I can't believe how many times I said this both out loud and in my head a week or so ago at a John Mayer concert at Lakeview Amphitheatre in Syracuse, New York.
And let me add a disclaimer here early on: you had to be there. What I have to say will not do the experience justice; the music, the lights, the shared transcendence. And yes, the rain. But I am going to write about it all anyway.
When I bought the tickets five months ago, I thought that I would get a bluesy hour and a half or so, but by the time of the concert, I knew better: he had had a series of hits, some more poppier than others and he had won seven Grammys.
For at least the last decade I have been pleasantly oblivious to popular music and maybe to a good chunk of popular culture as well, but I decided I wanted to see John Mayer because I had come across him in a YouTube video of what I think of as Old Blues Guys. I mean, there was this kid up there in the finale of Eric Clapton's 2007 (okay, a while ago) Crossroads Guitar Festival alongside Buddy Guy, Hubert Sumlin, Jimmie Vaughan, Robert Cray, Johnny Winter and Clapton for "Sweet Home Chicago." Who's the kid? The kid, one John Mayer, seemed earnest and self-conscious; he looked over towards the others on the stage than they did at him. Clapton had called him "a master" of the guitar. Not too shabby of an endorsement.
I had seen Clapton and Buddy Guy in person. Next stop: John Mayer.
And I had heard that he had spent last year touring with Bob Weir and the reconstituted (sort of) Grateful Dead. Not a bad credential to have. Plus I heard Mayer was better live than he was in the studio and that he was basically Slowhand Junior. Rumor was he had the best guitar face in the business.
I didn't know at first that he had been a heartthrob who had been involved with a number of young female singers and actresses whom I have difficulty keeping straight. Oh well. Then again, what teenage girl would not find "Your Body is a Wonderland" worth listening to? I may have been one of the newer people to his music, but I was not the oldest, for the audience last week was a mix: a father and daughter (although Mayer did not play "Daughters," a song, which after I first heard it, made me wonder, "Why hasn't anybody written this song before?"); adult couples; small groups of twenty- and thirty-somethings, and a few ageing teenyboppers, among them Sam and Jamie who stood behind us as we were finally in line to go in. At least where my friend and I were, the audience did not seem very rowdy. (Few people hollered out song titles, for instance.) Yes, the phones were up and recording. People bopped around and applauded. Old and young, some with families with small children on the upper lawn. A family-type event on a rainy last summer weekday night. (But at some points the stage had the fog machine working anyway.) People sang along.
Perhaps the audience was appreciative in part because of the rain and the logistical ordeal of getting to Lakeview. The entire region, 200+ miles in any direction, was under a storm and tornado watch--and it had monsooned off and on all day. Rain whiteouts were so bad that traffic on the Thruway (including my friend and I) pulled over and waited them out. Even when we got to the venue a good two hours before the concert was originally scheduled to start, there was only a single, slow line of cars into the parking lot of the venue for 15,000 people. And we were lucky; others spent at least an hour in bumper-to-bumper stop-and-go traffic after Lakeview changed the start time from 7 to 8 and then back to 7.30--the result being some people barely getting to their seats after hiking the mile from the wet gravel parking lots. After the doors opened in the drenching rain at 6.30: a slow line with no metal detectors, no check of ID, and a security check that consisted of someone opening my glasses case.
And then another hike on pavement past and to the predictably overpriced merch and food stalls. (A woman wearing a sign saying "FREE HUGS" had no business.)
On the bright side, the seats were comfy and we were in out of the rain. Lakeview is not the amphitheatre version of the cheap seats in a long-haul 747.
"I can do concerts," my friend said, nodding as he looked around and sipped his beer. We were stressed and drenched, but we had arrived.
By that time the opening act Dawes (to my ears with a sound similar to The Band) was playing away. They pitched their CD entitled "We're All Going to Die."
The rain stopped for the intermission. We got another beer. The sun went down and all the seats slowly filled up.
John Mayer came out. The audience stood up and stayed standing for the hour and a half.
Let's just say that in normal life I tend not to be much of an everyday wow-er. The next morning, I had a raw throat from whoohooing. Why? I knew at least some of the songs' lyrics, but I was also dazzled by what I was seeing--on both the stage and the Jumbotron, including the musicians' hands.
I had known it was unlikely that I was going to hear a lot (if any) takes on old blues songs, probably not much jamming or improvisation, and that was okay. Although Mayer regularly changes his setlist, I had a sense of what I was getting into.
There were four chapters, each announced in neon and which he said someplace are four chances to start over. Not a bad way to think about it: full band, acoustic, trio, full band.
