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CONCERT REVIEW

JOHN MAYER

With: Michael Franti and Spearhead

Where: Rexall Place

When: Sunday night

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The blues is where you find them.

For John Mayer, the man who made "your body is a wonderland" a catchphrase for giggling couples everywhere, it's a groovy kind of thing, a way to expand beyond his sensitive lover-man image. In his cover of Robert Johnson's Crossroads, the second song in on his Sunday night Rexall show, he located the blues in sizzling leads snaking out from three guitars over a hot rhythm section, anchored by celebrity drummer/ producer Steve Jordan.

It was impressively over-the-top, and Mayer can really play. But the end result is less like Otis Rush and more like Blueshammer, the ham-handed blues-rock band from the movie Ghost World that became a byword for cheese.

Worry not, though, fans: I have not come to bury Mayer, but to praise him. After all, you have to give the man credit for abandoning the acoustic and ripping it up with Kanye West and Buddy Guy, attempting the sort of mid-career shift that gives managers ulcers. Heartbreak Welfare and Perfectly Lonely, tunes from his latest, Battle Studies, show what he's learned -- if not how to play the blues, at least where to find them, in shiny, uptempo pop-soul music given rhythm-and-blues weight by a killer backup band.

The guitar hero himself was no slouch, measuring up nicely even against another high-priced sideman, former Pretenders/Paul Mc-Cartney guitarist Robbie McIntosh. Switching to acoustic midway through, Mayer gave the 8,000 in attendance a little bit of that wonderland magic with a medley of early hits, including No Such Thing and My Stupid Mouth.

Spot Mayer a couple of years and he may even enter Boz Scaggs territory, though he's got a long way to go before he'll approach Scaggs's brand of elegant blues-funk. Still, he's got the falsetto, the guitar and taste in sidemen, so who knows? If he plays his cards correctly, and maybe grows an ironic moustache, he can jump the queue and be taken up as the new Hall & Oates, in one body. Fingers crossed.

Michael Franti and Spearhead may not have had the sex appeal of the headliner, but for many in attendance, they clearly outshone Mayer. Franti's music is completely different from when he first came through town in the late '80s with the Beatnigs, hammering sheets of metal while declaiming over industrial rap, but it still twists in unexpected ways.

Reggae, rock, funk, hip-hop are the starting points, but Franti (who lived in Edmonton for a year in the '80s) seems uninterested in being branded for better selling purposes. This results in middling record sales but fantastic live performances, and if his songs sometimes lose their edge in this blend, they're still irresistible.

When he does find a way to get a hit single, as he did with set closer Say Hey (I Love You), it's almost ridiculously irresistible, a go-go-powered dance number that had audience members up onstage and dancing through at least three false endings.

Franti then jumped off the stage and wandered into the crowd, signing autographs, posing for photos and dispensing hugs while the crew set up for Mayer. Like his music, it was both surprising and affirming, and made you wonder what might happen if more rock stars ignored the boundaries between themselves and the audience.

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