Island lady, sometimes God manifests Himself, and even if they were just lies, I promise you wonderful lies to live with.
Tom Rapp "Island Lady"
I didn't think I had left all those pearls untended in the attic and completely neglected every rule of civil observance, leaving that gem of the Love vinyl of "Da Capo" in imprudent proximity, almost in contact, with a protozoic Nintendo console. But moving is known to be often exhausting, and often generates domestic contradictions. Yet in the shadow of an abandoned corner, quietly and wandering under the vestiges of that Tiffany lamp, of which I only vaguely remember the feline leap that helped me dodge it in its murderous flight, rests blissfully the vinyl of City of Gold, the fourth or fifth album of the never-forgotten Pearls Before Swine. And so I reflect, how many contradictions, that album whose listening has always made me so serene and jovial, placed under that lamp that reminds me of an episode that was not memorable but not trivial either. And so can hate and love coexist under the shadow and dust of that attic, in beloved silence for all those years?
But then, listening carefully to the album, this City of Gold, after so many years, am I really sure that it is music that makes one so jovial and serene?
...
Did you ever capture
All those jewels in the sky?
Did you find that the world outside
Is all inside your mind?
Or have you come by again to die again?
Well, try again another time.
On the vinyl cover, a man with a mouse's face, or a mouse with a man's face, you decide. A strange smile that paints that face with comedy, lost and waiting for some falling star, yet the needle lowers once again defying all laws and ssssss... miracle, that mechanics converts once more into radiant electricity. And so the doors to the perception of that staggering rhythm open, yes I remember well, that seems to emanate from a happily narcotized world, another ecosystem supported, I believe, by the laws of another physics, a bizarre Middle Age soaked in soups and biblical veins, transplanted among the Midwest plantations.
Late Romanesque ruins of fleeting beauty, divine pearls abandoned among dumps and American overdose. And then the world didn't need Him, even though he was indeed 10 cm taller than Dylan.
And always that little man, a bit hippie, a bit cow-boy, weaving that song as graceful and delicate as it is arrhythmic, like that canticle of the fallen angels in that exile, adrift of vocal technicality but at the brink of that disconcerting magic. He steps away from the crowd, drinks from a jug that warm spit, but it's his, so it's sacred and it doesn’t matter. That young man was named Tom Rapp, he wore short pants and legs as slender as reed stems when, at just twelve, he came second in a folk contest for young talents ahead of some guy named Bobby Zimmermann, just behind that mysterious girl, enveloped in her youth also by a scanty red sequined dress. They say life, by torturing and brutalizing him to death, slowly makes that Genius disappear. And time, with its ruthless march, is ultimately sovereign. And it happens that even a nonconformist poet like Rapp, with that principled and not very people-friendly aesthetic, eventually negotiates a truce with his spirit, finally finds that pause.
In that civitas, in that law firm, hiding that innate depth behind those delicate glasses climbing on his nose. Let's call it out, all this art and beauty, but we all have a family. Surely if Pearls Before Swine had had a modicum of legal advice when they were just delightful hippies and were less inebriated by those exhilarating marimba and vibraphone solos, they probably would have avoided signing that coffin contract with zero royalties with Reprise. But what a universal wealth that shabby lightning of those first albums, that revolutionary nature and paradigm shift with the summer of love, associated with that Franciscan virtue. The first four albums are bearers, in equal measure, of love and misfortune, like the Horsemen of the Apocalypse. The fifth album is that ugly duckling that the more you listen to it, the more you learn to frolic in that pond like a Prince. From then on, a carpet of rare folk gems, scattered here and there among guests and exotic spices.
As Tom said in that ancient Sermon on the Mount, "Do not give what is holy to the dogs; do not throw pearls before swine." But then why masochistically name a band Pearls Before Swine when in those 70s company names were a spark of freedom and testosterone, among those Rolling Stones, Mercury Messengers or even those cheerful neo-liberalists of Big Brother and The Holding Company.
To tell the truth, Rapp, who had been practicing law for a few years already, was fascinated by that renewed interest in him. He was called by an old manager for a concert and a reissue of Pearls Before Swine in '97 at Terrastock, which was a success. From then on some bands reunited and put together a tribute album, "For the Dead in Space," with groups like Bevis Frond and Damon & Naomi (ex Galaxie 500). The album, released under the Magic Eye label, surprised its producer by selling several thousand copies.
A huge success compared to the period when Rapp decided to abandon his passion and enroll in law school in '76, on the eve of the punk revolution, when you could find his albums among the bargain shelves for 99 cents, along with the Greatest Hits of the Supremes and Chuck Berry's New Juke-Box Hits.
The band's first album "One Nation Underground" is an album with fantastic songs and sings of that winter of loneliness, which is quite trendy in that summer of love. There was just no will to conform to the current counterculture, the beat and the renaissance, that defiant music recalled indeed a "bizarre Middle Age soaked in soups and biblical veins.” The first song is called Another Time, it talks about another time, but in a sense, it also speaks about our times, about that scattered ego, a fading and multiform particle among multiple and scattered shares across the universe. But also of that prehistoric indifference, that invisible patina that separates lives, a unique melody where Rapp's semi-ascetic vocal timbre blends with alienating incisions of vibraphone, harpsichord, celesta. And despite that alienating voice of Rapp, that delicate Venusian sigmatism, which seemed to be born free and cleared from the sources of that music. Despite that tenebrous cover of Bosch’s "Garden of Earthly Delights," with all that torment of souls impaled by the strings of a harp, in front of the others decidedly more fortunate and only finally taken down by that swarm of arrows on the buttocks. But surely a more delicate cover than that of the second album Balaklava which prominently featured Bruegel’s "The Triumph of Death," and the funeral hymn of Pieter Bruegel the Elder, which heralded that canticle of people randomly hanged, strangled, beheaded, or simply burnt alive. A one-man band from another time, archaic and distant, with other conceptions of life, of sociality, with those colorful verses of their songs that were basically dancing pirouettes just above the level of Reason, which served as a counterbalance to a gloomy conception of Love;
Bodies on bodies
Like bags on shelves
People are using each other
To make love to themselves.
