Tom Rapp & Pearls Before Swine

by Lahri Bond

[From Dirty Linen #50 Feb/Mar '94]



A short inquiry as to the whereabouts of Tom Rapp, the enigmatic leader of the psychedelic folk band, Pearls Before Swine in the news section of the June/July 1992 issue of Dirty Linen (#40) generated some surprisin responses. Between 1967 and 1974 Rapp and P.B.S. recorded nine albums and toured heavily around the United States and parts of Europe. Responses included a number of fans who waxed poetic about the special place P.B.S. held for them in their formative years.

One letter by Chuck Stewart from Indianapolis serves as an excellent introduction to Rapp's music. I listened to P.B.S. albums fervently in the late '60s early '70s. Alas, these treasures were inadvertently lost in one of the moves between my salad days and the present. I particularly miss Balaklava, probably the most moving anti-war recording of all time. I have many fond memories of listening to this album in the wee hours of the morning with dear friends in college when we were all so very young and idealistic in the early 1970s. I'll never forget the brief opening by Trumpeter Landfrey.

Just before the first cut on side one, which began with the haunting image of "Translucent carriages, drawing morning in..." The technique of running two voice tracks -- the second was an impassioned whispering that built to a kind of anguished breathing -- was particularly effective. I also remember a song about a mysterious, magical man who appeared in a small town with his music and rhymes, but left in sadness one day when he "heard the news from the war." I remember also a song about a jeweler ("He knows the use of ashes") on the fourth Pearls Before Swine album.

By all accounts Rapp stopped performing around 1976. Nothing much was heard about him since except for a passage in The Harmony Encyclopedia of Rock that theorized he was living in Holland or other assorted rumors (like the one we published that had him digging graves in Italy).

In December of 1992, a Christmas card appeared with the return address reading simply: Rapp, Montefiore Cemeteria, Rome, Italy. Inside was a xerox of the Dirty Linen inquiry stapled to a piece of stationery from a law firm in Philadelphia. An arrow was drawn from the smiling face on the clipping to the name of one of the lawyers. The name read Thomas D. Rapp and gave his real phone number and address.

It seems Tom Rapp was indeed still around and had lost none of his sense of humor. Though no longer playing music professionally, he was all too happy to talk about those surreal days of yesteryear.

Rapp and his fiancee Lynn Madison agreed to chat at their country house in north east Pennsylvania. While contact lenses have replaced the old round glasses and Rapp's hair once described as hairy bedspring curls is short and his beard neatly trimmed, the old gleam is still in his eyes and the spark of mischief flickers about him.

The still boyish looking Rapp loves to talk about the old days with Pearls Before Swine. He started by dispelling some of the old rumors, like being a grave digger in Italy.

"I had not heard that rumor, but I had heard others. I heard when we made the first album (1967) that we were all in our sixties back then, probably because there were no pictures of us on the early albums. We also supposedly had a dwarf drummer. I don't know where that one came from."

The Encyclopedia lists Rapp's earliest claim to fame as finishing above Bob Dylan at a talent contest. "I was living in Minnesota and used to be in talent shows which they used to have there every year. There would be an eight year old baton twirler and a blind lady who played a saw," he laughingly recalled. "Then there were the regular people. I used to play with my guitar when I was eight or 10 or 12. My parents kept a book of clippings from the newspapers of all those things. One of the newspaper articles listed everybody who was in the talent shows and one of them was Bobby Zimmerman, who I presume was Bob Dylan. I knew he had been in these things, but I don't remember him from that time. I had come in second and he had come in fifth."

During the years P.B.S. were making records, they struck a chord among the people who wanted more than just loud rock and roll. Pearls Before Swine's music was always very surreal and wonderfully strange. Rapp's chief influences were probably typical for that time.

"Drugs," he chuckles and then corrects; "...no, no, actually that's not true... till later. I was writing songs, the first I ever wrote was `Another Time' (the first song on the first album). I was in a car accident, I was in an Austin Healy Sprite convertible, I was the passenger. The car missed a curve and went off into the service road. I was thrown out. The car flipped over, the windshield was in a tree about a hundred yards away. I had a little scrape on my elbow and that's it! I suddenly realized, standing in the road and this came to me (honest to God) is that the universe doesn't care at all. I built the first song around that."

"Did you find that the universe/Doesn't care at all?/Did you find that if you don't care/This whole wrong world will fall?/Or have you come by again/To die again/Try again another time."

The first two albums, One Nation Underground (1967) and Balaklava (1968), remain among their most experimental and bizarre. Both have recently been rereleased on CD by the German division of ESP DISK (ZYX Music) and are currently being distributed in the U.S. as an import by Rounder Records. Rapp is delighted with the results.

"In a way those two albums have been rescued because no one is going to have record players in 10 years; anything that hasn't been translated onto CD never existed. Like in Orwell's book, 1984, they were changing the language to take out words that would cause trouble and after a while no one could even think certain thoughts."

