The defining document of the John Mayer Implosion Era will not be the Q.&A. in the current issue of Playboy magazine, in which he made flip and unfortunate use of a racial epithet. That will survive, for better and worse, mostly in Twitter-bursts and sound bites and only fully in the outlets where that slur is reprintable.
Instead, it will be the shaky video, recorded from the audience at a Nashville concert the night the news broke, in which Mr. Mayer addresses the crowd and thanks his band members — the majority of whom are black — for their support. It was his Oprah moment. “They’ve done an unbelievable thing by standing on this stage and standing by my side and playing tonight,” he said, seemingly in tears.
It was an act of humility and contrition, and certainly Mr. Mayer’s only option. His unfortunate comment had the potential to stain everyone in his blast zone, and this was his attempt to shield those people, or maybe more troublingly, for him to control their message.
But it’s also the last significant public statement he has made about the controversy, a silence that is threatening to become too much of a comfort zone. Right after the interview was publicized, there were murmurs of backlash against Mr. Mayer, but mostly his high-profile peers were forgiving. ?uestlove of the Roots said he would give Mr. Mayer the “benefit of the doubt,” saying he’d “assume that was a punchline gone awry.” In the last week or so there’s been little conversation about Mr. Mayer’s faux pas. The result is an implicit and worrisome approval of Mr. Mayer’s quick fix, as if it were enough.
With no need for continued accountability, the normally garrulous Mr. Mayer has largely kept mum, as he did at Madison Square Garden on Thursday night during the first of his two shows there, part of a tour that continues through June.
He referred to his troubles only obliquely. “I have never in my entire life intended to come off like” a terrible person, he said near the end of the show, using considerably stronger language, “and thank you guys for not believing I’m” a terrible person.
Most of the apologizing, though, he did with his hands. Mr. Mayer is an astonishing blues guitarist, both in his technical gifts and in his ability to make those gifts appear accessible. From “Heartbreak Warfare” at the beginning of the show, when he marked the song’s rhythm with quick percussive taps of the guitar strings, all the way up to the end of his set, when he laid his guitar on the ground and, hunched over it in a feral crouch, played it with one finger, he was virtuosic. He found spots to show off everywhere from “Crossroads” to “Why Georgia” to a cover of Bill Withers’s “Ain’t No Sunshine.” He closed “Slow Dancing in a Burning Room,” which had been one of the night’s lumpier songs, with a bit of pealing Black Sabbath theatricality.
Overhead lights rotating and slowly dropping down around him, he stretched “Gravity” into Jay-Z’s “Empire State of Mind,” recalling the last time he’d been on this stage: a triumphant turn at last September’s 9/11 memorial concert by Jay-Z. (There was no Jay-Z, who was on tour elsewhere, to return the favor.)
At the end of “Vultures,” the intimate back-and-forth between Mr. Mayer and the guitarist David Ryan Harris, who is black — each with head bowed toward the other — played like an absolution, the night’s most emotional moment.
As a bluesman — a pop star, but always a bluesman — Mr. Mayer is playing black music that’s been appropriated and popularized by white musicians for decades. He’s not a rapper like Eminem or a modern soul singer like Justin Timberlake; his sphere is less immediately fraught with concerns about race.
Still, his fame can place those issues front and center, and Mr. Mayer would never settle for just being Jonny Lang or even Stevie Ray Vaughan: in other words, for the version of his career that doesn’t involve getting interviewed by Playboy. He may be an old-fashioned sort of musician, but he’s a hypermodern sort of celebrity, and that can lead to trouble, real or imagined.
For example, after he played “Half of My Heart,” from his latest album, “Battle Studies” (Columbia) — a song that features the young country star Taylor Swift on record — Mr. Mayer segued into Fleetwood Mac’s “Dreams,” which set off a couple of triggers: Mr. Mayer and Ms. Swift were recently pegged in the tabloids as a possible item, and Ms. Swift performed with Fleetwood Mac’s Stevie Nicks at the Grammy Awards a month ago. Was it all a coded message?
Intentionally or otherwise Mr. Mayer, whose highly performative public life has become almost impossible to disentangle from his creative life, courts that sort of convoluted reading. After the Playboy interview, tabloids feasted on his comments about his famous ex-girlfriends, restarting the gossip cycle he had been so adept at steering for the last couple of years. But despite the bonus details — Jessica Simpson as “sexual napalm” — this was old news. His status as a lothario had been damaged before and survived. This time is likely to be no different.
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