You won't see him on Total Request Live, and only adult contemporary stations around here seem to play his music. Yet his upcoming Avalon concert has been sold out for weeks, and droves of college-aged fans are flocking to Providence to catch his show at Lupo's. John Mayer is not your everyday rock star.
In fact, if you'd known Mayer during his ordinary Connecticut childhood, you'd have guessed that any chances of his becoming a rock star at all were virtually nonexistent. But somehow life has led him to creating Room for Squares, his major label debut, and a headlining tour of the East Coast's most prestigious venues. This same path led Mayer to the Holiday Inn in Farmville, Virginia - where he'd "just rolled in from Athens, Georgia....on the rock 'n roll time machine that is a bus." That's where the Daily caught up with him.
Legend has it that Mayer was your run-of-the-mill Fairfield County high school freshman until an influential neighbor one day handed him a Stevie Ray Vaughan Tape he'd copied. "It was a blank tape that said 'Stevie Ray Vaughan and Double Trouble' on the front," Mayer explained. "I didn't know what it was. I just put it in, in the middle of the tape... What I heard was just like oh, my God." Mayer had just come across one of the most influential blues legends of all time, and set about discovering more about him.
"Growing up in Fairfield County, Connecticut, you don't naturally end up hearing 'Tin Pan Alley' by Stevie Ray Vaughan - it was a high-speed intro into something else. I didn't know what kind of guitar playing that was." Perplexed and intrigued, Mayer began taking lessons at a local music store. Of course, he brought the tape his neighbor had given him along. "It was a credit to my guitar teacher at the time, to find what I needed and show me how to do it. This is soloing; this is lead guitar...how do I get there?"
Previously, Mayer had been rooted only in the music of the day, early '90s glam-rock: "It was Tesla, Warrant, M?¶tley Cr??e, Guns 'n Roses...and then I heard Stevie Ray Vaughan, and then it went on to Pearl Jam. I kind of erected and tore down several times over a Pearl Jam tribute all over my room, and a Stevie Ray Vaughan Tribute all over my room." Mayer immediately became absorbed in discussing his early industry voices, his youthful voice speeding faster and faster as he described hearing the artists that fueled his curiosity and creativity.
"I got Jimi Hendrix, Axis: Bold as Love - holy shit! - and you can print 'shit', because -" Mayer paused, trying to find the words that match his emotion. "I held it in my hands and I was like, what is this orange Jimi Hendrix record with a guy in a turban on the cover and elephants? I put it in and it was just noise." He paused to catch his breath. "By the way, Axis: Bold as Love answers the question, 'What is the best Jimi Hendrix record of all time?'"
After drinking up such powerful influences, Mayer began to appear in local blues clubs when he was 16. "Grown-ups would take me to open mic nights, and I'd sit in with the band," he reminisced. In high school, he formed his own band, which played at Fairfield High's annual Spring Jam. "It was this huge battle of the bands," he explained. "It was really on a grand scale for a high school. That was my prom - for a while, I kept telling people that. I didn't even go to my own prom."
As one listen to Room For Squares will demonstrate, Mayer didn't exactly fit in during high school. "I prided myself on not being labeled at all; I was invisible. For the most part, people didn't really know me at all...and I really liked that. There was a time that I thought I was above it. I thought at the time that that was my emotional ammunition to get through high school. That I'm not really 'from here.'"
Immediately, Mayer is struck by something: "Dammit...I just had the thought: What if the prom was right now?" While the fame would certainly help, achieving it didn't come easily. Unlike a lot of today's stars, Mayer actually had to pay his dues.
"I honed my guitar playing skills at my local Mobil for two years," he said, revealing a fact that is often omitted from the public spotlight. "There's something you take from every job - like turning pumping gas out in the cold into a morning drive-time DJ shift." Like a true artist, Mayer turned his unleaded-pumping routine into a daily performance as soon as he got to know his audience.
"Each person or group of people would come in at the same time every day. It was just an amazing thing, to take something that in and of itself is pretty banal and turn it into a performance thing," he said. "I'd come up with jokes every day and use them on everyone that came in. I'd like to believe that because the place across the street had coffee that was a little bit cheaper, that maybe, just maybe, people started coming in just to see me." One could almost hear Mayer grinning through the phone line.
After two years at the Mobil, Mayer decided to enroll in Boston's prestigious Berklee College of Music. "It was kind of the petri dish," he said of Berklee. "All the playing I did was either in my room or someone else's room." He only stayed in Boston a year, and never played out, not even at an open mic night. However, Mayer fell in love with Boston itself
"I'm gonna tell you the condensed version of Boston: T tokens, nutty Bars, ATM machines, Tower Records bags, the stink of the cafeteria on my clothing. Boston is my happy place. When I'm on stage in the middle of nowhere, Boston is my emotional kind of last resort. I always know that wherever I am...[I can ] sell all my stuff, move to Boston, and live in the rain. The external climate there matches my internal climate."
Still, after two semesters at Berklee, Mayer knew that the academic approach to songwriting wasn't for him. Convinced by a longtime friend, he moved to Atlanta. "I was told that the music scene was great there, and in terms of supply and demand, there was a lot of supply and little demand." So Mayer packed up and moved south.
In 1999, while living in Atlanta, he released Inside Wants Out, an acoustic solo debut. "It started out as a demo and ended up being a little more timeless than I thought it would be," Mayer explained. "Not that I think it's that timeless." Four of Room For Squares' fourteen songs were taken from this hard-to-find debut.
The next year, Mayer performed at the prestigious South by Southwest music conference in Austin, and was shortly thereafter signed by Aware/Columbia. "I think Columbia is the best label to be with in terms of perks," Mayer noted. "I just got the Miles Davis/Coltrane box set from them, and I'm stuck on disc three."
Since moving to Atlanta, things have come together incredibly quickly for Mayer. His major label debut was released last September, and he is currently on his second US tour in support of the album. Every show he will play this week is already sold out. It's not hard to imagine the youthful Mayer rolling up I-95 in his bus, listening to Davis and Coltrane and enjoying the fruits of his labor.
