Pearls Before Swine

Beyond tangible reality, past the rational gaze on everyday life, on the edge of the precipice that opens up other dimensions to mankind. Here, or rather there, one glimpses the elusive shadow of Pearls Before Swine who, like two-faced Janus, laughs at the tears on his other face.

A group that was never truly a group, being primarily the incarnation of Tom Rapp alone, backed by ever-changing sessionmen. A project usually filed under psychedelic folk but which, in truth, cannot be traced back either to the pure, naive outlook of folk tradition or, even less, to the experiences of altered consciousness stemming from drug use (the leader himself once described his compositions as hallucinations induced by Winston cigarettes, the only "drugs" he ever used...).

All this to say that, to truly grasp the deeper meaning of the music made by a band that, from its very name (that biblically-derived "Pearls Before Swine" – from Jesus's Sermon on the Mount), proudly claims its own otherness with an invitation not to waste things of value by metaphorically casting them before those unable to appreciate them, one must make the effort to look beyond mere appearances, temporarily suspending judgment.

Melbourne, Florida, 1965: assembled by an eccentric eighteen-year-old folksinger originally from North Dakota (who had moved with his parents, both teachers, first to Minnesota and then to Pennsylvania), the colourful instrumentalists of this chamber-music ensemble (including high-school friends Wayne Harley, Lane Lederer and Roger Crissinger) dug up, from a more or less distant past, the nostalgic, ethereal sounds of harp, English horn, vibraphone, celesta and sitar, elevating them to rock glory thanks to the leader's remarkable gift for arrangement. That talent is already fully on display in the band's astonishing 1967 debut, "One Nation Underground", released by New York's ESP-Disk, which managed to sell over 200,000 copies despite the sheer singularity of its musical vision.

Although a first, distracted listen might relegate Pearls Before Swine to mere Dylanesque epigones in terms of vocal delivery, following in the wake of the influential "Blonde On Blonde" (incidentally, our own Tom Rapp had a few years earlier enjoyed the satisfaction of beating (3rd place) a certain Bobby Zimmerman (5th place) in a talent contest in Rochester…), or might liken his lyrics to the intimate poetics of Leonard Cohen, and although the restrained dissonances of certain sonorities might mistakenly point toward the psychedelic path, the dreamlike atmosphere breathing through the album's grooves is something fundamentally different.

It's 1968, right in the thick of the hippie counterculture, but unlike the acid-rock of Jefferson Airplane, the long lysergic jams of the Grateful Dead, the ethnic ragas of Kaleidoscope and, more broadly, the substantial sonic impact of other flower-power heroes, Rapp's rebellion carries us to an undefined elsewhere, through a distortion of reality built on delicate sounds that belong not to any specific historical moment but to the collective unconscious.

It's the title of the album's closing track ("The Surrealist Waltz") that gives us the right coordinates for interpreting the artistic quest of a band unlike any other on the late-Sixties music scene. This is, in fact, genuine Surrealist art. The unconscious breaks free from the chains of reason and emerges, through the association of sounds and words, to depict hypothetical alternatives, transformations of the known, unexpressed potential. A revolt against socio-cultural conventions, against the status quo, that harnesses the freedom of thought to move beyond the limits of the conscious mind.

This critical intent finds its fullest expression in what is regarded as the band's masterpiece, namely "Balaklava" (ESP, 1968), a fiercely anti-militarist second album (dedicated, in the liner notes, to Edward Slovik, the only American soldier executed for desertion during the Second World War) that takes its name from the famous battle (a key episode of the Crimean War) fought on 25 October 1854, which saw the allied forces of the United Kingdom, France and the Ottoman Empire clash with the Russian Empire. It was the first of two Russian attempts to break the siege of Sevastopol by attacking the British camp at Balaklava.

This bloody episode, an example of the sheer futility of war, becomes here the springboard for a fatalistic gaze of blame and censure toward human nature and the evils it is capable of, set against the primordial purity of an unspoiled bucolic paradise. Atrocities, miseries and horrors captured on the album cover by the metaphysical brush of Pieter Bruegel the Elder (a forerunner of pictorial Surrealism) in his work "The Triumph of Death" (an oil-on-panel painting dating to around 1562, held at the Museo del Prado in Madrid).

At the centre of the painting, Death astride a horse mows down human beings of every social rank like stalks of wheat, in the most varied of ways, in an allegory of war and human calamity wrapped in an arid, infernal atmosphere.

