John Mayer: Hero, Hack, or Somewhere in Between?

Okay, so John Mayer wrote "Your Body is a Wonderland".... get over it.

First and foremost, let's talk about the aspects of John Mayer's life that have nothing to do with music. And that's exactly my point. The things I'm about to discuss have nothing to do with music. Anyways... so you might think John Mayer is a "douchebag", a term commonly associated with his name, due to the fact that he posts blogs about his watches. Or because he once smoked pot out of a vaporizer in a Rolling Stone interview. Or because the lyrics to one of his hit songs turned into a cheesy pickup line for frat boys everywhere. Or because he's taken on stand-up comedy in his free time and is apparently failing miserably. Or because he often comes off cocky, confident, and arrogant in strongly opinionated interviews. Or because he uses big words and sarcasm. The point is, none of this has anything to do with musical credibility. Whether or not you chose to believe or judge Mayer on any of the aforementioned points, no one trying to make an intelligent argument should ever use any of these points in trying to justify the idea that John Mayer is a hack on the guitar. The youtube comments are classic, "John Mayer is a douche and sux at teh guitar, Yngwie rulezz!!!11!!1!!!!!!1".... Okay little boy, please remove yourself from the internet now. The fact of the matter is, maybe John Mayer is a douchebag. Well, Clapton snorted a lot of coke, Stevie Ray Vaughan binged his brains out, Hendrix took a lot of acid (and I doubt his girlfriends "made" him), and Buddy Guy got around like nobody's business in his prime; and they're all guitar legends. And maybe you argue that they lived in different time periods where "acceptable" had a different definition. Newsflash: John Frusciante of the Red Hot Chili Peppers has all kinds of personal demons, and he still blazes up and down a guitar neck. Musical artists do not owe us their personal lives. Leave that to people who are famous for being famous like Paris Hilton. Only when aspects of an artist's personal life interfere with their musical career is there conflict. By no means am I using what other guitarists of the past have done to excuse John Mayer's perceived personality flaws. What I'm trying to say is that I don't care what any of them do outside their musical careers.


That's done with... Let's talk music. When you first heard John Mayer he was most likely as poppy as can be. Heartfelt acoustic ballads about lost love and finding yourself, overplay on the radio, the whole nine yards. That's great and all, but if you're on the cynical side of the John Mayer War initiated by the Rolling Stone cover article that proclaimed Mayer one of the "New Guitar Gods", then you probably aren't that into pop music. What people often fail to realize is that long before Mayer was writing acoustic pop music, he was rocking out and playing the blues. At a young age Mayer took a liking to the blues, citing influences such as Hendrix, SRV, Buddy Guy, Eric Clapton, B.B. King, the works. Contrary to popular belief, Mayer's first guitar was a Squier Stratocaster. For those that don't know, that's an electric guitar. Mayer went on to become involved in a few bands at young ages, and eventually began his short stint at Berkeley. Only then, Mayer has said, did he pick up an acoustic guitar. Without a band, a musician has no choice but to pick up an acoustic and try to keep creating. What people miss out on among Mayer's early acoustic music is the jazz/blues fusion and complex, funky strumming patterns in some of his lesser known or unreleased songs. Despite appearing often in acoustic form, songs like "Neon" even demonstrate John's vast technical ability on guitar, and this song dates back to Mayer's original CD, Inside Wants Out, which was released in 1999.

What we hear on the radio and on the albums is one thing; singles pushed by record companies for their mass marketing potential. What we see in concert is different ballgame. Record companies own musicians, giving artists less freedom to create on an album than one would think. However, live shows take place on a less restricted playing field. Fast forward to 2002 and you will find that Mayer had already begun to channel bits and pieces of where he was headed musically through his live shows. Consult Mayer's live album/DVD, Any Given Thursday, and yes, you will find "Your Body is a Wonderland". But what you will also find is an astonishingly epic guitar ballad with an uncharacteristic solo for the time period of Mayer's career in 2002. This live gem, "Covered in Rain", never made it onto a studio album, but it provided live audiences with an example of Mayer's potential to become a great guitarist, as did the cover of SRV's "Lenny" in Mayer's intro to "Man on the Side", also from Any Given Thursday. Mayer continued to tease audiences as his career progressed, with his shows' setlists containing less of his early hits, and more of his encores and intros tainted with blues, with covers and influences of Stevie Ray Vaughan and Jimi Hendrix filtered into his performances. And then Mayer went ahead and lost the pop act all together, taking up the side project of the John Mayer Trio in 2005 with Pino Palladino and Steve Jordan, playing only blues-inspired live music. With this project Mayer began getting recognition for some of his more guitar-intensive work. However, my point here is to show that Mayer did not one day wake up and decide to play the blues. Even now with his most credible album Continuum, Mayer is still shunned by those who listen only to album recordings. Mayer shows great restraint on the album recordings in terms of face-melting guitar work-- a restraint that is not shown in the live concert experience.

