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(Clicka qua per la versione Italiana)
Summary.
Tom Rapp's Pearls Before Swine
were perhaps the greatest band venturing in psychedelic-folk during the 1960s.
Their two masterpieces,
One Nation Underground (1967) and especially Balaklava (1968)
are mosaics of atmospheric songs that defy classification, evoking the
hallucinated state of Dali's surrealism, lushly arranged, and influenced by both
classical and jazz music. Each album is performed by a veritable
"chamber ensemble": organ, harmonium, piano, harp, vibraphone, English horn,
clarinet, celeste, banjo, sitar, flute...
Full bio.
(Translated from my original Italian text by DommeDamian)
Pearls Before Swine were the invention of North
Dakotas folksinger Tom Rapp, who moved to New York to seek his
fortune. The group was actually primed to record their first album, One
Nation Underground (ESP, 1967), and was never a real band. His
folk music on that record was bizarre not because it was psychedelic-rock
(Rapp, a good guy from the Midwest, had never used drugs) but because its
author was an eccentric character.
On this disc, a strong Blonde On Blonde-influence occurs,
but mostly Rapp turned out to be an original of the arrangements. Pearls Before Swine were in fact a chamber ensemble complete with organ, harmonium, piano, harp, vibraphone, English horn, celeste, banjo, sitar, flute, as well as rock instrumentation. Among the musicians
were Roger Crissinger (future One) and Lee Crabtree
(ex Fugs and Holy Modal Rounders ). The similarities with Jefferson Airplane and Grateful Dead were superficial: the sound of this record
was derived from the orchestration of Rapp and the "loose" way in
which the musicians could operate. Above all Rapp imposed his surreal
metaphysics: dreamlike atmospheres, a sense of fairytale, poetic texts, refined
counterpoints, delicate singing. It was as if Leonard Cohen faced the formation of Blonde On Blonde and Van Dyke
Parks dictated the arrangements based on the I Ching.
Apart from the pacifist song Drop Out, the album sports the lyrical
glimpses of lean and tender ballads like Another Time and Amber
Lady, as well as impressionist watercolors of an almost religious intensity
like Morning Song and Regions of May. The
raga-rock I Shall Not Care and the Surrealist Waltz are
the only concessions to the hippies' goliardic spirit.
Rapp did even greater on Balaklava (ESP, 1968), one of the rock masterpieces of
those years. Anti-militarist concept album inspired by the homonymous
battle, it is structured like a mosaic of apocalyptic panels that speak of
death and desolation. It is a picaresque journey through the ruins of
humanity, immersed in dense symbolism and a funereal atmosphere.
Once again it is easy to confuse surrealism with psychedelia,
but Rapp's art is much closer to the paintings of Dali and Ernst than to LSD's
"trips". Inside the naturalistic cartilage of Translucent
Carriage (wind), Images of April (birds) and I
Saw The World (sea) breathes medieval
ballads, set in mysterious landscapes, secreted by daring alchemy and
accompanied by intimate lyrics. And then Ring Thing is
the macabre fresco, a nostalgic funeral with gong blows with distant bagpipes
and pipe organ, canceled by bands of radio disturbance.
The lyrics stand out particularly in the ballads of Cohen-esque"
pathos, such as There Was A Man and Lepers And Roses , imbued with disarming fatalism and grim despair.
Rapp also has the brilliant idea of
giving them the bad' sound
quality of the tremulous 78 RPM chants of yesteryear.
The arrangements are even more rarefied and experimental: jazz pianos and
flutes, classical string sections, oriental percussion, orchestras from the
1920s.
Tom Rapp then recorded five albums under the Pearls Before Swine name but actually
included only himself, his wife and assorted sessionmen: These
Things Too (Reprise, 1969), The Use of Ashes (Reprise,
1970), City of Gold (Reprise, 1971), Beautiful Lies (Reprise,
1971), later collected in the box Jewels Were The Stars (Warner,
2003).
30 Years of Pearls Before Swine (Birdman) is another anthology.
Stardancer (Blue Thumb, 1972) Sun Forest (Blue Thumb, 1973) Subsequent records instead reduced the genius of Rapp, presenting
a twilight songwriter unable to keep up with the times.
Thanks to a renewed interest around Pearls Before Swine, Rapp returns after a quarter of a century
with A Journal of The Plague Year (Woronzow,
1998), a record that in the best moments brings back to the atmosphere of his
first records ( Shoebox Symphony , Silver
Apples ).
The double-CD The Wizard of Is (2005) collects unreleased material from 1967-76.
Rapp died in 2018.
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