So it's not surprising when Mayer says, "Everyone begs me not to do stand-up. Everyone connected to my well-being and on my payroll says stand-up is terrible. When I say, 'I'm doing stand-up tonight,' they hear, 'I'm going to start heroin.'" On some level, Mayer agrees — but he's also sick of being forced to apologize for his unguarded comments. He leans close to my digital recorder and says, "Everybody right now in the world of entertainment is a pussy. A pussy," he says, drawing out the last word. "They're all so sensitive. What the fuck happened?"
Some of Mayer's fans may be asking the same question about their favorite sleepy-eyed balladeer. In 2004 he won two Grammys with the sentimental acoustic tune "Daughters" — his biggest hit since 2001's "Your Body Is a Wonderland." He had begged his label and management not to release "Daughters" — the only acoustic tune on his second album, Heavier Things — as a single, fearing that it would cement his image as a teeny-bopper-pleasing softy. "I saw that as career death," he says. His manager, Michael McDonald (no, not the Doobie Brother), remembers a "battle" over the song. Mayer lost.
Since then, he has spent just about all of his time trying to move away from sensitive. "It was, 'let me take a year and get myself on track,'" he says. "I've met people who didn't realize they were off target, and they looked up and they were forty — they had six failed records, but everyone told them they were great. And they're fucking miserable." To avoid that fate, Mayer unleashed his formidable Stevie Ray Vaughan-inspired electric-guitar chops in jams with Buddy Guy, Herbie Hancock, B.B. King, Eric Clapton and Vaughan's old backing band, Double Trouble. He mocked his fans and himself in the unexpectedly hilarious VH1 comedy special John Mayer Has a TV Show — in which he informed a credulous group of teenage fans that all of his hits were ghostwritten by Richard Marx. And last year, he recorded a fiery blues-rock live album, Try!, with the John Mayer Trio, a group he formed with two of the industry's most elite session musicians, drummer Steve Jordan (who has played with Keith Richards and Bruce Springsteen) and bassist Pino Palladino (who was the Who's choice to replace John Entwistle). "John Mayer Trio is the anti-'Daughters,' the anti-'Wonderland,'" Mayer says. Along the way, Mayer — who had been until age twenty-six the least punk-rock straight-edge dude on Earth — also started drinking scotch and smoking (or rather, vaporizing) pot.
The result of all this change is Mayer's third studio album, Continuum — which has a funky, slow-grooving, soul-man feel, polished to a Steely Dan-worthy sheen. For all of its falsetto-laden soulfulness, there's no obvious follow-up to Mayer's twin smashes on Continuum, and the disc was enough of a departure to prompt Don Lenner — the since-ousted head of Mayer's label, Columbia Records — to tell Mayer that he didn't hear a single. Mayer didn't take the news well. "I cried all day," he says in the Pittsburgh hotel room. "My chest was burning because it's like sending letters every day to someone you love, and you find out they threw 'em all out." He contemplated quitting the music business. "I started looking up design schools online, because I was ready to go to design school," says Mayer, who attended Berklee College of Music for two semesters before dropping out in 1998. But that same day, Mayer was finishing a Curtis Mayfield-inspired tune called "Waiting on the World to Change," which ended up as the album's first single. "I knew it was a hit," he says. "And by the end of the day, I'd gone back to 'Nah, fuck that, this is a great record.'"
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