Pearls Before Swine Frontman Tom Rapp Dies

Drag City – Tom Rapp

Tom Rapp, who was known as the frontman of psychedelic folk-rock band Pearls Before Swine before he became a civil rights lawyer, passed away Feb. 11 at age 70 after a battle with cancer. 

Pearls Before Swine released six studio albums, from the group’s 1967 debut, One Nation Underground, to 1971’s … Beautiful Lies You Could Live In. Rapp released three solo albums between 1972-1973 before leaving music behind to go to law school and become a civil rights lawyer. 

He returned to the stage at New York’s Knitting Factory in 1997 for his first performance since the 1970s, according to the New York Times. Two years later he released the album A Journal of the Plague Year. 

A tribute to Rapp on NPR’s Morning Edition featured several interesting tidbits about the musician, including that he finished in third place in a youth talent show in the 1950s in Rochester, Minn. – and “the boy who would go on to be known as Bob Dylan finished in fifth.”

And although Pearls Before Swine’s popularity came in waves over the decades, NPR pointed out that Elton John lyricist Bernie Taupin said the song “Rocket Man” was influenced by the Pearls Before Swine song of the same name. 

“Like a true veteran of the changes and phases of the ’60s and ’70s, Tom’s worldview was a bemusedly cynical one combined with a beatific suggestion that there was invisible magic everywhere just waiting to be tapped, and that he knew how,” the label Drag City wrote in a statement about Rapp. 

“The combination of these two things made for his music and poetry and the nine albums he made as Pearls Before Swine and Tom Rapp between 1967 and 1974. This also informed his existence as a civil rights lawyer following the closing of the music chapter – a deep feeling for what was right and a desire to understand and help things filtered through a hard-eyed understanding of what could be done.”

The label added, “We have seen justice served to have the first two Pearls’ albums put back into circulation – and even more so when we were the label doing the circulating, at the behest of the man himself! We look forward to continuing that process, for the music of Tom Rapp is forever, and we’ll be happy to ensure the little bit of that time that we have any say over.”