During an appearance on Let There Be Talk, John Mayer was asked: “Are you a Zeppelin guy?” Now this kind of questioning can only end in two ways, but somehow Mayer managed to give the most perfect answer.
The interview with John Mayer was transcribed by Ultimate Guitar for our enjoyment, you can read it in full below:
Let There Be Talk: “Are you a Zeppelin guy?”
John Mayer: “Good question. I happen not to be a Zeppelin guy. It never caught me, it still very much could. The vocabulary isn’t my vocabulary.
“Jimmy Page playing basically a Gibson, that’s a different sound for me. I’m a Strat guy. Everyone I love comes from the Strat side. I also am a melody geek.
“I think ‘Going to California,’ that song is outstanding, I mean, Blind Faith probably wishes they wrote that song. It sounds like anybody would’ve killed for that song.
“Anything that has melody in it, I can dig, but when it gets into like bluesy Led Zeppelin, it’s a genetically just a little outside my zone, just by a little bit.”
I want to lay this out here, when you came onto the scene – I guess it was 2001, I was still playing music and I got to say, man, being a fan of you or enjoying what you do has changed my life… when you came out, I said, ‘Fuck that guy.’ I played your music, and it was just a jealousy thing, and I realized over the years that’s all it was, I realized over the last six years, I changed, and so I dug into more and more about you, I was just, like, ‘This guy is amazing.’
“I understand what you’re saying and I would also take a little off of your shoulder and say that I changed too. When I first started out, see, I don’t think I really understood what it takes to break out of your town.
“The force that you must put out to break out of your family, to break out of your house, to break out of your town, to sleep on your friend’s couch in the basement, to get through that, to not give up… You probably need about four times as much force than most people would expect.
“You need to really drive through a steel wall and what happens is: you don’t know you’re through, you’re still going hard. If I had to do it over again, and I truly have the perspective to know that I was gonna make it, meaning, like, ‘Okay, your first record is out, people love it, you’re good to go, pull back the throttle, drop the booster rockets, you’re good to go.’
“Looking back, I was only two years from me living at my parents’ house, and it took so much force to break out of that, for people to tell you, ‘You’re not gonna make it.’
“Say you want to be a musician, you’re gonna be a rock star or a guitar player or whatever. At that time, it was me saying, ‘I want to be a blues player.’
“But then you make it, and that’s why I have so much grace for other people – if you’re in the first few years of making it, you’re in the rocket ride and nobody can tell you you’re good, nobody can tell you, ‘You don’t have to worry,’ you’re just pounding.
“So my point is that I didn’t make it all that easy to see someone like myself also be kind of aggressive, kind of intellectually show-offy, kind of overly sarcastic. The only thing I could’ve done to really not rub people wrong would’ve been to have low self-esteem, that would’ve been really good for me – if I had a crippling self-esteem issue.
“And I probably did, but not in a conventional way. And so I just looked at it, like, ‘I want to be great, and I’ll tell you what I’m not, and I’ll tell you what I am.'”
You can kind of tell when you have a great song, it really just starts to stick in your own head.
“Yeah, it plays like a radio in your head. If I get home from the studio, I play a little game. I go, ‘Sing it. Can you sing it? You can’t sing it after you’ve worked on it the whole day? If you can’t sing the song when you’re brushing your teeth, it’s trashed.’
“If you have to press play to remind yourself how it goes and you just wrote it three hours ago, it’s never gonna stick. If you think about what makes a hit song from a new artist, it’s a novelty song.
“You bring up a song that I think is great, I’ll talk about it like someone else wrote it, I’ve always been divorced from that. I think that’s what rubbed people wrong is that I’m divorced from the fact I made it.”
(John Mayer continued:)
“I wish young people could have the empathy that older people have because your empathy is directly related to your experience.
“And it’s only after you realize the grey area in life where you can try your hardest and still be an asshole, where it just takes time to realize how to communicate with the world, and by the time you realize how to communicate with the world, you’ve burnt some bridges, and that’s okay, that’s just part of it.
“Sometimes you get in a fight with your significant other, you’re, like, ‘This fight should be happening, this is not a sort-of-out-of-nowhere fight, this is supposed to take place.’
“And sometimes I see other people be so extreme in their black-and-whiteness and taking other people down, one day something will happen to you you will realize you said something you didn’t mean, and then you’ll forgive other people in the midst of their doing things. I root for people because I know how hard it is.”
(Elsewhere in the interview, John Mayer talked about collecting watches and a new “serious addiction” he has. The guitarist explained:)
“I have a serious addiction, which is, like, googling specs. Good lord, and what’s funny is: if you told me when I was in middle school, if you said, ‘See that card catalogue over there? You are gonna flip your shit for that card catalogue in 30 years,’ I’d be, like, ‘What are you talking about?’
“‘No, you’re just gonna love looking things up. And you know the Dewey Decimal system? You’re gonna love it. It’s gonna be for watches, you’re gonna learn every reference number.’
“What could be theoretically more boring than a reference number for a watch? Yet, for us, they’re like visual numbers. I say 5513, you know what I mean.
“Who would have ever thought that I would be this interested in this sort of mathematics, you know, and are you like me where you buy something and you were pretty well-informed the day you bought it, but once it’s in hand, then you google everything about it? I look at it, like, ‘I know that the thing I have is real, but I want to get my money’s worth.’
“My parents were educators, so I still have that as a point of reference, I have my parents’ annual salary as a point of reference that keeps me grounded.
“So when there’s something I know would make, like, would’ve made my parents sick to their stomach to see the number on, it’s like, I feel I don’t get the most out of the item unless I google it to the very last spec both the spec sheet on the manufacturer’s website.
“And then I go on forums, and then I go into Instagram hashtags, I will keep looking and looking, and that’s what a lot of Rolex collectors would do.”
