Bash Compactor: Shred Heads

[ Ah, the beauty of the guitar solo, which lets even an awkward 15-year-old shyly step on stage and capture the hearts and souls of an audience.

It was the sixth annual Shred For Your Life guitar solo competition at Webster Hall Saturday night, and that meant head-to-head, balls-to-the-wall guitar shredding as 12 contestants competed for the crown.

After starting out in the back room of Max Fish, the contest had been so well received that now it was being judged by rock royalty like Andrew WK, TV on the Radio’s Jaleel Bunton and Les Savy Fav’s Seth Jabour.

The contestants could be split into two categories: those who weren’t old enough to drink, and those who looked like they had spent a lifetime drinking way too much.

Chris Johnson fell into the latter. The guitarist of Total Social Suicide, he played his set barefoot, spray paint covering up the areas of his body that weren’t tattooed. He spilled his beer on the judges’ table in the first round and quickly became a crowd favorite. I tried to get a good quote out of him, but he mumbled something about being too fucked up the night before and jumping in a river that morning to recuperate, then told me he would explode if he lost.

But the night truly belonged to two adolescents. Rusty Goldbaum of Brooklyn, an awkward bespectacled 15-year-old, looking more the computer-programmer type and clad in the decidedly non-rock attire of dad jeans and New Balances, quickly became the Cinderella story, receiving ovations and catcalls from tattooed metal chicks after releasing a torrent of awesomeness. “You put out some dark shit,” said Jabour after Goldbaum’s first solo round.

Dylan Brenner, also 15, who took second place last year and opened the show with his kick-ass teen metal band BYS, shined brighter than the lights hitting his braces as he grimaced through his second solo round. “That was one of the greatest guitar solos I ever heard,” WK said in awe.

In the end, guitar teacher and prog-rocker Lily Maase took home the huge guitar pick trophy after beating Brenner in a controversial final decision that saw the judges showered with boos. “I’m preparing to get beat by a 12-year-old,” Maase told me before the final round.

After the competition, semi-finalist Damien Paris didn’t seem perturbed by the 15-year-olds who beat him. “I’m trying to figure how to get backstage,” he said. “To get a free beer.”

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