About Playing Air Guitar

Playing Air Guitar

 

Playing air guitar is probably not the best description, although I did that as well. To be completely accurate its more like playing tennis racket, let me explain.

When I was a kid my parents gave me a guitar.  It was one of those that you see in the toy store that had plastic strings and when I picked it up to play it I came to the realization that there was possibly more to playing guitar then just wanting to play the guitar, in other words, the noise coming out of my guitar just did not sound like a Led Zeppelin guitar solo.

So at that point I figured I had two choices, I could either take lessons and learn how to play, or I could self teach myself like all the guitar greats had done. Ultimately I choose to do neither and instead I, well, faked it, enter the tennis racket.

Now, when I was younger there was no such thing as playing the air guitar.  There was either playing a real guitar, acting like you were playing a guitar for real when you were actually just holding a real guitar in your hands, or using a guitar substitute (tennis racket, broom, the cat, you see what I mean).  I choose the tennis racket.  I decided on a tennis racket because I had one in my room and I couldn't figure out how to sneak the broom to my room without anyone noticing (and we didn't have a cat).

So I used to play my tennis racket to every Beatles' song I could get my hands on.  You would think that I would have left it at playing my tennis racket alone in my room (and signing all the John Lennon parts to my fake, hairbrush taped to the TV antenna, microphone) but that wasn't the way I rolled.

I actually found other kids in the neighborhood who also played tennis racket, actually one kid played fruit but that's a different post, and we would all set up in my room and play our (fake) instruments.  Then one day we were ready for a real concert and possibly a tour.

Now our tennis rackets, and English cucumber, didn't have speakers per say so we all decided to put the record player out the bedroom window to the driveway and set up there.  I don't remember what the guy who was supposed to be Ringo used for drums, may have been a trash can or one of his mom's hat boxes, but we set up out there and played for the whole neighborhood.  Evidently no one in the neighborhood was home at that time because no one came to watch the concert except for one kid that informed us that The Beatles were just a fad, according to his dad, and they wouldn't be around for long. Yeah right...

So my "air guitar" days lasted until I was about 19 when my mom caught me playing my tennis racket in my room while I was home on leave from the military.  I stopped doing it then because I realized that it was either learn how to play the guitar, or learn how to play tennis.  The combination was not working and it was getting a little embarrassing walking around with a tennis racket in a guitar case.  Besides that I had always had an interest in girls and the tennis racket was apparently a turn off when I pulled it out of the case and started playing the Stairway To Heaven guitar solo, evidently no one could actually hear it but me, and it got to the point where all I could hear was laughter...

I have just been informed that an English cucumber is a vegetable not a fruit.  Now if everyone is going to get all picky I am not going to write the post about how I learned how to drive.