Tom Rapp

Pearls Before Swine

Thomas Dale Rapp was born on March 8, 1947 in Bottineau, North Dakota, and grew up in Minnesota, Pennsylvania and, from 1963, Eau Gallie, Florida, where he graduated from high school in 1965. He took up the guitar at six, and Dylan's "Blowin' in the Wind" inspired him to write songs. Pearls Before Swine formed in 1965 in Eau Gallie, now part of Melbourne, Florida, with Rapp and the high school friends Wayne Harley on banjo and mandolin, Lane Lederer on bass and guitar and Roger Crissinger on piano and organ. Wikipedia describes his sound as having a slight lisp, a gentle voice and an apocalyptic vision.

One Nation Underground (1967), recorded in four days and nights at Impact Sound in New York in May 1967 for $1,500 with engineer Richard Alderson, was ESP-Disk's best seller, with estimates running from 100,000 to 250,000 copies; its cover reproduces Bosch's The Garden of Earthly Delights. Balaklava (November 1968) followed, then These Things Too (September 1969), their first record for the major label Reprise, which included Dylan's "I Shall Be Released". Rapp and his wife Elisabeth then moved to the Netherlands, where most songs for The Use of Ashes (August 1970) were written. Later albums include City of Gold and Beautiful Lies You Could Live In (1971), Familiar Songs (1972), and Stardancer (1972) and Sunforest (1973) on Blue Thumb.

He toured with Buddy Guy, Gordon Lightfoot, Chuck Berry and Bob Dylan, declined Woodstock, and once opened for Pink Floyd. The touring band broke up in 1974 and he retired from music in 1976 after a show supporting Patti Smith. He took an economics degree at Brandeis and a law degree from the University of Pennsylvania in 1984 and became a civil rights lawyer. He returned to the stage at the Terrastock festival in Providence in 1997, made A Journal of the Plague Year (1999) and played Terrastock again in 2002 and 2006. Rapp died on February 11, 2018, aged 70, and a tribute was held in Philadelphia on March 10. Drag City reissued the first two albums in 2017 and 2018. Spin's 2006 guide to freak folk cited One Nation Underground.