John Mayer at Key Arena
He might have "issues" off stage but man he's talented!Say
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Free Falling
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Your Body Is A Wonderland
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Who Says
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Daughters
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Waiting On The World To Change
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John Mayer rocks Seattle; gets cheers – and a pair of undies
The underwear was a pair of granny panties – ladies’ Hanes, to be exact. The kind with little black polka dots.You kind of expect those to be thrown on stage at a John Mayer show. And apparently he does, too.
The undies landed on the KeyArena stage – where Mayer and his band played a 15-song show for thousands – minutes before he concluded his set with “Half of My Heart,” the third track on his recent studio release, “Battle Studies.”
“But the underwear is being used to wrap something else,” Mayer told the crowd. “The underwear is merely the outer packaging, and I don’t think that I necessarily want to unfurl to find what my fortune is. I thank you, though, for the projectile.”
The woman behind the underwear toss was Crystal Kosta. A third-generation Seattle hairdresser, she’s been a fan of Mayer since his first major-label studio album, “Room For Squares.”
Kosta came to the Wednesday night show with friends and clients from her Greenwood salon. It was the husband of one who, tongue-in-cheek, wrote the message on the Goodwill-bought undies: “JOHN, Come see my WONDERLAND. Love me longtime.”Sitting in the ninth row, Kosta was one of the die-hard fan club members who bought tickets roughly four months ago.
“I love him for his music,” she said. “I know he can be kind of a freak show. I also think Michael Jackson is a freak show, but I still like his music.”
That’s the catch.
Eric Clapton has praised Mayer. Buddy Guy told Rolling Stone that Mayer is “single-handedly making the Stratocaster cool again.” But you can’t talk about his skill without talking about the times he came off, well, like a real tool.
In that same Rolling Stone article, Mayer said he never got to have sex with former girlfriend Jennifer Love Hewitt because of food poisoning. He talked about his sex life and his quest to find “The Joshua Tree of vaginas.” In another interview with Playboy that month, he compared his penis to white supremacist David Duke and later apologized – on Twitter – for using the N-word.
Like many people in their 20s, I like much of Mayer’s work. That can be tough to admit with the racy comments, and when his most popular songs are sap-coated radio hits like “Daughters,” a Grammy winner, and “Your Body Is a Wonderland.” Co-workers don’t cut you much slack, no matter how many times you try to point out the guitar solos or blues covers.
I promised my editor that if the show sucked, I’d honestly say so.
But, other than poor sound in some parts of KeyArena, it didn’t.Michael Franti and Spearhead opened. And, as The Mountain’s John Fisher said, Franti is a man of the people.
He walked through the KeyArena stairways, singing next to fans. Franti empathized with the loss of the Sonics before launching into a song he said was about tenacity and resiliency. At the end of another song, the band went into the opening riff of Nirvana’s “Smell’s Like Teen Spirit.”
The opener’s finale was “Say Hey” – a catchy radio song that is Franti’s first to crack the top 20 on the Billboard Hot 100. Keeping the crowd energized, the veteran musician brought dozens of Seattle fans onstage to dance and sing the song with him.
The rendition would even have made Oscar the Grouch crack a smile. Slightly.
Mayer opened with “Heartbreak Warfare,” the first track on “Battle Studies.” He went next to “Belief,” then another track off his latest album, and a rocking version of the Robert Johnson blues song “Crossroads.”
Guitarist Robbie McIntosh played a ukulele on “Say,” the first of Mayer’s slower songs played Wednesday.
He slowed things down again later in the set doing a solo version of “Heart of Life,” “Dreaming with a Broken Heart,” and “Clarity” – the latter two played on a Martin acoustic.There were other covers weaved into the set, such as part of “Human Nature,” the song Mayer played last at Jackson’s memorial. The last song before the encore, “Half of My Heart,” worked into a cover of Fleetwood Mac’s “Dreams.”
“Daughters” brought screams from Mayer’s legions of female fans, including the two next to me who screamed at just about everything he did.
As the 20-somethings swayed and sang along, some guys including one in front of me, wore the same pained faced that comes while deicing a windshield in sub-zero temperatures.
I’m pretty sure the guy, clearly there for his date, left for a long bathroom break about 30 seconds in. He didn’t hang around for the two song encore of “Who Says” and “Gravity.”What may have been the most impressive part – outside of Mayer’s making Stevie Ray Vaughn-style guitar solos look easy – were the skills of his backup musicians, specifically McIntosh and drummer Steve Jordan who had a knockout, minutes-long solo before the band launched into “Waiting on the World to Change.”
“It was a unanimous decision backstage that we all respectively went out and had our own day today, but collective came back five weeks into a tour feeling like this was the first day we set out,” Mayer told the crowd, praising them and Seattle’s weather. “So, thank you.”
As far as the racy comments, there were none. Mayer didn’t talk about lost love Jennifer Aniston, didn’t drop the N-word, talk about his penis, jilted girlfriend Jessica Simpson or future plans for his sex life.
Though there’s always hope for those granny panties.
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