Review: John Mayer Took St. Louis to ‘Wonderland'

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Courtesy Steve Leftridge

John Mayer played a solo show at Enterprise Center last night.

John Mayer has a split personality, musically speaking. On one hand, he is the guitarist/vocalist for Dead & Company, stepping into the Jerry Garcia role to help keep the long, strange trip going for Grateful Dead fans. That is the John Mayer who will be at Hollywood Casino Amphitheatre on June 7 for Dead & Company’s third (and final) concert at that venue in as many summers. 

The other John Mayer was at Enterprise Center last night, playing to a packed house as part of his Solo Tour, featuring the 45-year-old alone on stage with his guitars and a piano. This is the hit-making John Mayer who blew up in the aughts, and the number of Deadheads in last night’s crowd can be tabulated to be approximately zero. 

No, it was Date Night for clean-cut couples in St. Louis, and Mayer delivered over two hours of hits and fan favorites on acoustic guitar and piano, interspersed with crowd-tickling stream-of-consciousness stage banter. 

Mayer looked and sounded fantastic, taking the stage in a plain green T-shirt, faded jeans and boots and his hair in JFK Jr. mode. Playing a variety of Martin acoustics, Mayer started in a chair at stage left for four songs, including “A Shot of Love,” one of just two songs of the night from Mayer’s most-recent album, 2021’s Sob Rock. (The other was “New Light” played on piano during the encore.) Toward the end of the song, Mayer threw in a snippet of Bruce Springsteen’s “Dancing in the Dark,” a trick he used throughout the evening, tacking Paul Simon’s “Homeward Bound” onto “Stop That Train” and Jackson Browne’s “Somebody’s Baby” onto “Daughters.” 

The latter was played by a request from one of several fan-made signs scattered across the front rows, some decked out with LED lights to grab Mayer’s attention. So Mayer veered from his set list a time or two to take requests, but preferred to call most of his own audibles, most radically with an offhand cover of the old yodelicious Eddie Arnold chestnut “Cattle Call,” which less than one percent of the audience appeared to recognize. 

For the bulk of the show, Mayer performed standing at center stage amid subtle, elegant lighting designs, and the show leaned on nostalgia with two video segues of a young Mayer talking circa 2001 and 2006 before he launched into songs from those eras. He played three tracks from his 2001 debut Room for Squares, including a faithful reading of “Your Body is a Wonderland,” before which Mayer cheekily asked the men in the audience to begrudgingly sway along. 

Mayer is, of course, an extraordinary guitarist, and he found the right balance last night of serving the songs, which often became impressive vocal showcases, and throwing in occasional instrumental passages. On several songs, he employed his percussive right-thumb technique — as on “Neon” and “The Heart of Life” — thumping on the low strings and using a loose fingerpicking style on the high strings, making complex patterns look easy. His left thumb also had a busy night — he’s a classic thumb-wrap-arounder when he’s fretting chords, and the dude didn’t use a capo once all night. 

Just as fine was when used a pick, as on “In Your Atmosphere,” embellished with a harmonica solo and when he switched to a 12-string resonator guitar for the undulating “Walt Grace’s Submarine Test, January 1967,” one of the evening’s highlights. 

Despite the one-man setup, Mayer was able to create arena-sized sound, particularly with a double-neck acoustic, looping chords on the 12-string while soloing with the six-string on a gorgeous “Edge of Desire.”

Midshow, Mayer switched to a piano for the first-ever full-song performance of the existential ballad “Why Anyone Has to Go,” For fans of Mayer’s electric blues playing, he broke out the strat for a fiery solo over looped piano chords while sitting at the keys.

During Mayer’s longest spoken intro of the night, he talked about becoming a fully formed human being, an accomplishment that he said has eluded him most of his life but that this solo tour has helped him get there. He also mentioned that St. Louis native Andy Cohen told him that he would love the St. Louis audience. The deafening roar of appreciation before Mayer’s encore revealed that neither Mayer nor the crowd were going to let each other down.