Pearls Before Swine – Jewels Were The Stars
Primarily a vehicle for psych-folk cult hero Tom Rapp, Pearls Before Swine enjoyed moderate counterculture success in the late ’60s and ’70s until Rapp repudiated the music business at decade’s end and began practice as a civil rights attorney. Often cited a primary influence of Galaxie 500 alumni Damon & Naomi and of Japanese acid rockers Ghost, Rapp made a hesitant return to performance at the original Terrastock in 1997 in Providence, Rhode Island. Though initial festival buzz centered around the Silver Apples’ impending/improbable appearance, it was Rapp’s astoundingly emotional set that enraptured an audience largely comprised of twentysomething music geeks in need of a fix. People were actually crying.
In that light, it isn’t surprising that it’s all a bit precious, and a bit too like sifting through someone’s treasure box, taking a listen to Jewels Were The Stars. The limited-edition (2,000 total) box set issues the Reprise recordings of Pearls Before Swine for the first time on CD: These Things Too, The Use of Ashes, City Of Gold and Beautiful Lies You Could Live In. The set is lovingly assembled, replicating the original LP artworks (Bellini’s Christ, violent detail from the Unicorn Tapestry, Rapp as hippie Christ figure, and John Everett Millais’ splendid painting of the drowning Ophelia), and supplemented with a 48-page book of Rapp’s memorabilia plus fawning essays and interviews from Byron Coley, Ghost’s Masaki Batoh and Damon Krukowski, for whom Rapp seems to represent near-mythical beauty and magic.
Image, text and sound operate part and parcel here, a most pleasing confluence of elements gone over the top. Yet the set doesn’t include A Nation Underground and Balaklava, the group’s first two recordings, commonly held to be their finest work. The former, a high school foray into musical expression/expansion, and the latter, an anti-war paean, were issued by ESP-Disk, the label that also released works by the Fugs and Charles Manson.
Twee and whimsical, only minimally electrified by the time Beautiful Lies comes around, these recordings resonate with a romantic darkness for which more of the same is the only cure, reminiscent of an Americanized and blacker-souled Incredible String Band. Rapp herein creates a world both Elizabethan and modern, in which Christ, Shakespeare, Auden and fairytales coexist. It is a dreamy, ethereal place, anchored on history and ideals, cobbled of hard words, and spun of modal chord changes, penny whistles and the lisping warble of a bard for the hideaway Gothic poets, the dropouts, the secret good-heart music geeks in need of a fix.