Every figure depicted is a terrifying variation on the theme, embodied by unsettling skeletons. One skeleton shows an hourglass to an emperor, a symbol of his time running out; another grinds away at a hurdy-gurdy atop the death cart; others still, clad in white, blow the trumpets of the Apocalypse. Nature too is doomed to perish: skeletons chop down trees, sink ships, while the carcasses of animals surface from the earth.

Visual representation is a fundamental part of Tom Rapp's art. Confirming this, on the back cover, is the image of a girl taking part in an anti-war protest march, accompanied by a quotation from philosopher George Santayana: "Only the dead have seen the end of war".

As if sounds and images weren't enough (the cover of the first album had already borrowed details from "The Garden of Earthly Delights" by another Flemish master, Hieronymus Bosch, a fundamental influence on Bruegel and, with him, a forefather of the Surrealist movement), the dark, mysterious aura surrounding the band was further heightened by the near-total absence of photographs of its members and their strategic absence from the stage until 1971.

On "Balaklava", alongside the leader (singer and guitarist), we find original members Wayne Harley on banjo and Lane Lederer on bass and guitar, joined by Jim Bohannon on organ, piano, clavinet and marimba, while Roger Crissinger had already left to join San Francisco's The One. Bill Salter contributes his bass to a handful of tracks, and there are sporadic appearances from other excellent musicians, which we'll look at in detail.

Coming back to the musical style: while before the needle even drops into the album's first groove the surrealist atmosphere is only a distant echo, from the very crackling, old-gramophone 78rpm intro of "Trumpeter Landfrey" onward, it becomes clear that this will be anything but an ordinary listening experience. The intro, in fact, is nothing less than an audio fragment of the actual battle charge, played by one of the original trumpeters (correctly spelled Martin Lanfried), recorded on a cylinder phonograph in 1890. This ghost of a past at once so distant and so present sends shivers down the spine, eternally recalling the dark, icy sound of death.

The album moves back and forth between harsh reality and the world of dreams, an ongoing alternation that shapes its tracklist. Dreams that often curdle into nightmares, born of humanity's innate, incurable madness. It's no coincidence that dream and madness were seen by the Surrealist movement as means of transcending rationality, and here they merge in the enchantment of voice and guitar on "Translucent Carriages" (covered by Psychic TV on their 1984 album "Pagan Day"), which carries the listener into a parallel universe.

It's small details – like the faint, ghostly countermelody intoning "See You", and Rapp's own laboured sighs (duly credited in the liner notes as "breathing"), spitting out words as if from a cavernous underworld – that set the record apart from simple folk and push the listener to the threshold of an unspoken mystery, with background hisses conjuring up a past resurfacing. This is one of the pieces almost always present in Tom Rapp's live sets, both solo and with the band. Sounds and noises overlap throughout the record, blurring real and unreal, nature and metaphysics, past and present, with the album's guiding thread evoked here through a quotation from the Greek historian Herodotus: "In peace, sons bury their fathers; in war, fathers bury their sons".

The chirping of birds in "Images Of April" takes us back to the season of spring, and thus to the "first" season, that of earthly paradise and, on a personal level, of untainted childhood, with Joe Farrell's flute distancing itself from traditional folk-rock to hint at an enchanted melody before marking the climax alongside the bass, with distant, unidentified voices joining in to glorify uncontaminated nature, devoid of humanity.

And while "There Was a Man" is, in its construction, a classic folk protest ballad, what strikes is the purity of the artistic expression, the extreme cleanliness of the voice. A voice that, standing stylistically apart from the chorus of its time, lends even greater strength to that very chorus's demands. Stop the war!

Once again, a noise-laden backdrop becomes a defining feature in "I Saw the World", where the narrating voice underscores ever-shifting atmospheres. Birds return, along with bells, waterfalls, waves and assorted sounds straight out of Bosch's "Garden of Earthly Delights". It's visual music. A sort of symphony of nature, with Warren Smith's delicate string arrangements and Lee Crabtree's (ex-Fugs) discreet touches of piano and organ painting the music with imagery.

"Guardian Angels" is a dreamy, sorrowful elegy from another era. We're suddenly plunged into the 1920s-30s. The strings, arranged here by Selwart Clarke, steep the composition in spleen, with the usual crackle of a worn-out record thrown in, the explicit intent being to create a listening experience truly steeped in the atmosphere of fifty years earlier.

