His memorable first single, "No Such Thing," begins with the recollection of a life lesson from a high school guidance counselor: "Welcome to the real world/She said to me/Condescendingly"; Mayer's ascent proves that the real world can occasionally be bent into unlikely, wondrous shapes. As of this writing, Room for Squares has passed the 2 million plateau and continues selling tens of thousands every week, while Mayer has moved from solo sets in listening rooms to rapid sellouts of 10,000-seat amphitheaters. And this is no flavor-of-the-month, fast-burn success story; his still-growing stardom is based on substance. In an age of ephemera, Mayer is a bona fide career artist--and there's no doubt that this guy is making a connection.
With Mayer, rarefied songwriting, singing and guitar-playing skills are accompanied by cover-boy looks and a disarming personality balancing confidence and self-awareness. Up to now, however, only those who've been fortunate enough to see this young dynamo onstage have experienced the full picture. That makes the release of Any Given Thursday, which documents a typically expansive live performance on DVD, VHS and double CD, particularly welcome and timely. The live set follows 1999's self-released Inside Wants Out, which showcased the youngster in a primarily solo acoustic mode, and the full-band studio effort Room for Squares, a strikingly sophisticated display of Mayer's literate songs and affecting voice. Any Given Thursday expands on its two predecessors, revealing Mayer's virtuosic but always song-serving musical chops, razor-sharp wit, poise and winning presence.
During the performance, recorded at Birmingham's Oak Ridge Amphitheatre on Sept. 12, 2002, Mayer, fronting a super-tight four-piece band, effortlessly shifts between acoustic troubadour, schtickmeister and guitar god (with facial expressions worthy of Spinal Tap's Nigel Tufnel during his solos), revealing himself to be a rangy performer whose artistic arsenal encompasses precision, spontaneity and literacy. The set includes the bulk of the material from Room for Squares, solo turns on Stevie Ray Vaughan's "Lenny," the Police classic "Message in a Bottle" and the zeitgeist-referencing new composition "Something's Missing."
Any Given Thursday also provides the uninitiated with a sense of just how passionate a fan base Mayer has built, from adoring teenagers to discerning boomers who've finally encountered a young artist who lives up to their decades-old memories. The lack, until recently, of media attention and next-big-thing status have actually been a benefit to this aspiring artist, allowing him to fly under the radar and enabling people to discover him in an organic way, thus forming a bond between performer and fan that is extremely rare in this fickle era. Reviewing Mayer's L.A. House of Blues set in April 2002, one writer noted, "Perhaps the most remarkable single aspect of the show was the way the crowd sang along with every word, in tune and in unison, so locked in that it sounded rehearsed. I've never seen an audience more hooked up with an artist." (Bud Scoppa, hitsdailydouble.com, April 5, 2002)
Before Columbia reissued Inside Wants Out in autumn 2002, bootleg copies of the disc were fetching $50 or more on eBay, a clear indication of the cult status Mayer was only beginning to enjoy, even as the mainstream audience began to embrace his music. Indeed, Mayer achieved Internet notoriety long before most people knew he existed. While most artists are horrified by the appearance of their material online, Mayer has always encouraged taping at his shows and the swapping of their recordings. As a result, there are thousands of song files available on numerous sites, some devoted exclusively to the trading of his songs. Mayer's official site, the Columbia-hosted www.johnmayer.com, receives in excess of a half-million visitors a month, and the label was shrewd enough to debut the video of "No Such Thing" on the site as a tip of the virtual hat to his Internet-savvy fans.
Mayer's pervasive Internet presence brought people to his shows early on, which further ramped up word-of-mouth, to the extent that a grass-roots phenomenon of national proportions took root and blossomed right under the noses of the cognoscenti. "It's almost charity work, what people have done," he marveled, "turning other people on to my music." (Chris Willman, Entertainment Weekly, Aug. 9, 2002)
From the beginning, Mayer headlined almost exclusively, moving from small clubs on one swing to large, House of Blues-sized venues the next time through, then concert halls and sheds, while the van gave way to a bus and the backing band grew to four pieces. When radio finally came to the party in mid-2002, turning first the sparkling "No Such Thing" and then the languid "Your Body Is a Wonderland" into hits, Room for Squares was already selling thousands of copies a week. Radio and MTV kicked the album into overdrive. But the explosion would never have happened without those early believers, who allowed this unknown guitar picker to hit the ground running.
Mayer, who grew up in Fairfield, Connecticut, by way of Bridgeport, is the second of three children born to an English teacher mother and high-school principal father. His first musical epiphany came at age 13, when he discovered Stevie Ray Vaughan, then badgered his dad into getting him an electric guitar. The kid turned out to be a quick study--two years later he was doing solo turns in local clubs. After high school, Mayer spent a few months at Boston's Berklee School of Music before dropping out and moving to Atlanta, where he quickly clicked on the area's club circuit. During this time, he began amalgamating the key elements of his influences--notably Vaughan, Hendrix, Clapton, Elton John, Ben Folds and Dave Matthews--into a wide-open approach that somehow meshed fluent guitar playing, fat grooves, conversational narratives, heady improvisation and emphatic hooks into a remarkably expressive whole.
"Connecticut's where I built the parts, Boston's where I assembled them, and Atlanta is where I sold them to people," (Kurt Orzeck, Venice magazine, Feb. 2002) he quipped about his own "Field of Dreams" scenario.
In 1999, Mayer cut Inside Wants Out to sell at his shows. What's startling about these early solo performances is how utterly complete they are--a vivid testament to his elevated songcraft and to the rich, expressive guitar style he'd developed by that time. Indeed, Mayer's guitar lines on the early versions of "No Such Thing," "My Stupid Mouth" and "Neon" provided detailed blueprints for the full-band arrangements on Room for Squares.
The buzz spread across the South--and caught the ear of the record biz--when Mayer played a masterful set at Austin's South by Southwest (SxSW) Music Conference in March 2000. Soon afterward, he signed with Aware Records and began traversing the U.S., winning over fans one by one, night by night, while recording his first official album with producer John Alagia (Dave Matthews, Ben Folds) between legs on what would turn out to be two full years of touring.
He decided to call the album Room for Squares, a characteristically wry take on jazz sax player Hank Mobley's 1963 LP, No Room for Squares. "It made sense to me because I feel unsteady in coolness," (Hal Bienstock, Guitar World Acoustic, Feb. 2002) he explained.
The album initially came out as an indie release on Aware in the spring of 2001 and was reissued by Columbia four months later, with the addition of the stunning track "3 x 5," new packaging and a limited-edition bonus EP featuring covers of songs by Jimi Hendrix and Stevie Ray Vaughan. By year's end, the media began to pick up the scent. In a benchmark review that December, Rolling Stone proclaimed the album "instantly likable and accessible. But it's no less smart and affecting for that. These thirteen songs are a travelogue of discovery--of love, identity and purpose." (Anthony DeCurtis, Rolling Stone, Dec. 6-13, 2001)
Then, in 2002, all hell broke loose, and John Mayer broke through.
"Every day someone says to me, 'I just want you to know this never happens,'" Mayer said last April. "And I go, 'Well, what do you mean? It's happening to me.'"
--Whitney Matheson, USA Today by way of johnmeyer.com
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