We moved to the block in 1985, only a couple of years after I had been hired as the first editor of GUITAR for the Practicing Musician, a publication that would go on to become one of the most popular music magazines of the decade. My neighbor, John Mayer, was then about eight or nine years old. To me he was just another of the regular horde of neighborhood boys who used the tree in our front yard as second base for their stickball games in the summer and the south end zone marker for their football games in the winter. There were at least six of them in the horde, as I recall, including the three Mayer brothers. My two daughters, aged 2 and 7, were definitely charter members of the sidewalk cheering squad that urged those boys on to even more unseemly acts of male bravado on my front lawn. When the older one got old enough, she invited John to a basement boy-girl party, where John got claustrophobic and wound up crawling out of the basement through the window.
It was several years later that I started hearing the sound of an electric guitar wafting out of the window of the house across the street and two houses down. This was just about the time my wife had decided to fulfill a lifelong dream of learning to play guitar and I had used my influence to get her a discount on a nifty Yamaha fS- 310 acoustic. But the speed and fluency displayed by our neighbor (we soon learned it was John) as he deftly mastered the pentatonic scale in less than a week-and-a-half proved too much for her as she earnestly plucked her way through "Mary Had a Little Lamb" for the 90th time. She was his eighth-grade art teacher, for crying out loud. So she sadly went back to painting portraits.
It seemed like days later when my older daughter came home to say that John Mayer wanted to know if he could call me to ask for advice about music. Of course, I told her to tell him, heavy-metal maven that I was. The difference, I found, between people who were really serious about getting ahead in the arts, and the mere dreamers, was their ability to identify the people who could give them good information and then go after them, in the process demystifying an otherwise daunting journey. I gave my daughter a GUITAR Magazine t-shirt for John, but he never did call. Nevertheless, when John left the block to attend the Berklee School of Music in Boston, we were impressed but not surprised. We were definitely more surprised in the spring of 2001, when word came circulating back to the block that a John Mayer was opening for The Dave Matthews Band on his current tour and was soon to have an album out on Columbia Records! This was a leap beyond our ability to grasp. In this fame-drenched world of ours, where the media leads you to believe that every third person is or has a great shot to be famous—if not for 15 minutes then at least five—few people realize that just about anyone they’ve heard of is already in the top 1 percent of all those who struggle daily with making it in the arts. I know. I was one of the perpetrators.
In the world of the magazine, where editors routinely bestow fame in the form of giddy headlines and outsized predictions, everybody is a star; that’s where you start. If you’re in a magazine, on tv, on the radio, or even a rumor on the internet, fame is a given. But to go from the Berklee School of Music to an opening slot on a dave Matthews tour would be a defining moment of achievement usually reserved for only the most amazingly brazen of fingerpickers. And John was surely not that brazen. It had to be a different John Mayer.
But then my younger daughter confirmed through her research online that John had put out an independent CD. Good for him—a great first step. I had to tip my cap to my old neighbor, my beat up GUITAR magazine cap, and run out to my local record store to purchase the cd. Not only didn’t they carry it; I was informed a couple of weeks later by the clerk that they couldn’t even get it. But this is a local kid, I ranted. Where else is he going to sell any records? They were a national chain, the ignorant clerk shrugged.