Listening to One Nation Underground today, one is instantly transported back to the early days of the counter culture with all its day-glo and equally colorful characters.

"In the early sixties I lived in Melbourne, Florida," Rapp explained. "Some people in high school and I got together and made a home demo tape. I had heard of The Fugs, who recorded on a small label at the time called ESP DISK. We sent a copy of this tape up to ESP DISK and said something naive like: Hey, hire us. They sent us back a note and said O.K., come on up and do an album," Rapp laughed.

"They put us up in Impact Studios, which was a little studio up on the second or third floor of a building, a block behind what at the time was not yet Lincoln Center. It was four-track equipment."

The entire album was done in four days with some of the songs written on the plane on the way to New York. "I wanted the Hieronymous Bosch cover. I think at the time not many people knew Bosch very well. The original release came out with an insert of the whole three panels of the Hell painting.

"It did real well for ESP DISK, we're not sure but we were told, maybe a quarter of a million copies sold. We were by far their best seller for such a tiny little company."

Among the album's more heady materials was a light and breezy little ditty, "(Oh Dear) Miss Morse," that had a chorus sung in Morse code. "I had read Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man by Marshall McLuhan. I think one of the songs around that time was `Winchester Cathedral' and we wanted a little vaudeville type song like that. We wanted the chorus to be a rhythmic chorus based on Morse Code.

"I looked up the word `love' but it didn't work. But DIT, DIT, DAH DIT, DIT, DAH, DAH DIT, DAH DIT, DAH DIT, DAH worked, rhythmically, even though it spelled `fuck,' of course. Remember (New York DJ) Murray the K? He got into a bit of trouble because he played `(Oh Dear) Miss Morse' on the radio. Well, who knows Morse Code (especially in 1967)? Boy Scouts and Boy Scout Masters. They all wrote in and said; Do you know what that says!?!?"

"Uncle John" was another extraordinary song, regarded as one of the first anti-Vietnamese War songs of the era. It foreshadowed Balaklava, Pearls Before Swine's anti-war album. "Even by '66 or '67 the Vietnam war was clearly an enormous sin of some kind. I wanted to write a song about it, even though it's not specifically about it. There seems to be a lot of Vonnegut influence in that song and of course Dylan."

The other highlight from the first album was a song based on the Timothy Leary inspired anthem of the day, Drop Out! "The phrase was around in those days. When we recorded the two albums in Impact Studios, Wavy Gravy used to drop in. He always came by and wanted us to try these interesting new drugs. He would come and say, `You have to try this, they put dogs to sleep with this!'

"No one believes this but I had never smoked marijuana until I was writing the third album. Everyone around me was doing it, but I wanted to know more, I was very conservative in those days. Back then everybody had drugs they wanted to give you. When you performed, people threw drugs up on stage, minor drugs, nothing vicious or uncool."

By 1968 P.B.S. were in the studio again and recording, what many feel is their best album, Balaklava. "We wanted to do an anti-war album and we picked The Charge of the Light Brigade because it was remembered as being quite glorious, though everybody got killed. The Charge of the Light Brigade was at Balakava in the Crimean Wars in about 1854 or 1856.

"I had these old records, with the recorded voices from old cylinders [recorded 30-40 years after the war] of people like Trumpeter Landfrey who was actually a trumpeter at The Charge of the Light Brigade. Florence Nightingale started her whole nurse thing, tending to the victims of the Crimean Wars and that's really her on the recording.

"The painting on the album cover: The Triumph of Death (by Breughel, the elder) looked like war. The little girl on the back cover was at an anti-war demonstration and the button that reads Pearls Before Swine originally read Flower Power. The drawings on the back were by Jean Cocteau who was recovering from morphine addiction at the time, which seemed appropriate."

The album opens with a swirl of voices and acoustic guitars on the haunting "Translucent Carriages." "It was an impressionist song," said Rapp. "I was reading Herodotus' histories in 1967 (God knows why!). Herodotus was an ancient Greek historian who travelled all over the world and wrote a history of everything."

Rapp used a line from those histories in that song. "In peace/sons bury their fathers/in war/fathers bury their sons." Another song in the lovely but very strange department was "Lepers and Roses." "Lepers do seem to show up a lot in these songs. There's one in `Morning Song' on the first album. There's probably a couple more lepers on the other albums. I must have caught the movie Ben Hur about 10 times during that period."

In the early days P.B.S. didn't tour. After the first album the band was made up of Rapp and whoever else was available at the time to play. "On the first album Roger Crissinger played the organ, harpsichord and clavoline. He wrote the words to `Ballad to an Amber Lady' and I wrote the melody to it.

"Lane Lederer played bass, guitar, English horn, swine horn, sarangi, celesta, finger cymbals and sang. He wrote the music and Roger wrote the words to `Surrealist Waltz.' He also sang lead on it. It's a terrific song.

