How do you feel about the whole Guitar Hero-game phenomenon?
I don't ever want to be the kind of guy who rails against whatever progress has taken place. But Guitar Hero was devised to bring the guitar-playing experience to the masses without them having to put anything into it. And having done both, there's nothing like really playing guitar. I mean, what would you rather drive, a Ferrari or one of those amusement-park cars on a track?
What about how easy it is for kids to get into music and produce music now?
The fact that you could record a song tonight greatly dements the creative process.
The fact that if you wanted to right now, you and your friends could get together, do a photo shoot. Within 20 minutes you could have a band name, a photo shoot, a Website, a logo. The first time I ever got a four-track recorder I didn't write a song. I did like as many-part harmony to "Star Spangled Banner" vocally as I could do, because you just want to experience the technology. So I think that's part of it too. I'm trying to be compassionate about it and not say oh, these fuckin' kids, you know? But it is.
What would the 16-year-old John Mayer say if he saw what you do now onstage and where you are?
Man, I'd say I like the blues stuff. I like your Blues stuff, me. 'Cause it is going for a sophistication. I'm not leaving my mark on the way that I soloed, you know? I'm gonna leave my mark on sort of the combination of lead playing, rhythm playing, vocal. I'm just trying to build one solid sound out of these elements of singing, songwriting, chord changes, lead playing, rhythm, melody, harmony, all these things that really are trying to get funneled into one sound. And like that one sound — I feel like that's my mark.
[From Issue 1054 — June 12, 2008]
Welcome to j-mayer.blogspot.com !!!
What drew you to the blues as a suburban teenager?
It's so fundamental in me that I have to imagine that it was just born into me. You either want to hear those notes bend or you don't. When I heard Stevie Ray Vaughan, the grammar of it made perfect sense to me, and I just instantly wanted to do that. He was my portal to Jimi Hendrix, Albert King, Albert Collins, Freddie King, Buddy Guy. And I'm still on the same unbroken course as I was when I was 13.
What does the guitar mean to you now?
For me, it's my flotation device, because I now exist in this celebrity sort of world. But I don't feel like anybody's been able to truly knock me off my legs, because I have a trade. You can't just walk onstage and start playing guitar 'cause you thought it looked neat. With guitar, you get out what you put in, and it's the ultimate shield for other people trying to fuckin' take away your heart and soul. It's a completely exposed craft. There is no facade.
Do you worry that your pop hits overshadow your playing?
I understand how people would say, "I don't think he's pure at heart. I don't want him getting anywhere near the same kind of circle as Buddy Guy." So it's a really weird sort of incestuous situation for me, because if I wasn't me, I'd stand in front of me and say, "Prove it to me for the next 15 years, and maybe I'll think about accepting you." Because everything else you can buy, man. But guitar is the stuff that takes your life to figure out.
What are some of your favorite guitar moments?
One of my favorite guitar solos in the world is from Metallica's "Hero of the Day." Clapton's got a bunch of songs where he's really playing blues but he's playing it over these chordal changes, like "Old Love" and "Wonderful Tonight." It's not really about the solo — when I hear Prince at the end of "Let's Go Crazy," I get it. But for me, it's more about the way the harmony and the melodic movement of the chords support the guitar-playing. People respond to chords. I mean, Jimi Hendrix was a songwriter.
What goes through your head when you're deep into a guitar solo?
You just get out of the way of yourself, and I've got a big self for me to get out of the way of. I've had a few nights where I got so close to leaving the ground that I didn't know where it was going and kind of got freaked out — close to feeling like my wheels were gonna come off. For me, it's like finding the zipper on the back of my body and just coming out of it.
You're in constant pursuit of the perfect guitar tone. How would you describe it?
There's so many clichés about this, which I hate, like "molten glass." But I want it to sound like a voice. That's all. And you want that voice to speak back to you in a tone you don't expect — so it doesn't sound exactly like you. You want to listen to what it's saying back to you.
How did you first hear Stevie Ray Vaughan? And why did he make such a big impression on you?
In 1991, a neighbor gave me a cassette of [1983's] Texas Flood. What hit me was the tone, the texture. It was rich, deep and round. It was wet, fluid, like mercury. I remember saying, "I don't know how you describe it, but that's the sound I want."
Stevie also began this amazing genealogical hunt for me: Buddy Guy, B.B. King, Freddie King, Albert King, Otis Rush and Lightnin' Hopkins. I wrote Buddy Guy fan mail when I was sixteen: "Dear Mr. Guy, I love your records. I'm going to play with you someday." Buddy used to play at Toad's Place [in New Haven, Connecticut]. I wasn't old enough to get in. I'd call the guys there: "I'm a huge Buddy Guy fan. Please let me in. I won't drink." They never let me in.
When you're onstage with Buddy Guy, he treats you like an equal. Do you feel like one?
I'm not an equal. But I feel like I can hold my own. And hold your own doesn't mean coming out the winner. When I play with B.B., I play as few notes as possible. I'm there to satisfy his sound. The first time I played with B.B., he kept going, "Play another solo." I don't think he was being generous — I think he didn't want it to be a cutting contest. As I played with him more, he'd turn his volume knob up. That's when I said, "Wow, B.B.'s really letting me in."
