John Mayer Chokes Up at Show Over Playboy Scandal

His Twitter mea culpa behind him, John Mayer asked a crowd of actual people on Wednesday to forgive him for those race-tinged, hyper-sexual and wholly inappropriate comments made in a newly published Playboy interview. The blues-rock singer teared up as he spoke to fans in Nashville about descending into a "wormhole of selfishness" with his "quest to be clever" in the media. He said he's "done" acting foolish and just wants to "play my guitar."

Mayer's interview went awry in so many ways, including a casual use of the N-word, graphic thoughts on his sex life with ex-girlfriend Jessica Simpson and, perhaps most bizarrely, that his sexual member was a "white supremacist" and prevents him from having intimate relationships with black women.

At the concert Wednesday night, Mayer said he had lost sight of what's important to him: "the people that I love and the people that love me."

"I went as I've begun to do, into a wormhole of selfishness and greed and arrogance," he said, adding he'd begun "thinking that if I just continued to be witty and pull together the most fast phrases that I could, that I could be clever enough to buy myself another day without thinking that anybody had finally pinned me down and said, 'you're a creep.'"

Mayer said he "feels absolutely terrible" for hurting people with his comments. "It feels worse than any headline I thought I could get my way out of."

He then changed the focus of his speech to his band, which includes many African-American musicians and singers, in an apparent attempt to defuse the scandal boiled up by his N-word use. His voice wavering with emotion, he said:

"I think it's important to know that everybody on this stage is here not because they condone what I say in any given interview -- and certainly not the interview that's arisen today. They're on this stage because they support myself as a possible future grown-up.

Maybe they see something that I haven't looked at in a while. So maybe I need to take a break from trying to be clever and just spend a little time looking at what they see. Because they've done an unbelievable thing tonight just being on the stage."

Mayer then made clear his game plan going forward: "I quit the media game. I'm out. I'm done," he said. "I just want to play my guitar to whoever's around."

The "game" as he calls it is one he plays often, both on Twitter and in numerous interviews that tend to teeter on ridiculousness.

Just last week, the singer was quoted by the New York Post as saying, "When I get married that's gonna be my vows, 'Do you, John Mayer, take this woman to have and to hold, to wear her ass like headgear?' Yes, I do -- you're the one whose ass I wanna wear like a hat for the rest of my life."

In an interview with Rolling Stone in January, Mayer introduced his views on the kind of woman he'd settle down with. "You need to have them be able to go toe-to-toe with you intellectually. But don't they also have to have a vagina you could pitch a tent on and just camp out on for, like, a weekend? The Joshua Tree of vaginas?"



Posted By: Lacy
PopEater