Tom Rapp, a singer, composer, and cult figure born in Bottineau, North Dakota, in 1947, originated the psychedelic folk ensemble Pearls Before Swine. After composing his earliest tune at six, he appeared in regional talent contests as a youngster and even topped a teenage Bob Dylan in one of those competitions.
Following his move to Eau Gallie (now incorporated into Melbourne), Florida, Rapp assembled Pearls Before Swine in 1965 and enlisted his high-school associates Wayne Harley, Lane Lederer, and Roger Crissinger to cut a demo forwarded to ESP-Disk. The label promptly offered a contract, after which the musicians headed to New York to capture their lauded 1967 debut One Nation Underground, an album that ultimately moved roughly 250,000 copies.
Balaklava, an overtly antiwar statement widely viewed as the band’s strongest recording, arrived the next year. By then the project essentially consisted of Rapp alongside whichever musicians happened to be present in the studio; the lineup shifted to Reprise for 1969’s These Things Too and mounted its inaugural tour after issuing The Use of Ashes in 1970. Two further releases, City of Gold and Beautiful Lies You Could Live In, appeared in 1971. Rapp resurfaced under his own name on Blue Thumb with the 1972 album Stardancer, yet retired from music after Sunforest surfaced the following year and later pursued a career as a civil rights attorney.
Damon & Naomi, the Bevis Frond, and the Japanese psych band Ghost have often named him a pivotal influence. In mid-1998 Rapp unexpectedly resumed live appearances at the Terrastock festival in Providence, Rhode Island, where he joined his son Dave and the latter’s indie-pop group Shy Camp. He soon commenced work on A Journal of the Plague Year, his first new LP in more than two decades, issued in 1999. That same year also brought Constructive Melancholy, a Reprise-era retrospective for Pearls Before Swine. Renewed attention followed, prompting Water to issue the 2003 box set Jewels Were the Stars compiling the Reprise catalog plus the collection of unreleased demos and live tracks The Wizard of Is. In 2005 ESP remastered and paired the first two albums as The Complete ESP-Disk Recordings. Tom Rapp died in Melbourne in February 2018 at the age of seventy.
