John Mayer/Sheryl Crow Live at the Woodlands

Friday, my wife and I escaped school after a half day and drove 2 and half hours to The Woodlands to get in line for the John Mayer/Sheryl Crow concert which would start at 6:3o. Of course for the first time ever, I overestimated our drive and traffic time, leaving us with an hour wait before we could get in to get seated. We sat out on the hill, this time we remembered to bring a blanket and some books, unlike the last time when we went to see Sting and Annie Lennox. I brought lawn chairs and food and then found out that we couldn't bring either in because the pavilion sells its own food and lawn chairs while tearing wallets from victims' pants. We setup right on the cement walkway behind the rail, basically the first row of the hill. It's always a better seat than in the overpaid seat section where there is no room to move your legs or seat comfortably; where your arms will lock or rub with some person you don't know for 3 hours or so.

Our blanket was just off the center of the stage and just left of the center speaker cluster. The sound was great and couldn't have been much better. Marjorie Fair opened the concert with a depressing 30 minute set. The only song we knew was "Empty Room" which appeared on a Paste Magazine Music Sampler. It was also the best song. For some reason Evan kept starting songs in a major key for the verse and then would seemingly run blindly into a relative minor with the fanfare of Starsailor. It wasn't bad, just parts were disjointed and their set really didn't set the stage for John Mayer.

John Mayer Set list (sorry, I can't remember where the last two songs fit into the set):

Belief
Vultures
Why Georgia
Slow Dancing in a Burning Room
Good Love is On the Way
No Such Thing
Daughters
Bigger Than My Body
I Don't Trust Myself (With Loving You)
Gravity
Waiting on the World to Change
In Repair
The Heart of Life
Bold As Love

Mayer started at 7:15 with "Belief" a mid-tempo song with lots of R & B flavor. Most of the music on his new album Continuum has this type of flavor, which is a step forward for Mayer. His first full length album, Room for Squares, established him as a pop star and Heavier Things took the pop and solidified it thematically and lyrically. The John Mayer Trio live album showed off Mayer's blues chops and showed that he wasn't just some pinup, but it isolated a lot of listeners who bought the album based on what they had heard before from Mayer. Mayer has channeled a blues-infused pop featuring great melodies and solos reminiscent of Eric Clapton's solo records over the years; something that most listeners can connect with on some level because the music offers something to just about everyone. His set primarily came from his latest album (nine songs), two of them first featured on the JMT Try along with "Good Love Is on the Way", and then two of the biggest songs from each of his first two albums. Mayer had another two guitarists on stage, a keyboardist/organist, two horn players, and the bassist and drummer from the Any Given Thursday Live DVD. They were a tight band, but sometimes their sound was overpowering, cluttering the quality for the crowd. Mayer seemed to have improved on the guitar, combining different styles in his new material to make things more interesting, although he seemed more impressed with his guitar playing than with the actual songs he had written and his arrangements showed his confused priorities. He overplayed several solos on several songs, taking monumental Clapton moments and turning them into acid-induced Hendrix lapses of reason. Granted he did things on the guitar that most of us could only dream to play in real time even if we understood what he was doing, but he reminded me of Steve Lukather playing an extended solo at the end of the song "I'll Be Over You" on the Toto Livefields DVD. He started off playing what was on the original song from Farenheit and then ten minutes later, way after everyone else in the band had stopped playing, he looked up and stopped abruptly, looking like he was ready for the men in the white coats to take him to his bed for night-night. Mayer was all show and didn't make much of an effort to connect with the crowd, but his performance was well worth the drive and the cash we paid.

Sheryl Crow::::

A Change Would Do You Good
Hard to Make a Stand
My Favorite Mistake
Anything But Down
The First Cut Is the Deepest
Good Is Good
It Don't Hurt
Redemption Day
I Know Why
Strong Enough
Real Gone
Steve McQueen
Soak up the Sun
Everyday Is a Winding Road

ENCORE

Is It Makes You Happy
Rock N' Roll

LPB (Louisiana's PBS) plays either the touring dvd from The Globe Sessions, Soundstage, or The Very Best of Sheryl Crow at least once a month and my wife and I watch each just about each time it comes on Tv. Something about seeing Jeremy Stacey playing drums again (I saw him play for the Finn Brothers at the HOB New Orleans a year before the hurricane) and enjoying so many of Crow's songs helps it to not get old. The concert really held no surprises, but the sound quality was excellent and a four piece string section only helped things. The set list included many crowd favorites, but also included some slow-paced songs that kind of faded into the background, taking away from what she was trying to communicate to the crowd. They filled the space between the well known songs, but killed the momentum. Crow's band was fairly solid, not a surprise since she's been playing with them for years, but "Strong Enough" sounded severely disjointed and Crow seemed to lose her place a few times on "Soak up the Sun". Crow is a great guitarist and she had no difficulty with singing while playing her acoustic, but she could only hit the root notes while playing bass and singing. This took away from the songs and the overall sound of her music. Her portion of the concert was so much more enjoyable than Mayer's because she connected with the crowd and played arrangements which supported the messages the songs were trying to convey.

Overall, a great concert except for the creepy woman smoking half a dozen cigars behind us, the strange man next to us who was playing air guitar for his wife, and the drunken college frat guy who was yelling rock and roll demanding a "high five" before running back into the crowd.