"We wanted to keep it all together, but they all had other things they wanted to do. After that it really wasn't a continuous group. I mostly wrote the songs, unless it was Dylan or a Leonard Cohen cover or we'd set something else to music like W.H. Auden or Sara Teasdale."

Rapp forged on to create an impressive body of work that included four Reprise albums, all under the collective title of Pearls Before Swine, and also had two solo albums released in 1973 on the small Blue Thumb label.

Reprise released an album in 1972 called Tom Rapp - Familar Songs, re-recordings of earlier rough-mixed P.B.S. songs with new arrangements. He was surprised when the album came out without his knowledge or approval and it remains his least favorite record.

They didn't start performing live until three years after their first album, but during the seventies P.B.S. traveled everywhere and shared bills with everyone from Country Joe and the Fish to Patti Smith.

"The best performing group was about 1972-1974, the group who's pictured on the back of Sunforest. We had flutes (Art Ellis), cello (Billy Rollins) and such. Elizabeth [his former wife] sang on a few albums.

"There was a performing group until '74 and then I was solo with just harmonica and guitar. I just wanted to get out because I had been doing it for about 10 years. We finally ended the war so I figured it was time to go onto something else. At that point I felt I had met everybody, played with everybody. We had played with Pink Floyd at an outdoor festival in Amsterdam and Dylan and everybody."

Among one of Rapp's more famous gigs was a solo performance in Philadelphia that lasted exactly one minute. Rapp explained. "It was in a big club in Philly and I was opening for Wishbone Ash and Genesis. I got to the club and they told me Genesis and Wishbone Ash both had their shows timed out and we started late, which meant there was only a minute left.

" `So why don't we pay you and thanks for coming.' I was quite impish in those days, I said `hey I can go out in one minute and get a standing ovation.' I think I bet something like five dollars on it. The guy introduces me to this packed house. I said `thank you, I only have one minute but would you please stand up and cheer if you think he's [Nixon] guilty.' It's August of '74. The middle of Watergate, I didn't even have to say who `he' was. The whole house stood and were cheering. I said thank you and left and Genesis came out and I collected my five dollars."

When Rapp and P.B.S. did get to play, the audience was treated to an evening of surreal music and humor. Rapp's excellent songs were always at the forefront. "When I'd write a song, I'd write it until it felt right and I knew it meant something, though sometimes I didn't exactly know what.

"The song `Riegle' on the Use of Ashes album (1970) is based on an actual event. I was living in Holland at the time and writing a lot of songs. There was an article in the International Herald Tribune, the only English language newspaper there. The article was about a ship that had been sunk by the allies even though it was filled with allied prisoners. Because the ship was German, it was sunk and they all died.

"I read that article, turned the tape recorder on, hummed a little bit, had a couple of false starts, then the song just came out. I played in real time into the tape recorder. I just had to play it back to get the chords. The song came completely formed with rhyme and everything. Completely out of nowhere.

"Usually when I'd write a song, I get the feeling first, the mood and then it's like they say about sculpture; you chip away at everything that's not the mood and you're left with this song that was meant to be."

Somewhere along the way, the glamorous life of rock and roll musician, the continual parties, the exotic locales, the unusual fans, began to wear thin. Rapp decided he would try his hand at another form of craziness; a normal life.

"I decided I wanted to get into something different. I went back to school, and got a degree in economics at Brandeis University in 1981. I thought you could change the world with economics, because it's like this great secret mystery, the real true thing underneath everything. It turned out that economics in the professional sense is Republicanism made flesh. Unfortunately I didn't know that untill I graduated.

"Then I wanted to be an attorney, because I had friends who were quite happy being attorneys and doing good things for people. I started law school and graduated from the University of Pennsylvania Law School in 1984.

"I got a job with a civil rights firm. We do plaintiff side, victim side cases of age, sex, race or national origin discrimination. We have had a couple of cases that have gone as far as the Supreme Court, and back down. Constitutional things, where people are getting screwed by Bucks County (PA) because they stood up for the wrong thing. We go on their side and make the county pay up. It's nice, I think of it as '60s law."

With the first two albums now available on CD, interest might be high enough for the whole P.B.S. catalogue to be reissued domestically. Rapp has a collection of unreleased songs, alternate versions and outtakes of others still on tape, and new songs. His former life occasionally comes back to haunt him. A corporate attorney at a deposition once asked if he were the Tom Rapp. "During a break he came up to me again and said `I've got all your albums.' It was fun.

"I have the guitar stored under the bed and I pull it out and play for two or three hours at a stretch, every six months. I have maybe 15 songs that were never recorded, that I wrote since the last album. I've been thinking about contacting some record companies and seeing if there's interest."

If sufficient interest is rekindled in P.B.S. would Rapp return to music? "Well I wouldn't stop working, but if the conditions were right, I might do the odd gig or two."

Tom Rapp/Pearls Before Swine Discography

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