John Mayer has kept some pretty heady company this year, playing with everyone from B.B. King to Herbie Hancock, but the one session that meant the most to him? "If you asked me a year ago who I wanted to collaborate with I'd say, 'Eric,'" he says, referring, of course, to Eric Clapton. Mayer guests on the guitar god's new Back to Home album and just recently finished a session in L.A. with Clapton and Doyle Bramhall for J.J. Cale's new album. Oh, there is one more person on Mayer's wish list: "I would love to meet Eddie Vedder. I totally respect his down-low, out-of-the-picture normalcy -- which is why I won't ever meet him" . . .
San Diego rockers Louis XIV were "disinvited" from playing the postgame party at Hoover High School in northern Alabama. Parents objected to the band's risque lyrics and the art work on the group's The Best Little Secrets Are Kept, which displays a woman's backside. Frontman Jason Hill kept his sense of humor about being booted off the football field. "It was sort of breathtaking in its hilarity when we first heard it," Hill says. "There was a bit of frenzy of locking up your daughters. They don't want their daughters to be influenced -- but I got news for them, their daughters are already influenced." Louis are growing used to the hullabaloo. "We got picketed in Indianapolis by two girls in their early twenties," Hill says. "I asked one to come up, take a drink on the bus and tell us what she found offensive about the music. She came up and took a drink, but she wouldn't talk to me" . . .
Louis found other ways to spend the weekend, hanging in Miami for the VMA's. "We played a party, and Carmen Electra was there." Hill says. "Later that night, I went to Kanye [West]'s party, where Jessica Simpson was. There were all those low-cut little tops. I love Miami!" . . .
The video for Huntington Beach quartet Avenged Sevenfold's "Back Country" might look familiar to fans of Hunter S. Thompson's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, as the song was inspired by the band's own experiences in Sin City. "'Back Country' was written about being all fucked-up, going to Vegas, and going crazy gambling," frontman M. Shadows says. And what is the band's haunt of choice? "My favorite place is Olympic Gardens, the strip club," guitarist Zacky Vengeance says. "You lose your money, but you still feel like a winner." Financially speaking, Shadows did the biggest damage one night at Scores in New York. "I woke up the next morning, and I started counting the receipts," he says. "Me and my girlfriend had gone crazy. It ended up costing $9,700" . . .
Los Angeles rockers Run Run Run, who just scored a record deal after their show at Sunset Junction Street Fair, are on a hot streak. The band has gotten Bauhaus' and Love and Rockets' David J to remix the quartet's cover of Mazzy Star's "Fade Into You." Run frontman Xander Smith told Up in It how he got one of his musical heroes behind the boards: "Some of the other Bauhaus guys had floated our name, so he came to see us. I gave him a copy of the record, and he called me when he got home and said, 'I'd really like to do a treatment of this.' He did this spooky, ambient mix of the song." The relationship continued this Monday when the two shared a bill at Spaceland . . .
Finally, animal rights organization PETA will celebrate its twenty-fifth anniversary with a blowout in L.A. this Saturday, September 10th. The Polyphonic Spree will perform during a dinner that will see Mr. Meat Is Murder himself, Morrissey, among those honored. Sharon and Kelly Osbourne will be presenters during the ceremony, and Sheila E. will headline the after-party . . .