmick,” said Brad Pelman, co-president of Maple Pictures, the company bringing Air Guitar Nation to Canada. Pelman’s advice is true, but the shtick can backfire. Kaptain Kozmic, dressed as an astronaut complete with a confetti-spewing pack, found his fish-bowl helmet rotating and blocking his face with every bounce. Hurricane Andy, wearing a full nun’s habit, had to fight the head covering out from in front of his face. The generally generous Björn Türoque awarded Hurricane Andy a 4.666. Neither Kozmic nor Andy made it to the final round.

Unfortunately, only a few women competed. Also unfortunately, they all felt that unzipping and often removing a layer would make for good air guitar. Only 2Cute2Compete moved on in the competition.

After the intermission and a solid performance by Björn Türoque, the six competitors of the final round assembled on stage to hear the song they’d all have to perform to: Rage Against the Machine’s Killing in the Name. With the start of the final round, the atmosphere in the crowd became pleasantly less frat housey as the competition on stage became more serious. Stephanie, who performed as Astro Girl in the first round, bet me that her favourite, the shirtless Schmidt Lad, would finish ahead of Glen-airy Glen Rock. She had faith in her competitor. After all, she had run her hand through his chest hair backstage.

Rad still looked super bad in the second round, but his gimmick didn’t work well with the new song. Dracula Borg had painted himself into a bit of a corner. Master Yoshi, a Grade 2 teacher who claimed to “rock out with his cock out” (though he kept his routine totally PG) did well, as did The PK, who definitely had the most, or at least loudest, fans in the crowd. In the end, I was a dollar richer as Glen-airy Glen Rock got the highest score and won the night to prostrate “we’re not worthy” bows from The PK and Master Yoshi.

The Toronto contest didn’t compare with the inaugural Canadian air guitar event in Whistler last December, where 500 people attended and at least 100 were turned away. Roughly 80 people came out to the Toronto event.

“It wasn’t amazing, but it was a good regional,” said Björn Türoque at the end of the night. If Toronto wants to send one of its own to Oulu, or even crown a national champ, it’s got a lot of work to do.

First Round of Competition (Link no longer active.)

The Championships (Link no longer active.)

After the media circus, the bootcampers were taken to some rustic Finnish digs. We had a full on traditional sauna. It’s not often I can say I got naked and sweaty with a bunch of strange guys. Jumping into the Baltic was intense. A wicked party. I think this event and the following days made most bootcampers a little more serious about the art of air guitar. It was weird, but for the next three days we’d all (bootcampers, other players, the press, the posse) be talking very seriously about the practice. More on that later.

So, Martha, Mike, Scott and I chilled in Oulu even after the Air Guitar Champs had ended. We went to a full on rave at the youth centre. We danced and screamed. I was told jokingly to be quiet, this was a library. The person who scolded me was the director of Freestyle, a movie about hip-hop from LA. He told me to come to the show tomorrow, but like, it was 4am already, like we’d even make it. The rest of our northern Finland daze were spent biking around town on low-riders with coaster-brakes and cooking sausages over a fire.

Down to Helsinki for the final paper-work for Russia and then, bam, we landed in St. Petersburg. This town was next level. Thankfully, we had a language book and had our Cyrillic alphabet down. If we didn’t have those essentials, things would have been even more difficult. There was a good amount of English in the city, but not a lot and especially not at the central visa registry. In Russia, you have to get invited to enter the country and you have to register once you get in. Usually, big name hotels can take care of all of that for you. We budget traveller have to do things a bit differently. We found some web site that e-mailed us our invitation. That was easy. But registering, that was a bit trickier. Thankfully, we met a wonderful girl our age who was bilingual. Let’s call here the Angel. She helped up wade through some of the bureaucracy at the main visa registry. In the end we found out that we couldn’t register with the main registry, but we had to track down the office of the people who invited us. Not a big problem especially compared to one woman we met. Her mother lived in St. Petersburg and was dying. But the daughter, who spoke excellent French and was born is St P, was having trouble getting permission to stay in the city to see her mom. A Brit and his wife found out they had to go to Moscow to register. The Brit used a method of communication he liked to call the American but we now call the Asshole, that’s where you just yell really loudly in English until you get what you want. That didn’t work in registry.

Grocery shopping was a challenge too. We had a hard time finding a Euro/N. American style of grocery store. You know, like you bring all your stuff to the counter and you don’t have to speak to anyone if you don’t want to. The first place we found was a get-in-line and order from the counter affair. We split up and all did our share of pointing, grunting and nodding.

With stamped visas in our pockets and water bottled by Pepsi in our back-packs, we set off to explore the city. St. Pete’s is hype. Kinda dirty, but big, intense and the parts that weren’t covered up in scaffolding were beautiful. Mike and I went clubbing one evening. That was crazy. Fancy-shmancy people in the line so, we hosers were getting passed by even though we were ‘next’ for half an hour. I was teaching Mike how to say “I don’t speak Russian.” in Russian and by the time those words left our mouths, we were in. Mike thinks we were taken for New Yorkers or something equally hip. So faster than you can say “abracadabra,” we were on the dance-floor grooving to throbbing beats and enveloped in more dry-ice smoke than is legal to pump into a Canadian stadium.

We did the high-culture thing too. All of us saw Onegin, the Pushkin novel turned opera by Tchaikovsky. We ate at a restaurant that catered to the local intelligencia around 1910. We saw Dovstoyevsky and Tchaikovsky’s graves and drank 12% beers in the subways. That is high culture!

Now Mike and Scott have gone their separate ways, well, I think they are both in London now. For Martha and I, St Petersburg just didn’t seem right without them. We left for Tallinn, Estonia. For me the border crossing was disappointingly easy. No hassles, nothing. Just a long delay at the duty free. Tallinn is a big old theme park for Americans. There are tons of tour groups. Compared to St Pete’s, this is Disneyland. The best way to see Tallinn’s old town is right after you get off the red-eye express. You can wander around delirious and sleep-deprived and it’s just you, the old town and little old gnomish ladies with their wig bristle brooms.

Here’s the long and the short of it: I was eliminated in the first round. This meant that I could not compete in the final for the title of Air Guitar World Champion. But, frig, let me tell you sometime about how much fun I had. Unfortunately that blog will have to wait. The posse is headed for St. Petersburg. Should be crazy.