VIA PRESS RELEASE | Stories of Baton twirlers, a young Bob Dylan, poets and wizards…
You’d be hard pushed to write a more romantic tale about lost folk troubadours and psychedelically enhanced neo-hippies than the story that revolves around the late great Tom Rapp and his revolutionary combo Pearls Before Swine. The roots of the yarn, oft recounted by Rapp in interviews and on-stage patter, include the colorized legend that, at a tender age, he took part in a talent contest alongside a fledgling Bob Dylan—Bobby Zimmerman to all and sundry at the time—the pair of them beaten into submission by a seven-year-old baton twirler in a red-sequined costume.
Tom Rapp was always destined to become a cult hero; an unsung contemporary of Tim Buckley and Love’s Arthur Lee, Leonard Cohen and the aforementioned Dylan; if you were lucky enough to have heard about the Pearls way back then, you were in for life—these were songs to make you wonder, lyrics for life, poetry in motion.
This new collection started life as The Wizard Of Is back in 2004, after musicologist Pat Thomas sifted through a box of tapes that the singer songwriter had unearthed. Some of the songs were made at home by the first edition of the band, some are with later incarnations of Pearls Before Swine, some are with notable musicians like David Bromberg, and some are Nashville session demos of Tom’s songwriting craft, all of this punctuated by a clutch of gorgeous covers including Joni Mitchell’s ‘For Free’, Leonard Cohen’s ‘Suzanne’ and Dylan that never sounded so different.
Now re-ordered to add to the flow, The Wizard Of Is is released for the first time on vinyl and on an extended CD which features Pearls live in the early ’70s along with an intimate solo show featuring Tom in great raconteur style live at The Other End in New York in February 1976. This beautiful collection brings together alternate versions of Rapp originals ‘The Jeweler’, ‘Translucent Carriages’ and ‘Rocket Man’ with download bonus material featuring seven amazing live performances.
It’s a weird and wonderful trip inside its creator’s mind, from sonnets and space hymns to stories of revolution and the war; theories on life and love, moments of belief and betrayal; an American Gothic fantasy that straddles Lincoln’s dream and the outer edges of an imagined stratosphere; a goldmine of possibilities from a prospector with a silver tongue and many stories to tell.
Pearls Before Swine’s The Wizard Of Is is released on 18th November on Earth Recordings.