If he wasn't in The Zone--Zen--as soon as he opened his mouth, he did an excellent imitation of being there. And he did not stand still, literally or figuratively.
Mayer came out roaring with "Helpless," a song that makes him sound anything BUT helpless with it Rolling Stones' "Miss You" type riffs (and presence). "If I'm helpless/Tell me now/Tell me now." Anything but helpless.
Wow.
In "Moving On and Getting Over" there was jam of sorts, it turned out, and it was just fine. "We're in a groove right now and I want to take some time to investigate it."
Wow.
In the acoustic set he played his first hit, "Your Body is a Wonderland," not one of my favorites since I prefer his later-in-his-career bluesy numbers. But I can imagine Sam and Jamie, wherever they were in the audience, thinking of it as I did the Beatles' "I Saw Her Standing There" when I was not much younger than they were. (And I did see Paul McCartney play it live before he took it off his setlist.) And my guess is Sam and Jamie sang along.
Wow.
And during the John Mayer Trio (probably my favorite part): "Vultures," and the scorching metal version of Robert Johnson's "Crossroads Blues." "Who Did You Think I Was" was loud and proud. The musicians seemed more engaged than before--but then I am partial to drumming- and guitar-driven music. Mayer and his partners Pino Palladino (about which I know very little) and drummer Steve Jordan (who has played with Eric Clapton and Keith Richards, among others) were tight. No slouches.
Wow.
The full band returned for a couple songs including the country-ish ballad "In the Blood" and then the screaming guitars of "Slow Dancing in a Burning Room," which was a metaphor I wished I had thought of. And I don't say that very often.
There is something other than possible resulting commercial success to be said for versatility: county-ish, folk-ish, pop, metal, bluesy, rock-y. Love and despair, celebration, and whatever else. Breathy, roaring, plaintive, emphatic. Sometimes understated but with flourishes. There is something to be said for making what he was doing look effortless and far less practiced than it actually was. (But I know I have heard some of those guitar licks before: Eric Clapton? Stevie Ray Vaughan?)
Mayer's patter was minimal: "I write a lot of songs in hotel bathrooms," and, about "Your Body is a Wonderland," "I didn't know this could go that far, and I thank you for that," and "All first songs are novelty songs."
The former teenage heartthrob boy John Mayer whom I saw was all growed up now that he is pushing forty. No more baby fat but he sports hipster scruff. He has great hair. (I notice hair. And I always have.) No doubt he was focused and tuned in (no pun intended)--and that is something of an understatement. Broad shoulders, lean angular lines. A sleeve tat, the veins and muscles in his forearm visible as he played.
Hands to fit his guitars. A note never missed. (I was reminded of the life-size photo of I think the hand of Kareen Abdul Jabbar in Esquire in the later 1970s. One look and you had some idea of why and how he was successful.)
And yes, John Mayer's guitar face, a face that did not seem the least contrived. How do you tell the dancer from the dance? The sheer pleasure of seeing people do something spectacularly well NOW, in this moment, in a world of often well-intentioned (well, maybe) mediocrity. Everydayness. Live music done this well rewards abundantly.
Even if John Mayer never grinned, the audience did. (Guitarists, or at least the intense ones, tend not to grin, I think.)
As the Alan Arkin character says in Little Miss Sunshine, "It's all a beauty pageant." Define beauty however you like, but for that time with John Mayer, everybody there was a part of that beauty.
Beauty and transcendence.
For some, the music may have been Mayer's Greatest Hits--and that us what they came for. For me that is not the point, more the means to the end: the man has guitar chops. As did the others on the stage. And therein lies the beauty.
Because the concert was on a weeknight before a work day (not mine), and the ride there had been something of an ordeal, my friend and I agreed to leave before the end when the other 14,998 members of the audience would be hiking to the parking lot as well.
Still, leaving was difficult. Mayer was only a couple songs from the end of the setlist, I knew, and we made our way to the exit to the tune of "Waiting for the World to Change." We were going to miss "Dear Marie," where the audience would no doubt be singing along, especially at the end with the oh-oh, oh-oh, oh-oh, oh-oh part. His finale would be a nice farewell, gentle "You're Going to Live Forever in Me" before the encore of "Gravity," a downer and not a downer at all ("Keep me where the light is/ Keep me where the light is") and my guess was it would be played with full screaming guitars for a big finish.
At the top of the amphitheatre, where the people in lawn chairs sat in the sweet and wet summer air, I couldn't not look back at the stage.
But as the rain began again, we moved quickly to the parking lot, a place where we couldn't hear the music any more.
But still, even now: wow.
