Tom Rapp

Tom Rapp, the creative force and frontman of the psychedelic folk outfit Pearls Before Swine, entered the world as a cult figure in Bottineau, North Dakota, in 1947. Songwriting began for him at age six, after which he started appearing in area talent contests; as a teenager he even defeated an up-and-coming Bob Dylan in one of those competitions. After settling in Melbourne, Florida, he assembled Pearls Before Swine in 1965 and mailed a demo to ESP-Disk, which signed the band without delay. The musicians headed to New York to cut their 1967 debut, One Nation Underground, an album that eventually moved around 250,000 copies.

The group’s 1968 follow-up, the overtly antiwar Balaklava, is frequently ranked as their strongest record. By that point Pearls Before Swine had become essentially a vehicle for Rapp plus whatever players happened to be available in the studio. The band signed with Reprise and issued These Things Too in 1969; after The Use of Ashes appeared the next year they embarked on their first tour. City of Gold and Beautiful Lies You Could Live In both surfaced in 1971. Rapp later moved to Blue Thumb and resurfaced as a solo act with Stardancer in 1972, only to step away from music following the release of Sunforest a year later, at which point he began practicing civil rights law.

Damon & Naomi, the Bevis Frond, and the Japanese psych band Ghost have often named him as a formative influence. He made a surprise return to the stage in mid-1998 at the Terrastock festival in Providence, Rhode Island, sharing the bill with his son Dave’s indie pop group Shy Camp. That appearance prompted the 1999 album A Journal of the Plague Year, his first new LP in more than two decades. Tom Rapp died at his home in Melbourne in February 2018 at the age of 70.