I realize that it’s unethical and illegal to conduct mind control experiments on living humans, but I think I should be cut some slack since I’m only doing it to bring a good man back to life.
OK, that might not be the best way to begin this. Let me start again.
Almost every Saturday and Tuesday morning, I go to the Woodstock farmer’s market, where besides finding the best produce and caramel corn, I listen to some of the best free music anywhere on this planet or any other.
And it’s those musicians who are my guinea pigs.
Since I grow a lot of my own produce in my own garden, it’s mostly for the music that I go to Woodstock on Saturday and Tuesday mornings, A lot of that music falls into the folksy singer/songwriter genre, which is my jam, so I always hope to hear a few songs by John Prine, who is my singer/songwriter guru.
If you only listen to popular radio, you may not know who John Prine is, because although he was a Chicago-area boy whose career spanned more than 50 years before dying of Covid in April of 2020, he never got much play on the airwaves. But if you love acoustic guitar players singing their own original songs, try asking any of those artists who their inspiration is. John Prine’s name will come up almost immediately. He is, you might say, an artist’s artist.
And as an acoustic singer/songwriter kind of guy myself, I would agree. Whenever I sing one of my original songs, I’m thrilled if a listener says it sounds sort of Prine-ish. I consider it the highest compliment I could be paid.
That’s why, whenever I go to the farmer’s market at Woodstock on Saturdays and Tuesdays, I wait to hear if the performer of the day has any John Prine songs to play.
And if they do, I always walk up to the stage at the end of the song and put a dollar into the tip jar. I wait until the very end of the song, because I want to enjoy it all the way to the end, and then I want to catch the performer’s eye and tell him or her: “I’ll be here at your tip jar every time you play a Prine song.”
They often laugh, and then they launch into another Prine song, just to take up the challenge. I dance to my seat to listen to it, then I mosey conspicuously back to the tip jar and feed it another dollar with a look that says: “I’ll bet that I have more dollars than you have Prine songs in your repertoire.”
And so it goes.
A century ago, Russian scientist Ivan Petrovich Pavlov figured out that he could condition dogs to salivate if he rang a bell just before feeding them. The dogs came to associate the sound of the bell with the taste of food, so every time the dogs heard a bell, they slobbered with drool, proving that they could be conditioned to behave in a certain way.
And because I wanted to keep the music of John Prine alive now that he is gone, I wondered if I could condition musicians to play his songs for audiences if I conspicuously paid them a dollar every time they dialed up a Prine song.
So a couple years ago I started my psychological conditioning experiment at the Woodstock farmer’s market, plunking a dollar into the jug every time the performer plays a Prine song. Smart performers are pretty keen about such things, and so, when they see that I am in the park, it’s not long before they slip a Prine song into their set list, to my thankful dollar. And then another. And another. And maybe more, if the audience responds well to hearing yet another John Prine song.
I’m glad to dish up the dough, because whenever I spend an hour or more listening to a live band or performer, I’m happy to send them home with ten or twenty dollars of my money as thanks for their efforts and artistry, regardless of their set list.
And if I can pay them my gratitude one buck at a time for keeping Prine songs alive, so much the better. And if some others in the audience are hearing John Prine music for the first time, then it’s not just extended Prine life that my experiment is achieving — it’s like a new birth altogether.
Now, that’s the kind of experiment result that would make any mad scientist proud.
Still, I’m starting to wonder exactly who is conditioning whom in this whole psychological experiment. Because although I started by wanting to condition performers to play more John Prine songs for audiences to enjoy, I’m feeling as if performers now are conditioning me to reach for my wallet every time they swing into “Paradise,” or “That’s the Way the World Goes ‘Round,” or “Fish and Whistle.”
It’s not clear any more who is the scientist and who the guinea pig.
It’s a quirky conundrum — exactly the kind of irony that John Prine would have written a song about if he were still here to see it happening.
TR Kerth is the author of the book “Revenge of the Sardines.” Contact him at trkerth@yahoo.com.
