Guitar Gear Forum

John Mayer was hosting the Late Late Show tonight and Bob Weir was on. They played Truckin'. John was into it. No idea at all Bobby was playing, but Mayer had a couple of Fenders.
Mayer said he is a Deadhead of about 3 years - Bobby looked at him kinda sideways.

Closed with Althea - I'm sure it's on YouTube.

Not the biggest Dead (sorry man) or Mayer fan, but checked it out. Pretty cool strat tones. Nice leads by both guitar players.

[video]http://youtu.be/nFSQExbSFKw[/video]

Fucking Mayer. No matter what he does he just has to infect everything with his SRV rip off bullshit. What a yankee twat.

I won't listen to it.

Douchebag to the power of infinity.

Dead + Mayer. Wow, that's powerful levels of meh.

I feel sleepy now. I'm gonna have to get an energy drink and it's this thread's fault.

Sorry Mamberg... tried to help

s'ok - I'm used to it.........
I just thought it was a strange pairing.

not to mention that Mayer was hosting a late night show........

I should theoretically like Mayer; he plays Strats, he is obviously influenced by SRV, what have you. I just can't get over how polished he sounds. I don't hear any sort of power in his stuff like I hear from Shepherd or Sayce and I can't get into it.

GRIMESPACE wrote:Not the biggest Dead (sorry man) or Mayer fan, but checked it out. Pretty cool strat tones. Nice leads by both guitar players.

+1 sounded good to me and it's cool to see this type of music in a mainstream TV channel/show.

Love the way Mayer plays. What blues isn't a ripoff (of a ripoff)? He does have a douche voice and douche face however

Thurston wrote:Love the way Mayer plays. What blues isn't a ripoff (of a ripoff)? He does have a douche voice and douche face however

Its not the genre of music. Its the fact that his style is directly lifted from SRV and thats lame as fuck to me. Same reason I don't like KWS, Los Lonely Boys or Indigenous.

I can tell the difference between all three Kings (BB, Al, Freddie) simply by the way they play without hearing any vocals, even if they're all playing 12 bar blues in the same key. All three of them had their own voice/style.

It also may have something to do with being born and raised in Austin and seeing SRV clones constantly.

Yeah I agree that Mayer playing style is directly lifted from SRV. Except that he doesn't have the fire of SRV so it makes everything a bit lamer.

On the other hand, he has a whole different side with the acoustic guitar and songwriting that ends up helping bringing blues-based guitar playing to an audience that usually wouldn't listen to it, often serving as an "entry level" artist for a lot of kids/people that wouldn't be interested in guitar-based music otherwise. Some of these people will eventually get deeper into it and research other artists and the whole guitar community benefits from it. So more power to him I guess.

At the end of the day, he's not a bluesman, he's a pop star that can play guitar really well. In that capacity, he's probably the best on his generation.

That acoustic shit is directly lifted from a virtually unknown singer songwriter whose name I am still trying to think of since yesterday.

Will report back when I remember. If that ever happens. Because bong hits.

Telephant wrote:That acoustic shit is directly lifted from a virtually unknown singer songwriter whose name I am still trying to think of since yesterday.

Will report back when I remember. If that ever happens. Because bong hits.

Yeah but whoever that is, I'd bet he can't cross into the electric side as well as Mayer does.
That's what I am saying... there are better bluesmen and better singer/songwriters, but very few have the ability to bridge both audiences like Mayer can and that's really no small feat. Clapton did it really well, so did Knopfler and a few others but none from this current generation...

Definitely. Usually you see dudes take on a schtick and completely copy it. Mayer managed to do it twice, which I guess is impressive in itself.

John Mayer would be a great artist if he simply wore a muzzle.

Guess JM is tired of bangin hot chicks and is switching to hippie chicks