At one point midway through his set Saturday night at Toyota Center, John Mayer told us to all imagine that we were watching VH-1 Classic so he could adequately interpolate Journey's "Don't Stop Believing" into his new "Half Of My Heart" with less guilt involved. A little known fact about the Journey song is that there is in fact no such thing as South Detroit; in effect, South Detroit is Windsor, Ontario, Canada. But you try explaining that to a "Whoo!"-screaming girl while Mayer is onstage making sex faces at his guitar.
For the rest of the night, that audience-performer exchange made us wonder exactly what the future holds for an artist like John Mayer when his female fans grow up and move on. Will he have his own VH-1 Classic moment in two decades, when older gals will sing "No Such Thing" at the top of their lungs folding clothes on the couch or will he go the way of say, Christopher Cross, and become another pop-culture punchline?
Personally, we are aiming for Dan Fogelberg. For him, not us.
The crowd on Saturday was somewhat sedated, and sadly, we have seen a Mayer throng before to be able to compare. Our secret shame is that we saw Mayer live before two years ago (chicks, man) and that crowd was infinitely more jazzed on the man than they were Saturday night.
And it's not like he's touring behind some clunker of an album, seeing that plenty of people applauded November's
Battle Studies as a more introspective outing than they expected. It's a good John Mayer album by the standards of his career, but not a great album in the truest sense of the term. He makes good John Mayer music.
But what will happen down the line? We boiled down the four tenets of the attraction to Mayer over the course of the night. First off, he's an attractive man at least by the standards of his target female audience. Floppy hair, gangly gait, and he seems like he wouldn't go under the shirt unless you let him, that kind of thing.
And then there's that second tenet: Inherent safety. But during the
Playboy interview and the ensuing fracas he betrayed that by being too open and perhaps punting whatever progress he had made over the past decade off into the ditch with other erstwhile '00s casualties.
No. 3 would be having the ability to wrangle an ax, synthetic "bad boy" aesthetic and whatnot. Cleaned-up whitey blues won't offend anyone under 70 and you can rock it with Mom in the car, who herself probably dug a few late-period Steve Winwood songs in her time. And once again, there's the safety.
The fourth thing is the thing that gets all artists like Mayer over on their target: A sense of vulnerability. You wanna rub and pat his back and tell him that "some girls are just heartless" so he can give you that hangdog stare, which opens the door to breakfast tacos and movie-night cuddles. He's not a manipulator; he's just working on a higher plane that other guys haven't mastered the art of yet.
And the thing is, Mayer knows all of this.