Gavin B.

Pearls Before Swine: The Surrealist Dark Side of 60s Psychedelica



Tom Rapp the singer, songwriter and frontman for Pearls Before Swine had a sublimely dark musical vision that was a stark contrast to the sunshine dayglow optimism of the psychedelic music of the 60s

Pearls Before Swine (PBS) is one of the great unsung groups of the first psychedelic era. PBS originally signed on to the independent avant garde jazz label ESP whose most notable artist was Sun Ra. The only other rock act on ESP were the Fugs and controversial East Village NYC folk rock group whose confrontational politics and use of "crude expletives" in their song lyrics made most of the Fug's albums an under-the-counter item, sold only in underground record stores. The Fugs first album was the subject of many obscenity busts of record stores in 1967 and this link to the archives of The Havard Crimson gives a blow by blow account of a 1967 obscenity bust of a Cambridge MA record store for selling the Fugs debut album.

Pearls Before Swine was in good company with space jazz pioneer Sun Ra and the raucous avant garde rocks the Fugs because PBS was one of those "not ready for primetime" bands that were too edgy for a major label contract in the mid-60s. Reprise picked up Pearls Before Swine in 1969 following two ESP releases but PBS never rose above it's cult band status during it's six year musical journey.

The first two PBS albums One Nation Underground & Balaklava established the group as earliest darkwave psychedelic peers to L.A.'s Love and NYC's Velvet Underground. Most striking was the album cover of One Nation Underground which was a reproduction of 16th Century Flemish painter Pieter Breugal's portrait of the savagery of warfare, The Triumph of Death:


The Triumph of Death Click on this link for a more detailed rendering of this amazing painting

The use of the Bruegal album cover was a sharp contrast to the prevailing album cover design that featured standard group portait photo usually embelli embelished with psychedelic calligraphy letter, offbeat color cominations, pop art imagery, and flower power psychedelic designs. One Nation Underground was an acid soaked broadside against the insanity of war and more specifically the American involvement in the Vietnam War.

All of the PBS album covers were end result of singer Tom Rapp's interest in frightfully striking images in the artwork of Medieval painters like Pieter Breugel (the Elder) and Hieronymus Bosch whose other-worldly imagery predated the formal Surrealist movement the 20th Century by over 400 years. Tom's keen appreciation of Hieronymus Bosch made the unsung Dutch painter the favorite artist of the psychedelic counterculture in the late 60s. To fully appreciate the surreal qualties of Bosch's paintings I've provided a link to his notable work a spectacular 3 paneled epic painting entitled The Garden of Earthly Delights

Each new PBS album cover provided the listener with an education in 15th and 16th Century European art. Many latter day indie artists like Joy Division and Fleet Foxes followed suit & used classic works of art as album covers but PBS was the first group to do so.


Tom Rapp (middle with accoustic guitar) in one of his last public performances before disappearing from the pop music scene.

I corresponded with Tom Rapp in late 90s via email, simply because of my curiosity about where he had traveled and what he had done since he disappeared from the face of the earth after the release of his final album Sunforest in 1973. As it turns out, Tom was living in Florida and retired from a highly successful 20+ year career as civil rights attorney in Philadelphia. With his second career as a civil rights attorney Tom Rapp has disproved the F. Scott Fitzgerald theory that "there are no second acts in life."

There Was A Man is from the1968 album Balaklava which was PBS' second and final album on ESP. After From 1970 on, Pearls Before Swine was essentially Tom Rapp vehicle and he was backed by a revolving lineup up studio musicians and touring bands. The Rapp/PBS 1970 debut on Reprise Records had superstar lineup of Nashville studio musicians like Kenneth Buttrey on drums, Charlie McCoy on dobro and guitar, Norman Putman on bass and David Briggs on key boards.