“The crazy part is they scream in the right places,” notes an astonished Mayer. “They’re cheering at the times when the musos cheer. They’re cheering for musical events that are nearly imperceptible to laypeople. They’re getting it.”

Indeed, though no one could have predicted it when he first cracked the rock radio code with 2001’s acoustic-driven Room for Squares, Mayer may be the first guy since his hero, Stevie Ray Vaughan, to bring not just the blues, but the art of the extended guitar solo to a new generation of music fans. Mayer emerged as the preppy pop-rock Pied Piper from Connecticut who won over mainstream audiences with breathy, multi-platinum, Grammy-winning swooners such as “Daughters” and “Your Body is a Wonderland.” Now, after proving quite soundly that he could conquer popdom on its own terms (and hold his own with Dave Matthews, Jack Johnson, and any other steel-string strumming hitmaker you can name), the 28-year-old singer/guitarist has tossed aside his acoustic guitars to strangle Stratocasters all night long with a blues fury rarely heard on radio since SRV. It’s an inspiring career risk Mayer has taken for the sake of both his music in particular and guitar music in general. And he’s more than willing to take his lumps along the way.
“I’m reading reviews of my record right now that are B-minuses or three stars, and I’m thinking, ‘Fair enough,’” concedes Mayer of Try!, which features bass go-to guy Pino Palladino (The Who, Eric Clapton) and drum deity Steve Jordan (Sonny Rollins, Neil Young). “I’m a good enough blues player to know when I’m not playing blues well enough, and I’m enough of a blues lover to know when I’m not getting it. And that’s what I wish people knew—that this is just the beginning. I’m not coming out here thinking I’m the s**t. I’m coming out here every night trying to move this boulder over this fence.”

Wow, a power trio blues record. Is reinvention a specific tactic of yours?
I don’t think about it like reinvention, I think about it like continuing to try and get it right. It’s almost the equivalent of meeting someone you really like, and you really want this person to like you. You hang out with them, and you feel they’re not really getting who you are. But you don’t care if they hate you at the end of it all—you just want to make sure they get you.

How did your fans react when they saw your trio for the first time?
They had no idea what to expect. They just knew they liked the idea of me playing guitar in a small club. There was no conflict, though. Nobody walked out saying, “I thought this was going to be different. This sucks.” It may sound dumb and political, but the role of an artist is to feel where the wind is coming from next, and change the way things are done to suit that. You have to get out before the building starts to burn. My whole vibe is, “Play for anyone who wants to hear, and don’t try and control your fan base by cutting anybody out.” There are artists who do that. They don’t want a certain faction of people at their shows—like girls, or people who watch MTV and VH1—and they die a slow, painful career death. The thing I always say is that Jimi Hendrix was playing for the same girls I am, demographically. Hendrix was a pop guy.

For a club tour, the crowds sure sound huge on the new record.
Well, there were like 1,200-1,500 people in the house. It was some loud s**t. Even if I turned my guitars down because I didn’t want to blow my ears out, I’d get my ears blown out from the front. It’s almost like my guitar amps were fighting a war against 1,500 sets of lungs.

People have made the Dave Matthews comparison, but I’m hearing some SRV in your voice.
I started out trying to copy Stevie Ray in every way, shape, and form. Then, when I started playing pop stuff, I really still thought I was copying him, but everyone said my voice sounded like Dave Matthews. Stevie never got the credit he deserved as a singer. His singing was great.

He never got enough credit as a rhythm guitar player, either.
You’re right. The thing about Stevie was that his right hand was so unique. A lot of people talk about his left hand, but you can get that easier than you can his right hand. There are things that take place inside Stevie’s playing that you can’t hear until the fifth year of trying to get it. The thing you end up realizing is that he was actually more dedicated to rhythm than he was to the actual sequence of notes in a riff. He never broke the rhythm. Ever. He’d break the melody line before he’d break the rhythm, and that is the exact way it’s supposed to be. If I sat down in front of the piano right now, I could fool more people into thinking I knew how to play it just by playing rhythms that make sense. It hardly matters what the notes are.

