Welcome to Sunday Morning Hot Tea where I send you something to read each week. This week, a soundtrack to being brave.
Sobbing and Rocking
I should be watching the concert in front of me. I can’t. I can’t focus on anything but the couple across the aisle. A diminutive pair, the man is wearing a short sleeve white shirt with a blocky black floral print. His jeans are skin tight. His hair is slicked back. I am across the aisle from him in a full arena, but I am convinced I know exactly what he smells like. He is glued to the woman in front of him, and she loves it. Her jeans are also painted on, so tight around her thighs and backside that I’m sure the couple can feel one other’s tiddly bits through the fabric.
They’re swaying to the beat, then without warning, they’re grinding. This isn’t too crazy given we are in the middle of a John Mayer concert. We all feel the various grooves in our own ways. During, say, “Your Body Is A Wonderland,” this level of grinding is to be expected. But that song is not what is playing.
I find myself looking over again and again. At first, I chalk their horniness up to not knowing the song. It has a sultry beat, and to be fair, it wasn’t one of his most mainstream hits. Probably because of the heavy imagery. “Belief” is intense.
What puts a hundred thousand children in the sand?
Belief can, belief can
What puts the folded flag inside his mother's hand?
Belief can, belief can
If you just heard the funky bass, you might expect a sexier song. That has to be what is happening here. They heard the riff and got to crushing.
But then I see it: their mouths moving. Oh no. They are mouthing right along with the rest of us. They know the words, and don’t seem to care. The woman even pulls her phone up and films them together singing along. The grinding has reached a fever pitch. I am convinced that somewhere down in the darkness of the fabric, they’ve achieved full penetration.
Like I said, we are all feeling the music in our own way. Every single song so far, I have sung out loud, at the top of my lungs. I have lifted my hands. I have danced. I am proudly wearing a hat I got from the merch stand even though it does not match my outfit whatsoever.
It’s 2022, twenty years after my first John Mayer concert. On August 27, 2002, my mom dropped me and a friend off at the now-demolished Bronco Bowl to hear this new John Mayer guy play his music. We were in the cheap seats, though in the 3,500 seat venue, no seats were really that bad.
I had first seen John — yes I address him by his first name, not because we are friends (yet!), but because he has been with me, at least sonically, throughout every era of my life. Also I made him laugh when I met him a few years back, so we’re cool.
I had first seen John back in March 2002 on the short-lived but funny Late World with Zach, hosted by a pre-The Hangover Zach Galifinakis. By that time, John had released 1999’s Inside Wants Out, his debut EP. It had some good jams, but his first major hit was “No Such Thing” from 2001’s Room for Squares. That's the song that hooked me, up well past midnight watching VH1 on a Friday night. Yeah, I was a super cool high school sophomore.
After hearing him perform the song on TV, I did what any self-respecting music lover did in 2002: I went straight to Limewire and downloaded every song I could find. Then, in an early aughts show of loyalty, I drug myself to CD Warehouse and paid full retail price for both the EP and the album.
I wore Room for Squares out in my blue Sony Discman. Fifteen-year-old Heather could not get enough of the songs like “Why Georgia.” In retrospect, singing about a “quarter life crisis” sounds far bleaker at 15 than it did for John's 24 years at the time. Still, I felt every chord in that song in my still-growing bones. Hearing it live was more than I could handle. I left the Bronco Bowl show a changed woman - or, rather, kid, teenager, whatever.
It wasn't my first concert ever. I had seen the Backstreet Boys live and watched pop acts at KISS FM’s End of Summer Bash before. My mom had taken me to a Bon Jovi show. But this was the first concert where the music felt like mine. John was up there letting us know it was okay not to be the coolest kid in school. Even if it wouldn’t all turn out perfect, it would be okay. We’d make it out alive, and there would be art and freedom and music on the other side.
At 15, I needed to hear it would all be okay from someone who had recently been there. It didn’t always feel like things would work out. I felt, like so many of us do when we’re that young, that it was a requirement for me to become fundamentally different from who I was to survive. I tried on goth clothes — all safety pins and fishnets and combat boots. I tried on funny t-shirts. I tried on cool clothes from Rue 21 and hand-me-downs from my sister. None of them ever felt like they fit.