Then comes the tribute to Cohen that opens the second side of the original LP: the cover of "Suzanne", transfigured into a heartfelt prayer, intoned like a rosary, delivered with emphasis on the final words of each verse and adorned by Joe Farrell's English horn, which hangs suspended over the shimmering guitar like a cloud carried along by a cool autumn wind.

The influence of medieval ballads is evident in "Lepers And Roses", one of the longest compositions the band ever recorded at 5'23", alternating moments of pathos marked by Rapp's halting voice with the hushed delicacy of Lee Crabtree's fluttering flute. Crabtree's own spectral organ and Al Shackman's jazz-tinged guitar work lend the whole thing a unique flavour; a nouvelle cuisine dish made with top-shelf ingredients, cooked flawlessly by a Michelin-starred chef.

The ending brings us full circle back to the beginning, first with the old, crackling gramophone giving us back the voice of "Florence Nightingale" (the founder of modern nursing, who proposed a reorganisation of field hospitals based on her experience at the military hospital in Scutari during the Crimean War), and then with a nod to the fantastical Tolkien world of "The Lord of the Rings" in "Ring Thing".

Tension from the very start, with the mythological tale unfolding over echoing bagpipes, dragged along on a bed of cymbals and barely-there sounds.

Something, or someone, is expected. Then the guitar dissolves and a cymbal crash seems to reveal the mystery. But it isn't over. It starts again right away, the same way. Once. Twice.

Then the ending. A tape gone haywire, still spinning even though it's now broken for good, and in its eternal, unchanging fate it brings us back once more to the opening "Trumpeter Landfrey", with the old trumpeter's words sadly confirming that the cycle of war is destined never to end.

A very short record, around 31 minutes, but of incomparable intensity.

Pearls Before Swine create a parallel world in which to address everyday issues with a sensibility that's more British than American, a kind of Fairport Convention with a political edge and less deference to tradition, in some ways akin to their Scottish contemporaries Incredible String Band, though the latter leaned more towards exuberant ethnic sonorities.

Unlike so many others, though, the songs on the masterpiece examined here are timeless and placeless, floating freely in an empty space waiting to be filled with one's own personal sensibility.

Tom Rapp went on to release four more solid albums between 1969 and 1971 under the PBS name (in reality just him, his Dutch wife and various sessionmen between Nashville and New York, since after "Balaklava" none of the original members remained in the group): "These Things Too" (Reprise, 1969), "The Use Of Ashes" (Reprise, 1970), "City Of Gold" (Reprise, 1971), "Beautiful Lies You Could Live In" (Reprise, 1971), later collected in the box set "Jewels Were The Stars" (Warner, 2003).

"Familiar Songs", from 1972, is the first album credited to him under his own name (although it's actually a collection of demos assembled by Reprise without his consent), followed, after his move to Blue Thumb Records, by the rather disappointing "Stardancer" and "Sun Forest".

In the mid-70s Rapp left the music world behind, and in the early 80s he earned a law degree from the University of Pennsylvania before going on to become a successful attorney.

We find him again in 1997 at the Terrastock Music Festival in Providence, Rhode Island (playing with Shy Camp, his son's band), organized by Bevis Frond's psychedelic music magazine Ptolemaic Terrascope, a great admirer of Rapp.

He would go on to perform at Terrastock several more times in the following years.

Surprisingly, Rapp returned to the studio in 1999 with "A Journal Of The Plague Year" (Woronzow, 1998), a deeply intense record in the vein of his early work, and to this day his last recording.

He currently lives in Florida.

In recent years Fleet Foxes, with their medieval-tinged freak-folk, have tried to capture, among other influences, something of Rapp's legacy too (note the bucolic touches and British folk strands), albeit in a more formal way (the cover of their self-titled debut features another famous Bruegel painting, "Netherlandish Proverbs") than in substance.

The truth is that no one has yet managed to approach the music of Pearls Before Swine with the sacred reverence needed to capture its magic and bring it back to life.

So there's nothing left to do but get hold of this record (a remastered 2005 CD edition exists, titled "Complete Esp-Disk Recordings", pairing it with their debut) and get ready, euphorically, for an intoxicating dreamlike flight "above" reality.

Ride the wave of great music

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03/03/2013