Does the SRV tone inspire your sound?
I held tight to the Stevie thing for a very long time. But, to be honest, if I can incriminate myself and make people think I’m an idiot, my relationship with Stevie’s music the last year has been, “If you don’t mind, I’m going to play some other stuff right now. I have to leave you and take on some other things. But don’t think that I don’t love what you did. I just have to become my own musician and my own guitar player. And that means not playing like you all the time.” The thing about the trio record is that there’s a little bit of Stevie in there, but there’s also a lot of B.B. King, Freddie King, and Clapton.
One of the things I want guitar players to realize is that you don’t have to obey chronology. You don’t have to update. You can plug into 1966, and just add to that. In other words, instead of doing it in series, you can do it in parallel. You can go, “Let me play as if [B.B. King’s] Live at the Regal came out just a year ago, but I’m still me in 2005 responding to it.” That was the exact process behind “Out of My Mind,” the slow blues thing on the new record.

Your lines on that song have some serious sting.
The thing I’m most proud of on this record is that there’s hardly a moment where I go, “I want to play a Stevie Ray lick here, and a B.B. King lick there,” because that’s where you start sounding like a music store. When you’re just flipping through your Rolodex and selecting other people’s sounds, you get this schizophrenic approach to playing, and I prefer to think like one brain. And when I listen back to “Out of My Mind,” even if it’s a little bit boring at first, it’s all on the same brainwave. I think that’s kind of a cool little accomplishment.

Don’t take this the wrong way, but I feel like your playing is still developing—still in its adolescence.
Absolutely. This is all very warm and bendable, and that’s the way it has to be. It can be forged and shaped to any form you want. That’s why it’s music and not a job. Bend it, bend it back. It’s a constantly malleable situation. I’ve talked to people who quit playing for five years, and then just started up again. Music is not going to get mad at you if you leave it for a week. You can go on vacation and come back, and it won’t have its arms folded when you get home.

You seem to have become a bit of a “tone guy” with your Dumbles and other fancy hand-wired circuits.
Yeah, I’m a big believer in Two Rock. They’re making bulletproof, amazing-sounding amps. They’re kind of based on the Dumble thing. Amps are funny, because everyone you recommend an amp to has a counter-recommendation for you. The counter-recommendation for Two Rock is Divided By 13 amps. I play through two Two Rock Custom Reverb Signature 100-watters. They’re very liberating, as they let you focus completely on your guitar playing because your tone is already there. And when you have something of that quality, it’s like, “If it doesn’t sound right, it’s not the amp, it’s me. ” Either that, or you get crafty and start blaming it other things—like the power in the room [laughs]. But what I do miss is a little bit of a midrange dip, so lately I’ve loved having the Two Rocks flanking a Fender blackface of some kind—like a 1x15 Vibroverb. I run all three at once, and, together, they create this kind of graphic-equalizing shape where the ends of your sound are very articulate, because the highs and the lows of the Two Rocks are absolutely stunning. The midrange is where you get that Larry Carlton, Robben Ford thing—that stiff midrange that doesn’t really compute with me on the same level as, say, SRV or Hendrix. I like a squishy center, which is what the Fender provides.

Did you stick primarily to your signature-series Stratocaster on the trio tour?
No. I used a lot of different guitars. It wasn’t because I liked the pretty colors. It wasn’t the C.C. DeVille school of “toss me another guitar.” It was the idea of using every tool I could to separate each song from the next. Steve and I both got into that—Steve even had two different drum kits going! That’s how we changed up the set so nobody got bored. People would leave going, “It felt like you guys only played for a half hour,” and the reason they felt that way is because the sound kept changing.

Did pedals help you change up the sound, as well?
I actually went “pedal lite” on this tour. All I had was a vintage [Ibanez] Tube Screamer and a Robert Keeley Katana Boost, which is a very cool clean boost. On some of my guitars, the pickup outputs are purposely lower, because I love weak pickups. Nothing sounds better. If you get pickups with a lower output, you can turn the amp up louder, and you actually get more color out of it—although I do use the Katana Boost to level out the sound at times. On my new studio record [Continuum, due spring ’06], pretty much the only electric guitar is this black Strat I had built at the Fender Custom Shop with very, very light pickups in it.

