Noise Pollution?

As a promotional event. Georgetown University's campus radio station invited the college's best musician impersonators to compete against each other and win valuable prizes.

Station WROX held its third annual "air-band contest" last week, attracting 18 bands of air guitarists, air drummers, air keyboardists and air-bassists to show their stuff, according to a story in last Friday's Washington Post.

According to WROX spokesman John Klops, bands must bring their own record, which they pretend to lip-synch and to play along with. Contestants were judged on the music they played, their dress, degree of realism, crowd response and overall performance.

Klops said eight bands were selected to the second round, and then three of the eight made it to the finals. Prizes included Budweiser jackets and t-shirts, as well as gift certificates for dinner in a Washington. D.C. restaurant, he added.

The first place prize of a keg of Budwerser beer (which helped to sponsor the event) went to a band called the "Dead Chimes" for their rendition of The Pretenders' song "Middle of the Road." Band members Bob Gerardi, John Pojman, Phil DeCosse, Pate Porterfield, Jamie Coakley and Matthew Salvey also won the contest two years ago, in the first annual competition.

The Dead Chimes is a joke on the name of a traditional barber-shop quarter at Georgetown called the Chimes.

According to Klops, the band members feel they have won because they have "been doing the same stuff in their basement for a while before the contest was even started."

Klops also said that a great number of the bands made joke appearances as parodies of heavy metal-bands.