The feedback I got back from other kids didn’t help matters much. I know now I was not alone in bearing the brunt of teenage judgment. Still, at the time, it stung. The boy who told me he would be my boyfriend only if I would “lose a hundred pounds and get cool.” The girl who told me my crush on a cool classmate would go permanently unrequited because he liked “soccer girls, you know? Girls in soccer shorts.” This was shorthand for girls whose thighs didn’t touch when they walked.
I had an inkling that maybe I wasn’t completely bankrupt when it came to love interests or self-actualization, but I couldn’t be sure. I thought it was possible I had something to offer even if no one was biting yet. I was suspicious that, despite all evidence, there was something there, like I was flush with cash in a foreign currency with nowhere to exchange it and no way to spend it.
John on VH1 that late March night felt like a call from the other side. It was a message from my home planet.
I’d like to think the best of me
Is still hiding up my sleeve
I thought, Sameeeeee.
But wait, there was more.
Something's better on the other side, he promised. Like a late night infomercial, I was ready to open my wallet and make however many easy payments to buy whatever he was selling.
Those transmissions were key. For me — for all of us who were listening — we got the message. It’s fine, he told us. Or, at least, it will be fine someday, and someday is maybe not so far off. He sang about high school, but even better, he sang about his ten-year reunion.
He had made it out. He was on TV. He was singing me songs on stage at a concert.
I am invincible as long as I’m alive, he sang, adding in live versions of the song, You are invincible, we are invincible, as long as we're alive.
I did not feel invincible at that time. I actually felt pretty worthless. But that became a mantra, even if I didn’t know what a mantra was back then. I just knew I could sing it over and over and maybe if I sang it enough times, it would make it true.
The truth is I’m not invincible. John isn’t either. Neither are you. Maybe the better word would have been “impervious,” but that doesn't sound as good in a pop song. I worse those lyrics like armor. I had his music, and so I was invincible — from mean comments or from being told I wasn’t good enough or from that sinking feeling that I was still cooking and not done yet.
When my ten-year reunion came around, it was time to put his promises to the test. Everything was not perfect, though, to be fair, he had never promised that. It was better though, that much he was right about.
It’s vindicating to hear him now, knowing he was right all along. Something better was, indeed, on the other side. Not just for me, but for him, too. Twenty years later and we are both still here. Far from the Bronco Bowl’s 3,500 seats, he has filled up the 20,000 seat American Airlines Center.
I’m not surprised when he leaves “No Such Thing” off the set list. Really, with all the incredible songs he has written in the interim, no one can blame him. He throws us old timers a bone, though. He tells us he knows the oldies are important to us. He recognizes that they got us through high school and college and that they’re part of our lives.
For us, he plays “Why Georgia”. I sing along, arms outstretched, palms up. Now, singing about a quarter-life crisis, I realize crested the hill where the lyrics went from bleak to fitting to now impossible. Even with modern medicine, I don’t see myself making it to 140 years old. Still, it feels good to hear this one live again. He medlies “Georgia” into a cover of “Forever Young” and “Shouldn’t Matter But It Does” off his newest album, Sob Rock.
I am happy to hear the new stuff. Unlike the chumps nearby who hoot and holler at “Your Body Is A Wonderland” and look around confused during the new songs, I like the most recent record. Paris and I chose one of the tracks “Carry Me Away” as our first dance. A new song for a new era, this one makes no promises of the future. It’s focused squarely on the present, on promises realized.
You know I need you, and that’s for sure,
You’re just the kind of crazy I've been looking for.
We sway together, Paris with his arms wrapped around me. Just over a month married and still in the honeymoon phase. There's nothing left to promise, nothing I have to wait for. It’s all right here.
Along with the couple making love in their seats beside us, there are thousands of other people in the arena singing and clapping along. Some as old as me or even older. Others are younger — college kids, high schoolers. In the lobby, we see a tiny boy, in maybe second grade, wearing a Sob Rock ball cap and matching t-shirt so long it nearly touches his ankles.
As we leave the arena, I feel so grateful for the show. So grateful that John is still making music — not just for me, but for all of us. All of us who hoped for something better on the other side and who have now crossed over. Whether we've been hoping for twenty years or just found out today. Legions of us pouring out the doors onto the streets, feeling invincible and so very happy to be alive.
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Until next week, that’s the tea, and I’ll be on tour with Sinisterhood the next time you hear from me.
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