Now is the part where I stop nut-swinging on John Mayer. So Mayer didn't just pick up the blues like a high schooler does a hot fad. But there's another side to the argument... He's also not a prodigy. I know there are people out there just shouting at the computer screen that they can think of some unknown virtuoso whose guitar skills can wipe the floor with John Mayer. And they may be correct. John Mayer is not a second coming of Jimi Hendrix, but his mainstream status provokes these kinds of comparisons by people who jump on the John Mayer bandwagon, proclaiming him as the best guitarist to ever live. I don't agree and neither would Mayer himself. So why do I value John Mayer as a guitarist? If Mayer is not a hack and not a hero, then what exactly is he doing that benefits anyone? People are mistakenly putting Mayer in the same league as innovators and icons because there is no current equivalent. Musical quality has dropped so much in the mainstream that Mayer may be one of the closest people in the mainstream to bridge the gap between the music of today and the guitar gods of the past. Like I said, Mayer may be the closest in the mainstream.

And that's where his value comes in. Mayer did not take his love for the blues mainstream until he had the star power to do so, because struggling artists cannot set their own agendas. But Mayer's fusion of pop, rock, and blues is having an important effect. It's not that Mayer is single-handedly saving music, but rather providing a connection between the worlds of blues and guitar gods, and the world of pop music. As if I haven't referred to Jimi Hendrix enough, I must admit that he falls into the realm of my favorite musicians of all time, and I blame much of my musical taste on John Mayer. Once upon a time I was not so musically diverse, and was working on expanding my horizons a bit. I checked out John Mayer and liked a lot of his live acoustic performances. Then I heard a bootleg audio recording of him covering Jimi Hendrix's "Wind Cries Mary", and then later "Wait Until Tomorrow", also originally by Hendrix. Now I must admit that at one point I had never looked much further into Hendrix than the typical "Purple Haze", because I had no influences compelling me to do so. Hearing an artist more relevant to my generation provide a recreation of Hendrix inspired me to dive deeper into Hendrix himself, and other influences of Mayer after hearing his cover of SRV's "Ain't Gonna Give Up on Love". From there I explored their influences. And their influences' influences. I had discovered truly good music. The greats: Hendrix, SRV, Eric Clapton, Buddy Guy, B.B. King, Muddy Waters, Freddie King, Albert King, Robert Cray, et cetera. Mayer provides a link to these genres of music through his live performances to a whole audience that might not have otherwise discovered such music. If John Mayer cannot even directly inspire someone, but rather points them in the direction of inspiring music, then his efforts are worthwhile.

Despite all that's been said, there are those that still say despite John Mayer having some technical ability, that he is a copy cat of those before him whom he cites as influences. At an early stage it was clear that Mayer drew guitar licks heavily from SRV among others. Some say he still "steals licks from Clapton" as he joked in the credits to Continuum. But as any other musical artist does, Mayer has progressed, doing less and less channeling of his influences by means of covers, and more so finding his own style and technique. Although often debated, Mayer's ability on guitar is becoming more distinctly "Mayer" and less susceptible to "SRV clone" comments. Whether or not Mayer is all the way "there" or not, and despite whatever pedestal the term "there" may reflect, John Mayer still has much of his career ahead of him at the age of 30. Love him or hate him, douchebag or guitar god, he's what we've got, and he's not going away.

I think one day he'll be great. Maybe not "changing music forever great", but great.



-Mark