You are one of very few multi-platinum artists who allows taping at shows.
I think the truth is probably that I’m one of the few major label acts that you’d actually want to tape. And I don’t mean that any other way than this band embraces the variables. I’m probably coming off nasty, but I don’t mean to. There just aren’t a lot of bands that embrace the “who knows?” element of playing live. And the bands that do—such as the Dave Matthews Band—have a huge taper following.

You’re certainly making inroads into the jam band scene.
There are absolutely some similarities between the mentalities of jam bands and blues. I’m going to keep playing wherever I can play. I’m going to do some trio shows [with Phil Lesh & Friends] to celebrate the New Year. We’re going to perform [Hendrix’s] Band of Gypsies in its entirety.

Is playing the guitar different for you after all this success?
It’s a little different. But I still trail my guitar cable into the bathroom, play in front of the mirror, and pretend that none of this ever happened. That’s the great thing about guitar playing—I guarantee you that my level of passion when playing is no different than somebody who just bought themselves a guitar six months ago.

What advice do you have for guitarists who want to take their music to the next level?
If there’s one thing I want to mention, it’s that I don’t want a kid to read this article and think he has to own a Two Rock to play well. I just feel like saying, “Save your money.” I can get by on any guitar through any amp as long as it will stay in tune. Give me a Squier, and I’ll go write a song—just to prove to everyone with Squiers that it’s no big deal. You need to ask yourself, “Am I a songwriter, or am I a sound maker?” A songwriter will compose a beginning, middle, and end, and make a statement. A sound maker is the person the computer recording companies are catering to. I don’t care—nor does the rest of the world—how big a library of beats you have. Nobody cares.
I walked through a music store the other day, and I said, “All of this is up its own ass. None of this is doing anything for music.” You can get caught in this swamp of thinking you need to have all the best sounds, but you’re not writing songs by pulling together loops. It’s not really making music to ask a drive to pull up a WAV file. Nobody has reached the finish line with this stuff—it actually takes the finish line away. You’re never going to be a songwriter if you’re constantly reading recording magazines and going, “Look, they just came out with an upgrade that will allow me to have twice as many drum sounds.” Instead of spending 600 bucks on a new sampler, buy yourself a guitar. You can have a song by tonight, and be getting laid tomorrow.

Some guitarists get so enthralled with the sound of their instrument—or their latest lick—that they never complete their songs.
If you don’t finish songs, you’re not a songwriter, and it’s better to be a bad songwriter than not to be one at all. Your job is to cross the finish line, and if you don’t, you’re nothing. I’m telling you, you’re a hobbyist—at best. I don’t care how bad your song is, once you finish it, you’re going to sleep like a baby, because you’ve just made something out of nothing. I’m saying this because I’ve gone through this before. Not once in the hundreds of hours I’ve spent on my Mac G4 with every piece of music software running have I come up with even a verse or a melody. You just enter this quicksand in your brain, and you never come out. By the time you get Giga-Sampler running, your soul is dampened. All of my new songs are written on a little tape recorder, or on a Sound Devices 40GB hard-disc recorder. I sit and write with a stereo mic. If your song isn’t good enough for a stereo mic, it’s not good enough. Sure, there are nights when I find myself on the living room floor with a screwdriver and a Dumble in pieces, testing different tubes, but that’s a night I’m not playing guitar or writing a song.
That being said, I’m so inspired by this change that the rest of the world won’t feel for a while. Five years ago, the state of guitar playing was—and I don’t knock it at all—a much more end-of-the-day, recreational kind of a deal. And now I think things are turning around. I know for a fact that hundreds of thousands of kids are picking up the guitar and getting into the sensation of forming music and breaking it down and practicing. They’re using the Internet, playing blues, or jamming with a friend, and putting it online. They’re having dialogues about which Strat they should buy. And, knowing how many people are naturally gifted at music, it won’t be long before we hear from them. So, if you’re reading this magazine in your room on a Friday night, and it’s going to be a practice night, get to it, man, and I’ll see you up on stage in ten years.