The next time you walk in on your roommate windmilling along to AC/DC, instead of ruthlessly mocking him like you usually do, you might want to encourage him to sign up for the sixth annual U.S. Air Guitar Championships. This year’s competition promises to be bigger than ever, with regional events in 20 cities before the finals in San Francisco and the world championships in Finland (air guitar is big there, trust us).

To gain a better understanding of this worldwide phenomenon, we caught up with one of this year’s hosts, Bjorn Turoque (real name: Dan Crane), a five-time runner-up for the national title and star of the award-winning documentary, “Air Guitar Nation.”

So you’ve been runner-up five times…you’re kind of like the Phoenix Suns of air guitar.
Yeah. I’m not really a sports guy, but I’ve been called the Dan Marino, the Avis of air guitar.

Avis?
Yeah, you know: “We’re number two, but we try harder.”

What can people attending the championship competitions expect? What makes air guitar such a dazzling spectacle?
It really combines the best of an intense, heated sporting event with all of the sex, drugs and drinking of a stadium rock show. It’s kind of like if you were playing Guitar Hero or Rock Band in your living room, and you move it out of your living room—you’re drinking instead of being stoned, and there’s thousands of people watching you. And your guitar is invisible. It’s pretty much like that.

Probably everyone has air-guitared in the privacy of their own home at one time or another. At what point in your air-guitar explorations did you suddenly think, “Hey, I could do this in front of a crowd”?
In 2003, I signed up for the very first U.S. competition, which was the New York regional. I play guitar in a band, but I used to put on little rock concerts in my bedroom by myself when I was a kid. And my brother would walk in on me and it was as if I was masturbating—which, in a way, air guitar is kind of a masturbatory act. So it just seemed like a natural thing for me to do.

Do a lot of the champions and the top competitors have experience playing actual guitar?
No, I would say most people have no idea how to play a guitar—and in many ways, that’s better. For myself, I knew too much, because I was always looking at my hands to make sure they were in the right place—and with air guitar, there is no right place. I mean, you have to have some sense of accuracy in terms of, you know, when you strum, that should be when you’re hearing notes. That’s kind of it.

Can I run some song titles by you, and you can tell me if these are great air-guitar anthems or not?
OK.

“You Shook Me All Night Long.”
One of my favorites. I host a night called “Airaoke”; it’s basically air guitar meets karaoke. And at the end of the night, we would do an “Airaoke all-stars”—we’d get everybody in the room to play air guitar to that song. It’s a classic.

“Won’t Get Fooled Again.”
A little slow for competition. It’s got those windmill power chords, especially at the beginning, and interesting air keyboards, with those arpeggios, but I haven’t seen it done in competition. That’s more of a personal bedroom song, a bedroom anthem.

“Purple Haze.”
People often make the mistake of pulling out “Purple Haze,” and it just never works in a competition. I don’t know if it’s the fidelity of the track, if it just seems like such a cliché, or if it’s just too hard.

“Pour Some Sugar on Me.”
I’ve seen a really hot blonde chick do that song, and it kind of blew my mind. To me, that song is pure sex, and so you’ve got to have the visuals to match.

“Sweet Child o’ Mine.”
Yeah, you know, “Sweet Child o’ Mine”: I’ve seen it done a lot of times and I’ve yet to see somebody pull that song off in a way that was worthy of a championship title. You know what the problem with that song is? When you get to the solo, it’s just too slow. You only have 60 seconds for your song, and a lot of people make the mistake of doing their whole 60 seconds as solo, and that’s just fucking boring. Who wants to watch that?

So based on my suggestions, it sounds like I would probably suck at air guitar.
You know, you’d be surprised. Good air guitar comes out of the strangest places.

What are some of the songs that people have won with? Or some songs that are just great air-guitar anthems in general?
Well, I don’t think anybody has ever matched C-Diddy’s performance to “Play With Me,” by Extreme. That was from the “Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure” soundtrack. You can see it online; it’s kind of mind-blowing. I think nobody will ever achieve what he did there. [And] I’m always a fan of “Killing in the Name Of” by Rage Against the Machine. It’s fast, it gets the crowd going, it’s got a crazy guitar solo, and it’s got a lot of tempo changes and stops and starts. To me, that’s what makes a great air guitar song, because it gives you time to pause, look out at the audience and then start playing again. My signature move is to light an air spliff in the middle of a song, and that kind of reignites my mojo.

So it really seems like the secret to a good air guitar performance is picking material based on how flashy the lead guitarist is—maybe even more so than whether it’s a memorable song or not.
Yeah, in some ways. Because as an air guitarist, you’re really trying to be a physical manifestation of the music. So the crazier the music, the crazier you shall be.

How important is it to have a great stage name?
It doesn’t hurt. Like I said, you only have 60 seconds to kind of tell your story. So if you come out and you’ve got a bitchin’ stage name and some kind of weird costume on, you’ve already got a leg up. If you come out with a T-shirt and jeans and start playing the Cure, and your name is like, Big Air—who’s gonna be into that?

I was thinking about calling myself Das Hermanator.
Das Hermanator? That’s not bad.