Kansas City dad is No. 1 air guitarist in the country. Now he’s challenged Taylor Swift
Cole Lindbergh saw Taylor Swift do something at the U.S. Open tennis championships in September that really got his competitive juices pumping.
There she was, in a VIP box with Travis Kelce, Patrick Mahomes and Brittany Mahomes, strumming on an air guitar to the 2003 song “I Believe in a Thing Called Love” by British rock band The Darkness.
Video of her rockin’ out with Kelce went viral.
Lindbergh paid especially close attention because, well, the 38-year-old Kansas City dad happens to know a thing or two about playing air guitar.
He is currently the best air guitarist in the land, the 2024 U.S. Air Guitar champion who competed in August in the Air Guitar World Championships in Finland.
So he was happy to see Swift try her oh-so-talented hands at invisible guitar. A few days ago he challenged her online to an “air guitar battle of the century” to raise money for charity.
Alas, “I have not gotten a response,” Lindbergh tells The Star.
Years of playing air guitar since he was a little boy paid off big-time for Lindbergh when he won the national title in July and a free trip to Finland to compete in the Olympics of air guitar.
Turns out there’s a huge difference between faux-shredding in your living room to AC/DC and doing it on a stage.
In Oulu, a city north of Helsinki, Lindbergh performed in front of thousands of people — enthusiasts, media from around the world, documentary film crews, a panel of judges.
The emcee introduced him like this: “All the way from Kansas City, Missouri! The current U.S. champion, Slappy Nutz.”
Lindbergh walked out wearing red suspenders over a plaid shirt and nerdy black glasses. The glasses didn’t stay on his face long. He starts every performance by shaking his head so violently they fly off.
Tongue hanging out, arms flailing, head snapping back and forth like a bobblehead, he rocked out to “I’m Gonna Be (500 Miles),“ the most popular song from Scottish rock duo The Proclaimers.
In his day job, Lindbergh is a corporate trainer.
“I look at this as an outlet of creativity,” Lindbergh said. “I look at this as a way to have fun. I know there’s a ton of people who would say this is the stupidest thing they’ve ever seen.
“But there are air guitarists all over the world that participate in this and I think we all kind of know that this is silly and ridiculous and I think that actually makes it kind of fun and kind of interesting and kind of cool.”
‘All subjective and silly’
“What do you think of these scores for Slappy Nutz,” the emcee asked the crowd when the judges held up their scorecards for Lindbergh’s first-round performance. On a scale of 4.0 to 6.0, he pulled a couple of dismal 5.4s and a lofty 5.8.
The crowd booed.
“Ultimately, it comes back to this is a fun competition,” he said. “People want to see something strange and weird. The judging doesn’t really matter.”
When he’s not going bonkers on a stage with an invisible guitar, Lindbergh is a husband, dad to a 5-year-old daughter and a sales trainer for the restaurant tech company ChowNow.
He can play real guitar. He started taking lessons when he was young. He can also play drums and keyboard and played in various school bands and a rock band around Kansas City. In high school, for a class assignment, he made a silly video about how to play air guitar, which now seems oddly prescient.
He began competing off and on in air guitar competitions in 2018, a journey that has placed him on stages across the country.
Knowing how to play real guitar isn’t necessary, but it can help.
“There are some people that would say technical merit is very important. There are others who would say, ‘Hey, you can do whatever you want with your hands ... it’s all subjective and silly,’” he said.
“Playing a real guitar gives you that sense of musicality that could give you a leg up. But at the same time, I’ve seen air guitarists who never played a musical instrument in their life. They’re great performers and that’s great, too.”
Slappy Nutz is born
At the world championships, Lindbergh competed against the likes of Guitarantula, Ichabod Fame, Seven Seas, a German dude called Ehr Wolf — and “Shred Lasso.”
When he started competing years ago, Lindbergh’s first stage persona was Air Lindbergh, an old-time pilot who was “very mean and rude and would flip the bird to the judges and get angry.”
(Side note: He is not related to famous American aviator Charles Lindbergh.)
But a curmudgeon playing air guitar didn’t score any wins. So when he decided to take another run at the national title this year, he looked for a character better suited to his own self-described silly self.
“The deal is, a lot of times your air guitar character is really just your personality cranked up to an 11,” he said. “Air Lindbergh being the mean guy ... that’s not really who I am. So I realized that this year, I think I’ve been taking this all a little too seriously. Let’s just go have some fun, let’s have a good time.
“So that’s how Slappy Nutz was born.”