How would you describe your guitar style?
I don't play so much like Stevie Ray Vaughan anymore. I realized my signature is not soloing. It is in the chord voicings, the inversions. In "Wheels," on Heavier Things, the lead line is chords.
That explains why you once said "Axis: Bold as Love" is your favorite Hendrix album. It's his most concise, song-based record.
The songs on Axis are an extension of beautiful guitar playing. You can almost hear Hendrix looking at the guitar as he plays [makes the sound of a long, shivering note], going, "I wonder what that does?" There is an element of discovery. Are You Experienced? is like a rough draft. Axis sounds like the colors on the cover.
Do you have an identifiable tone or color?
I'm going for the biggest, fluffiest, tubbiest sound. I want my guitar to sound like Sting's voice — thick, on the bottom. I want to figure out my own phrasing, my own vocabulary. Eric Clapton is so influential that people go, "Is that Clapton or someone doing Clapton?" I would like to get to the point where someone says, "I can tell that's John Mayer."
Why didn't you play more solos on your first two albums?
I landed in Atlanta in 1998 and wanted to be in a band — play electric guitar and sing. I couldn't find anybody. And the electric guitar doesn't sound great alone. So I wrote Room for Squares on an acoustic guitar. Compositionally, there was no room for me to sprawl. And Heavier Things was my Axis: Bold as Love intention.
But I came off the road after Heavier Things and went, "Why am I still not happy?" How could I have sold that many records and still misrepresented where I'm coming from? The Trio saved me. It was me putting up a roadblock and saying, "There is some shit I have to do, to get back on track."
The Trio album is mostly original songs. Did you write them with the band in mind?
Originally, we were just going to play covers. But I love composers who write for the format. Guitarists like John Scofield and Pat Metheny write for the personnel. So we wrote songs lightning-fast. "Good Love Is on the Way" was written out of wanting to have a song like "Why Does Love Got to Be So Sad?" by Derek and the Dominos. "Out of My Mind" — I wanted a slow blues tune. You gotta be high to like that one — it's so slow.
You did some songwriting with Eric Clapton in London last year. What was it like?
One of the most pivotal weeks of my life. That man is bullshit-free. We had lunch, and he told me something that I think about every day: "You can't mastermind everything. You'll go crazy. Just show up and play."
But look at who his heroes are. You're only as good as your heroes, and Eric is flawless at giving his bibliography, his footnotes. Eric embraces his lineage. And he said something to me — he let on that just as Muddy Waters took him in, he was taking me in, as a passing-on. That was absolutely huge.
The guitar has been the king of rock & roll instruments for more than half a century. What you are about to read are twenty reasons why the present and future of rock guitar are as exciting and explosive as its history. In attack, technique, lyrical ambition and experimental drive, these players are all descendants of the original heroes — including Jimi Hendrix, Eric Clapton, Duane Allman and Jimmy Page — who transformed the electric guitar in the Sixties and Seventies. As John Frusciante says, "For me, the genuine guitar heroes had a lot to say musically and put themselves out there. They tried to take the instrument to new places."
But Frusciante, Derek Trucks, John Mayer and the other guitarists in these pages are all heroes and gods in their own, often extreme, right. They are also proof that, long after Chuck Berry minted the fundamental twang and addicting joy of rock & roll guitar on his 1955 debut single, "Maybellene," there remains much to discover and study in the unlimited alchemy you get from wood, six strings, electricity and the highly personal poetry of touch and strum. The distinguishing mark of rock's greatest guitarists is, Mayer insists, "they're all stuck on what they're seeking, not where they are."
This celebration differs from our 2003 survey, "The 100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time," in some ways. The guitarists here are, by the measure of rock's extended history, new. Most are under forty, and all have made their impact in the last two decades. Also, there is no ranking. Numbered lists can be fun; we still get blowback from last time about who should have been up, out, in or down. But nerve and originality are not easily quantifiable, and that goes for record sales too. Frusciante and Mayer are among the few multiplatinum sellers here. Yet everyone in these pages is a true star of the instrument.
In one central way, however, this tribute to the guitar and those who play it is exactly like the 2003 issue: You cannot turn a page without a reference or a deep bow of gratitude to Hendrix. Frusciante, Mayer and Trucks all speak of him with informed reverence, and Hendrix's cataclysmic influence appears repeatedly in the sound and vision of the other players. In the Rock & Roll Guitar Hall of Fame, Jimi Hendrix is, by every standard, Number One. Everyone else -- including the hundreds of great guitarists who will be cited in the blizzard of letters and e-mails sure to follow — is Number Two.
