Concert Review: John Mayer at Eddie’s Attic 12/20 in Decatur

Every once in a while, a show pops up on the concert calendar that you know is going to be great long before you ever walk through the door. Maybe its an artist who rarely tours that you’ve waited for years to see, or perhaps you happen to capture a meteor seconds before it explodes all over radio and the national music conscious. Seeing John Mayer back in the listening room at Eddie’s Attic, where he got his start, is one of those shows. I can remember the first time a friend clued me in to Mayer. I went on Napster (in the good old days before the terms illegal and RIAA ran rampant) and downloaded about 20 live tracks of selections from Inside Wants Out as well as numbers that would become the uber sensation Room for Squares. “Why Georgia” was the first song I heard, and I just remember becoming incredibly giddy like I’d just unearthed the Ark of the Covenant. Musically speaking, I had. There was a purity in his voice, mixed with a clarity in his songwriting, that was so refreshing to hear. Unfortunately, he’d just grown to the level that he was too big a fish to be playing Eddie’s anymore so I had to settle for seeing him open for Guster for my first concert experience. I’d always wondered what it would be like for him to return home again and give his Atlanta fans a taste of the days before bodies were wonderlands, when he couldn’t yet conceive what it would feel like to be bigger than his body.

Eddie’s Attic is hands down the best music venue in Atlanta. It’s a quaint, smoke free listening room that holds around 180 to 200 people. It’s a great place to meet up with friends for food and a couple beers over an evening of choice music. They are the premier acoustic venue in the southeast, pulling in up-and-coming artists from around the country to play on its stage. Besides their golden boy John, Eddie’s has launched the careers of such well-known artists like Shawn Mullins, Josh Joplin and Sugarland. It is the pulse of music, and you return each night to see which artists are moments away from igniting and who are just the flash in the pan.

John’s return to Eddie’s shouldn’t come as a huge surprise. The venue’s management recently changed hands back to Eddie, giving it a more artist-friendly atmosphere where the music supersedes the almighty dollar. Also with the new bluesy direction he’s navigating in his new Trio format, he seems to be more comfortable in his own skin, getting back to his love for the music regardless of what his masses of sorority girl fans might think of his defection from the pop charts. Tickets were highly sought after, going for as much as $800 a piece in the aftermarket. This is the first of three shows he has on the docket and plans to bring as much magic with him along the way.

I Nine (I9) opened the evening. I’d seen them perform at two previous Open Mic Shootouts, and they recently snagged the enviable spot on Cameron Crowe’s Elizabethtown Soundtrack. Since seeing them last, they have refined their sound, lending it a crispness it lacked before. They certainly have the talent to make it to the next level, plying a good sound, but their songs need more distinction to separate them from one another. Too often one bleeds into the next in your mind, making it hard to leave a lasting impression on the audience.

Then it was time for John to take the stage. He was greeted with exuberant cheers and walls of excited energy. Settling in, he commented that his nerves were jingle jangling. The man sells out arena shows, and this small room is intimidating? Maybe he’s just saying this show has meaning, and it matters. It’s personal. He wasted no time digging into his growing catalog of material. He queued up two of the first songs he ever wrote (“Victoria” and “Love Soon”) to begin the evening. The entire night had a very VH1 Storytellers vibe to it. John would introduce us to the song and tell the story or inspiration that birthed it. It was an intriguing glimpse at the scaffolding and the paint cans left behind when creating the finished product. These moments would leave some of the most enduring impressions of the evening. He’d joke that in the early days, when he didn’t have enough material to fill up his time onstage, he’d do impressions to get the audience laughing. His thoughts on shattering the fabric of time, should he and Dave Matthews ever share the same space at the same time, were priceless.

He structured the set list as a timeline of his career; starting with the first songs he penned, chronicling the blinding whirlwind of success, and finally leading up to a couple musical thoughts that hadn’t been played live before. We were watching an artist evolve before our very eyes. It was a good sampling across his body of work, and the stories factored in a whole new dimension to the songs. For instance, he said “3×5” was written during one of his first tours out west, right after he found out Columbia had decided to pickup Room for Squares. He admitted that the riff from “My Stupid Mouth” was lifted from Shawn Colvin’s “Sunny Came Home.” He also said “Your Body is a Wonderland,” invading you from radios and grocery PA systems everywhere, is an overproduced mess that puts a sour taste in his mouth. He stripped down “Wonderland” and brought the song back to life, bathing in the beauty of its essence. I’m proposing that a law be enacted that acoustic is the only way that “Wonderland” can ever be played from henceforth.

He was playful and joking around the entire evening. He flubbed a line mid-strum in Clarity, popped out the escape hatch, blabbered on about kitty cats and Rorschach tests then launched back in like that was just a planned little aside built into the song. The audience seemed to love him all the more for his fallibility and was kind enough to coach him along with the words to bring it home. It’s hard to pinpoint the best moment of the evening with so many possibilities to choose from, but if pressed, I’ve got to go with “Gravity.” He introduced the new song by calling it the most important song he’d ever written, and he’d listen to it every day for the rest of his life. He explained that it was about the things in life that will bring you down, especially planted on the pedestal of fame, and it takes discipline not to fall into those all too human traps. You could just tell his heart and soul were wrapped up in this piece. It was more than a song. This was a piece of himself.

I’d be hard pressed to say I’ve seen an artist be more honest or heartfelt during a performance. John came into this evening with no strings attached, playing with all the love and passion that he had when he was maxing out credit cards during those days as a starving artist. I have no qualms saying that this was one of the best shows I’ve ever been to. It surpassed my impossibly high expectations and left an indelible impression that can’t be erased. He may be eating off of platinum records and having a larger mantle built to hold all his Grammy’s, but he’s never lost his undying devotion to the music. He never stopped being the wide-eyed kid, fascinated by the magic released when you run your fingers over the guitar strings.

Set List
Victoria * Love Soon * Outside in the Underground * My Stupid Mouth * Your Body is a Wonderland * City Love * Not Myself * 3×5 * Don’t Think I’m Gonna Go To L.A. * Clarity * Bigger than My Body * Tracing * Gravity [Encore] The Hurt * Stop This Train