John Mayer takes fans to a guitar wonderland
You know an artist is pretty chill about a show when he hits the stage wearing his own merch.
John Mayer turned up at PPG Paints Arena Thursday night in a Sob Rock sweatshirt for the penultimate show of a Sob Rock tour that would have ended a few weeks ago had he and a few of bandmates not been hit with COVID-19.
One of the shows postponed was a February night in Pittsburgh.
“Sorry we missed you last time,” he said, after opening with “Last Train Home. “We’re going to make up for it tonight.”
He didn’t waste any time, scorching the room with a fierce solo to end the quietly intense “Belief.”
No one else in the pop universe has quite the same package of movie star looks, seductive bedroom voice and lyricism to go with that level of guitar firepower.
The man who jokingly called himself “America’s boyfriend” stood tall at center stage with the Sob Rock sweatshirt, jeans and sneakers, needing very little in the way of visuals other than the big screen.
When someone requested he remove that sweatshirt and whatever was under it, he shot back: “Is that all I am to you? A piece of guitar-shredding meat?!”
He went on to explain that not only was the act of removing a shirt on stage highly awkward but also that his body was slightly misshapen from wearing a guitar since the age of 8.
With his chops, Mayer could go like Stevie Ray Vaughan with just a two-man Double Trouble, but he likes the wall of sound. So it was a band of seven seasoned players, including bass legend Pino Palladino and two backup singers laying down a beautiful, dreamy backdrop.
Our guitar- shredding piece of meat is not choosy with which songs he will shred. Otherwise mellow fare like “I Don’t Trust Myself,” “Changing” and “I Guess I Just Feel Like” gently flowed right into hard, jagged, sometimes screaming solos. He started the “Rosie” solo with just a little wah-wah plucking before escalating it into dizzying loops.
His showed off his fluid fingerpicking and popping during a solo section with a rare acoustic “Assassin” (he noted), “Neon” and a cover of Tom Petty’s “Free Fallin’” that featured some of his most impassioned singing of the night.
He handed “Your Body is a Wonderland” over to Isaiah Sharkey, who took us to an exploratory jazz wonderland more reminiscent of the East Village.
Late in the set, when things were getting more festive and the band more percussive, “Till the Right One Comes” took an Afrofunk detour into Paul Simon’s “You Can Call Me Al.” (That was after “Stop That Train” was appended with the opening line of “Homeward Bound.”)
After ending the main set by taking “Gravity” to astral places, he returned to cap the night and get folks dancing with the breezy disco funk of “New Light.”
Mayer said he knows he’s playing to an appreciative crowd when the songs he’s playing sound better to him. He humbly thanked the Pittsburgh audience for letting him experience that.
He’s going to change some colors in the guitar tones and he’ll be back soon (July 12), filling the big shoes of Jerry Garcia in Dead & Company at Star Lake.