Ask John Mayer if he is a guitarist or a singer-songwriter, and he replies immediately: "Always a guitarist." As a kid, he goes on, "I had this vision — sitting by a window on a rainy afternoon, just playing guitar. I said to myself, 'If I have enough strings and electricity, I can play guitar forever. I don't need anything else.'" Today, Mayer, 29, is more famous as a singer-songwriter. His first two albums, 2001's Room for Squares and 2003's Heavier Things, have sold a combined 6 million copies, and his latest record, Continuum, is nominated for five Grammys, including Album of the Year. But as a teenager, Mayer — who was born in 1977 in Bridgeport, Connecticut — was so obsessed with Texas guitarist Stevie Ray Vaughan that, Mayer recalls, laughing, "in my mind, I was on my way to being the next Stevie Ray." Instead, Mayer is a pop star and a dynamic, accomplished guitarist with an electric-Chicago attack and melodic concision best heard on Try!, his 2005 live album with the John Mayer Trio. He is also a passionate apostle for the blues elders he loves so much, such as Buddy Guy, B.B. King and Eric Clapton. "I never practice," Mayer insists. "I'm always playing. I want to write songs people can just jam on."
In your Jimi Hendrix essay in our 2004 "Immortals" issue, you wrote, "Who I am as a guitarist is defined by my failure to become Jimi Hendrix." Can you elaborate on that?
If I could play more like Hendrix, I would. I'd want to do it all the time. But who I am is an amalgam of pop and something rootsier. It's not a choice. As for Jimi Hendrix, all guitar players feel that way: "I'm not him."
When did you get your first guitar?
It was January 1991. I was thirteen. My father rented a Washburn acoustic guitar from a music store. I took it to the bathroom, closed the door and sat there, thinking, "How do I find out what's in here? What are you hiding?"
I'm attracted to what I don't know. Everyone else I knew said things like, "I watched him play, and it made me want to quit." I never wanted to put the guitar down. I watched guys who made me want to pick it up. That's when you have the disease: You get your ass kicked, and you say, "I'm going to figure out why I lost that fight."
Back in the hotel room — after some Glenfiddich, Caesar salad and vaporizing — Mayer and I are laughing about B.B. King's sex life. Mayer is serious enough about his blues scholarship to have read King's 1996 autobiography — though not serious enough to actually have finished it. "I got to, like, chapter three, and he'd bedded, like, 600 girls," he says, shaking his head. "It's like an erotic novel written from the point of view of an eighty-year-old: 'She was sweeter than molasses. I sampled her sweet molasses in January. We would go on up to the top of that maple tree. . . .'"
Mayer's own sexual adventures are less exotic. Six years ago, on one of his first tours, he decided it would be "fun" to sleep with some fans. "I slept with, like, three girls in a week," he remembers. "I thought that's what you did, but there was one girl, I don't remember anything about her, but I left my own body and looked down at myself and said, 'Nuh-uh. Not you.' I stayed up all night and didn't sleep." He never had sex with a fan again — though that doesn't rule out voyeurism. "Totally different. There's ways to have fun with people without ever worrying about violating somebody." Mayer has plenty of platonic female friends, but he finds himself seeing a lot less of them when they find boyfriends. "If your girlfriend knows me, she's really not allowed to see me," he says. "Guys assume that 'Wonderland' guy wants to take their girl." (Later that night, Mayer shares a list of rules on "How to be John Mayer's girlfriend." Jessica, you can clip this out: "One: You've got to be really careful with me on the phone. Distance makes the brain grow more maniacal. Two: Twenty-four-hour phone-sex assistance. If there's a cute girl in the front row, I'm gonna run offstage and call you. Three: You have to run every single fantasy you've ever had through me. You'll never cheat. You see a cute guy at the gym, I'll be him. Or we'll get him. I don't care.")
Mayer knows that he doesn't have the blues birthright of B.B. King or Buddy Guy. But he's had his version of hard times. When Mayer was seventeen years old, his heart started beating irregularly — an episode of arrhythmia that sent him to the hospital for a weekend. Until they found the right combination of medicines to fix the problem, his doctors were ready to stop his heart and restart it. "It was so frightening at the time to be seventeen and have heart monitors hooked up to you," says Mayer. "That was the moment the songwriter in me was born. I discovered a whole other side of me. I came home that night and started writing lyrics. I discovered it all at once: It was like opening up a lockbox, and inside was a depth that I didn't even know I had as a person, or a writer — incredible creativity and vision and neurosis, complete neurosis. They all go together in a package." Afterward, Mayer started having crippling anxiety attacks, which he's only conquered in the past two years — to this day, he keeps a Xanax in the small pocket of his jeans at all times as an insurance measure.
Very little of this turmoil is evident in Mayer's music, which shuns noise and aggression. "It's not a part of my personality," he says. "I was a mild kid, man. I don't yell. There's some people who don't like me, just because I represent a certain kind of normalcy that people see as a waste of a music gig." He laughs, gets up to pour more water for his scotch and keeps talking. "I roll with the same truth as to who I am as the hardest-core punk rocker or the worthiest rapper," he says. "I am as John Mayer as 50 Cent is 50 Cent or Eminem is Eminem. And I think that's why I am where I am: Know who you are and be who you are. All the way. All the way to the hilt."