Apparently like a lot of air guitarists, Lindbergh draws inspiration from the physical, frenetic playing of Angus Young, the schoolboy uniform-wearing lead guitarist and co-founder of AC/DC.
“If I was a guitar player, I’d want to be Angus Young,” he said. “Like, come on, I think there are other guitarists who also feel the same. There was an air guitarist I met from Belgium who was Air Gus, instead of Angus.”
Stage presence is a competition category. How well can you command a crowd?
“I personally believe that a lot of air guitar is in the face,” said Lindbergh. “You think about watching music videos or concerts. The guitar player is always making those crazy faces. So I feel like you’re going to see a lot of different facial expressions, for sure.
“I also think you’re going to see a lot of different power stances, if you will. I’m in the middle of the stage, I’m playing the guitar and I’m kinda crouched, or I’m down on one knee or I’m jumping in the air, kicking my leg. I think that’s a common thing.
“And also hair. If you’ve got hair, you use your hair.”
(“I’m past that stage in my life,” he joked.)
Technical prowess counts, too. Does it look like you are playing an actual guitar?
Playing an air guitar can be a sweaty pursuit.
“Air guitarists, many will find themselves absolutely exhausted. Me included. Maybe part of that is maybe not being in the greatest shape,” he said. “But the other part is that I want to give it all my all. I want to put on a show, I want to put on a performance.
“There are many injuries in air guitar. Because you could be jumping around, fall off a stage.”
Once, in a competition in Kansas City, he had to perform to a “weird metal song” he had never heard before, “so I just did a lot of head banging and my neck hurt for days, just days, afterwards. It still hurts sometimes.
“Doing really hard strumming with your arms, getting a sore bicep. These are all things that can happen.”
The action is frenetic. Competitors are on stage for only a few seconds at a time.
“I have only performed about 15 minutes of actual air guitar,” he said. “I flew all the way to Finland for a chance to perform 60 seconds of air guitar. I managed to turn it into 120 seconds because I made it into the second round.”
The third category is “airness, basically the je ne sais quoi of air guitar. It cannot be defined,” said Lindbergh. “You are watching somebody on the stage and they have airness, they have something about them, there is an airness about them.
“One of the best ways I describe it is you’re no longer watching an air guitar performance. You’re watching something more. It’s elevating it beyond just a guy up there flailing around on stage pretending to play a guitar.”
Olympics of air guitar in Finland
Lindbergh estimates there are maybe 100 or so competitive air guitarists in the country; some have competed for years. They come and go. But once you’re in the band, so to speak, you’re in.
“The air guitar community is a very close-knit community,” he said. “I like to say the air guitar community is one of the most wonderful groups of people in the entire world. If you go and do this and take part in this, you are part of that community because you have been willing to get on stage, pretend like you’re playing an air guitar and have fun and entertain the crowd.
“And not everyone is comfortable doing that. So once you’ve done it, you’re one of us.”
He found that same spirit in Finland, where he was one of 30 competitors from 10 countries vying for the world title.
“It’s one thing to go to the nationals. We are collectively silly and doing this. But it’s also really funny when you get to a world competition and you see people you would never likely meet ... I would not expect to be hanging out with Team Japan and Team Belgium and Team France,” he said.
“They are just as silly as us, even though we can’t fully communicate all the way. But then you make an air guitar pose and they’re like, ‘Yeah!’
“It ended up making the world feel much smaller.”
Ichabod Fame, the national champ from Canada, won the world title.
For now, Lindbergh plans to “spread the word of air guitar over the next several months” through performances and appearances until he defends his U.S. title next year.
Like a newly crowned pageant queen, Slappy Nutz has a platform: world peace.
The stated ideology of the Air Guitar World Championships, founded in Finland, is that “wars would end, climate change stop and all bad things disappear, if all the people in the world played the air guitar.”
Lindbergh believes that, too.
“I’ve thought a lot about how ... people can use their voice in certain ways, the message they want to get across. And the thing is, the purpose of air guitar is to promote world peace. That’s the message,” he said. “You can’t hold a gun if you’re holding an air guitar.
“And I know some people think that’s the silliest thing in the world. But I want for my daughter ... I want the world to be a safe place, I want it to be free of gun violence.
“So using this platform as a way to share that message is very important to me. And this may sound ... I don’t know how this sounds ... I think it’s easier for me to promote that message through air guitar than it is if I was just posting hey stop gun violence.”
Having trouble seeing the video? Watch it here.
This story was originally published November 4, 2024 at 6:00 AM.
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