At the Pacific Coliseum on Tuesday, May 1

My instinct is to skip straight to my Payback Time response, because a letter-writing shit storm is going to be unavoidable here. But I'm under contractual obligation to use this space for an actual review. So here goes. Are you kidding me? Are you seriously buying into this white boy's Mississippi makeover? I'm talking to you, John Mayer fans.

The night started with a man and his guitar under a red spotlight–very dramatic. The message was clear: "I want to be taken seriously as an artist." After the mood was set, the one we'd all been waiting for didn't waste any time getting his blues on with "Belief", a Carlos Santana wannabe from his latest album, Continuum. Right after that he grabbed his acoustic and switched gears with "No Such Thing", one of the many pseudo-sensual pop numbers from his career-launching debut, Room for Squares. And that's basically how the rest of the night went: Mayer Ping-Pong–ing between the sensitive summery sap that put him on the charts and the watered-down devil's music that he's trying on for cred.

Every once in a while he'd start a song with a teasing lick from one of his heroes. This was totally wasted on this particular crowd–they didn't pay to play Name the Jimmy Page Tune. They came for the Grammy award–winning hits, goddamnit. But for what it's worth, guessing which Led Zeppelin album he was riffin' on made my night go by faster and so did that five-star White Spot burger I had. (What do they put in the Triple "O" sauce?)

Later in the set, he kicked out "Waiting on the World to Change". With lyrics like "Now if we had the power/To bring our neighbours home from war/They would have never missed a Christmas", you might be inclined to think that Jessica Simpson's fuck buddy was expressing some sort of anti-Bush sentiment. Mayer set us straight: "This song is about as much about politics as Grey's Anatomy is about medicine."

Which brings me to my next point. For those of you with a huge hate-on for Mayer–and I know you're out there–I feel it's my journalistic duty to inform you that he's not nearly as annoying as his music. His banter was light and breezy. He was in and out of there with his jokes. Furthermore, he was quite accommodating when it came to acknowledging the I Love You signs that die-hards held up, and when someone threw a Canucks T on-stage, he knew the drill. He held it up for us so we could cheer for ourselves. (Sadly, we didn't know the score at the time.)

And when he saved "Your Body Is a Wonderland" for an encore, natch, he took the piss out of his newfound Stevie Ray Vaughan persona. (Huh, he wishes.) He jokingly introduced his soundtrack for beige afternoon sex as a bluesy number: "We're gonna take it down to the dirt and the tumbleweed." Mind you, the song still sucked just as hard as the recorded version, but I must say his attitude totally rocked. Let the Paybacks begin.