He became obsessed with Vaughan and Hendrix and Buddy Guy and Robert Cray; all of his free time was spent playing his guitar. His grades suffered, and several times he asked his parents to let him drop out. As he saw it, he was going to be a famous guitarist, so why bother with high school?
"It frustrated the hell out of my mom," he says. "She saw my conviction as though I was in a cult and needed to be reprogrammed. So she took me to two different therapists to try to get me to stop playing guitar." He says his first hit, "No Such Thing" — about a kid who's tired of being told "to stay inside the lines" — was largely a response to his parents' skepticism. "I remember standing at my mom's door and saying, 'Just watch, just watch,' " says Mayer.
"We've seen so many teenagers who didn't pay attention to their studies because they had dreams of being a basketball star or whatever," Margaret offers. "And in the end they got nowhere. We didn't want to just go, 'Oh, yeah, John, good idea.' "
"I am no judge of his music," says Richard, who at age seventy-six is nineteen years older than his wife. "I am the most un-hip guy you'll meet, but my experience with musicians was that they played on Friday and Saturday nights and had another job during the week. I would say to John, 'Where's your Plan B?' "
Mayer made it through high school and was accepted to the prestigious Berklee College of Music in Boston with a partial scholarship. After his first year, he became frustrated by the emphasis on technical expertise rather than creativity; he quit college in 1997 and moved to Atlanta, where his career got going in earnest.
He started playing regular gigs at a small club called Eddie's Attic and attracted the attention of major-label A&R reps after performing at the annual South by Southwest music convention in Austin, in the spring of 2000. The next few months, he says, were even more demoralizing than all those years in high school. Nearly every weekend, he would fly to New York to meet with music-business executives, and almost every one of them showed him the door. "The record people would always pose questions to themselves and answer them," he says. " 'Do I think it's a great record? Absolutely. Do I think that people would want to hear this record? I think so. Do I think that the climate is right for this kind of record right now? I'm not sure.' And I remember thinking, 'Can I just finish my smoothie and go?' I came in pretty headstrong, and I can see how I could come off as a cocky little fuck."
That John Mayer speaks Japanese comes as a surprise to the two Japanese reporters who have traveled to Camden to conduct brief interviews. I can only assume he's saying something bawdy because he often is, and because the reporters are giggling and blushing. He learned Japanese as a freshman in high school, which is also when he met his first serious girlfriend. "Her mother said she should learn Japanese because it would look good on her college applications," he says, slouching his six-foot-three frame down low on the couch as the tour bus heads back to New York. "There was a magnet program in another town, and we'd get bused together. I was like, 'I love Japanese! Mom, I wanna study Japanese.' When really it's just so you can finger your girlfriend on the bus every morning."
Mayer doesn't have a girlfriend right now, but he readily admits that he really, really, really wants to fall in love again. He wants it so much that he has resisted — as best he can — hooking up with random girls on the road, so that he will be completely unfettered if he meets the woman of his dreams. "I used to be able to mess around," he says. "I don't really anymore. The lady I'm looking for is not backstage. I want to meet somebody so I don't have to do my hair that much. I don't want to fuck around anymore."
Honestly, do you think you'd have as many girls interested if you weren't John Mayer?
"You don't have to persuade me to be perfectly honest. This gets into a whole chapter: 'Heartthrob.' Because I'm not a heartthrob. I have a butt chin. No underchin. I have a giant head, I'm lanky as can be. I have back-ne. I'm not conventionally attractive, but there is someone who my look totally does it for, no matter what it is. Whether it's the fact that my neck seemingly comes out of my chest and not the top, whether it's that I have terrible posture. I've never labored under the illusion that any of my success has to do with looks."
Do you have a type?
"It's a know-it-when-I-see-it thing. I don't like Faberge-egg beauty. I like sweat-shirt-and-ripped-jeans beauty. That's what 'Wonderland' is about. It's not about hot girls. It's about a girl who does it for you. People always thought that was a make-out song, but it's really about loving every part of someone like they're a jungle gym. It's not just tits and ass and pussy. Sex is so utilitarian. Foreplay is like a sixty-four-count box of crayons and a couple different types of paper. Sex is like banging a Coke can with a mallet."
But isn't it hard to have a serious relationship when you're on tour all the time?
"I would give this all up right now for a wife if it meant that if I didn't give it all up, I'd never find one. Money? It's nothing until it means taking care of a wife and kids. I will gladly be former one-time successful rock musician John Mayer who pitches the first ball at Little League games."
Mayer remembers the first time someone called him "sensitive." He was eleven years old and looking through an issue of Dog Fancy magazine when he came upon an ad for an animal charity. It had a picture of an emaciated pooch, and Mayer just started to bawl. Patting him on the back, his mom said, "Oh, you're a sensitive boy." He still cries at goodbye scenes in movies, and he remembers a recent Diet Coke commercial that made him tear up. ("Something with a guy looking in the hamper and realizing that his wife wears the same underwear his mom used to wear," he says. "Pure nostalgia.") But to call Mayer a "sensitive singer-songwriter," as so many have done, is getting him all wrong.
"People seem to think I'm at a heightened level of sensitivity all the time," he says. "But when I look at someone's face, and they're trying too hard to be earnest, or getting all Cusack with me, I want to smack them."
Mayer has the same passions as the average twenty-six-year-old American male: He and his bandmates are so geeked-out on the sniper video game Halo that they wear fake Army dog tags bearing their Halo aliases. He doesn't watch as much porn as he used to, but he still has a healthy appreciation for it. He wears the same pair of sneakers almost every day. He is such a regular guy that when we walk down the streets of Manhattan one night, no one takes much notice.
"I don't want to be a famous person," he says. "I want to be a famous musician. Right now, I'm a big target, just living off the land with no scandal attached to me. I feel like, with this record, everybody is going to look for a weak spot to say, 'I knew it.' I'm focused on proving that my success wasn't an accident. And when I play onstage, I want to get twice as good as I am now. Why? Because fuck everyone else. I don't care what you could possibly have to say about me, because I will always work hard enough that you will have to follow it up with, 'But, boy, that kid can play.' "
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