And if the rhythm of Pearls Before Swine, before detaching gently in flight from that Mother of Pearl and gliding with such soft delicacy in that kaleidoscope of antique sounds, among celesta arpeggios and vibraphone beats to accompany Rapp's sometimes wrenching, sometimes heavy singing, owes much to that upward trend made of elegiac and Dylanesque caresses, under the textual and narrative aspect Cohen's spiritual shadow is an ethereal presence. Because that silence, that thin microsolco between the verses, is the very source of that oasis which remains the form of life closest to the peace of poetry. And sure enough, like Cohen, also the PBS, even if it was apparent to very few, had strong, wide shoulders to give voice to sadness and loneliness. And it was like revealing, just with that heavenly gaze fused in silence, that eternal enigma, finally casting with mercy those pearls upon the frenzy of those dogs and those swine, hiding the moon with that trembling hand and dissolving with crystalline grace.
Because a poet, as Cohen was, as Rapp was, not only does not wear a dress but shows himself to everyone also without the protection of his skin, because in the world below there must necessarily exist, also, the soul, spirit and nerve. And Love, written, sung but never needed...
...
City of Gold
The beautiful things last the span of a breath, and indeed this album, in that carousel of colors, varied like that Tiffany glassware, shattered a few inches from its innocent target, when it is time to greet it is already farewell. A bit like those parties of the past, where you met that beautiful and mysterious woman, who with her smile would give you that Petrarchan breath of oxygen in the midst of all that Dantesque toxicity, and then when it was time to delve deeper into her acquaintance, she had already withdrawn to her regal rooms without leaving a trace, enveloped by that invisible silence.
And you, between disbelief and bewilderment, would return to your Planet of the Apes.
The astute connaisseurs of the genre called it Alt Folk, but I cringed, in my ignorance I admit, when I found Pearls Before Swine on the psychedelic shelves, this music does not have a simple cataloging, but I think it has of psychedelic only Rapp's sigmatism.
A handful of minutes, twenty-eight, for eleven songs served on a carpet among tapestries of viola and harpsichord. A country inclination that owes much to Nashville, where the album was produced along with the previous The Use of Ashes, a delicate and melancholic atmosphere, enriched by the cream of the local session musicians, who usually played for Arthur Lee, J.J. Cale, Roy Orbison. Rapp's wife, Elisabeth, sings magnificently in the cover of Judy Collins' My Father, a memory and a re-edit of Rapp's complicated paternal relationship, practically a textual sequel to the version of Rocket Man present in the previous album, the same song that a candid Elton John admitted to using as a main inspiration, while denaturing it and removing all that melancholy from the text, so little user-friendly.
And here we are in that muffled punctuation of chamber folk, with the knowing bass of Norbert Putnam setting the pace to a discreet and minimal drum,
But in these 28 minutes that have always somewhat taken my breath away, there is also time and space to project beyond Nashville and into French Polynesia. Exactly to glide on that cover and in the memory of the last seasons of that dying Jacques Brel, in that wise gaze on life from that deathbed, that canticle during that announced end of that anglophone Seasons in the Sun. A delicate cover barely pinched by a slight hint of oboe and viola, with an arrangement of overwhelming simplicity, faithful to the original but with that timeless PBS beauty trademark. Just three years after this fantastic version, the subsequent Canadian Terry Jacks’ cover of Seasons in The Sun, an abomination that should have been previously beaten and then prosecuted, fitted back into that cart and was about to conquer the planet of the apes selling over 10 million copies.
But I ask the world only one thing, even in the totality of defeats: let me forever keep this vinyl amid shadow and dust, grant me the listening of songs written by Rapp at any time of the day, refresh the morning with that celestial harmonica by Charles McCoy in Once Upon a Time, that country oasis where every miserable wanderer of this earth could quench their thirst from that magical source, in that bubble suspended between Bluegrass and Honky Tonk, among ranchers, banjos, and Tennessee whiskey.
And now you look around you
See her everywhere
Many use her body
Many comb her hair
In the hollow of the night
And I don't care about going to hell, for having said that a cover of Cohen could come to be more intense than a Cohen song. Because things must be said and the sensations must be externalized and this version of Nancy, with this even more panting breath than the original, this plucking of guitar strings under a thin gothic line, those violin and harpsichord textures by David Briggs, probably succeed in that supernatural endeavor.
Before the end credits, for an album that is just a moment of joy with that expectation of a storm hanging, above our heads, that dream of roses before touching the thorns, closes Did you Dream of Unicorns. A song that even in an album critics define minor, is one of Rapp's most beautiful and poignant songs. And that observance of all those rules, Rapp says in the text, makes one feel a strangely cold sensation, it asks you if what you feel is love or a smile before fading. I will never know if from that magical intertwine of piano and harpsichord, from that magical sound I hear from those unicorns, from the flowers that are opening, from that silent blush, love flows or just a smile that fades before dying. I don’t know if in the end the petals will open or all be crushed.
But I thank and listen to all this merciful gift with joy and wonder.
Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus.
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