Tom Rapp

At 70 years old, Tom Rapp physical status not available right now. We will update Tom Rapp's height, weight, eye color, hair color, build, and measurements.

In Florida, Rapp became a fan of Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Woody Guthrie and Bessie Smith, and formed Pearls Before Swine in 1965 with high school friends Wayne Harley, Roger Crissinger, and Lane Lederer. On the basis of thinking "if they'll record The Fugs, they'll record us", the following year they sent demo recordings to ESP-Disk Records in New York. The label agreed to record the band's first album, One Nation Underground, predominantly consisting of Rapp's own songs and produced in New York by Richard Alderson. Rapp sang and played lead guitar. He said: "We were just kids from Florida and everything was so hip, we thought we might faint." The record sold an estimated 200,000 copies, but Rapp said that "We never got any money from ESP. Never, not even like a hundred dollars or something. My real sense is that he (Bernard Stollman) was abducted by aliens, and when he was probed it erased his memory of where all the money was". After their second album, the experimental and anti-war themed Balaklava, often regarded as the group's finest, the group split up.

By the time of the third Pearls Before Swine album, These Things Too for Reprise in 1969, the other original members of the group had left, but Rapp retained the group name for recordings. At this time, Pearls Before Swine did not exist as a performing band. The next three Pearls Before Swine albums, The Use of Ashes (1970), City of Gold (1971), and Beautiful Lies You Could Live In (1971), contain some of Rapp's best songs, and were recorded with his Dutch wife Elisabeth and top session musicians in Nashville and New York City. He toured with Buddy Guy, Gordon Lightfoot, Chuck Berry and Bob Dylan, but turned down the opportunity to appear at the Woodstock festival.

Rapp's lyrics "told hard truths about the human condition"; they were sometimes confrontational and cynical, but often embraced a "whimsical brand of mystical humanism". His songs included "Rocket Man", which inspired Bernie Taupin and Elton John's song of the same name.

The album Familiar Songs (1972) was his first credited solo album, but was in fact a collection of demo recordings released by the record company without his knowledge. After moving from Reprise to Blue Thumb Records, he released two further albums under his own name, Stardancer (1972) and Sunforest (1973). Although these were issued as solo albums, they included recordings by a new version of Pearls Before Swine which from 1970 did tour and perform widely, once opening for Pink Floyd, as well as containing Rapp's solo recordings with session musicians. Between 1974 and 1976, Rapp performed as a solo singer-songwriter but did not record.

Rapp later considered that the contracts he signed with his manager, Peter H. Edmiston, were a mistake as they allowed Edmiston to control Rapp's relationships with record companies and accrue all the financial benefits. Rapp said: "Any of the money he made... was gone. He had taken all that. It would have been a different life if I'd gotten all the money I was supposed to have gotten." Rapp estimated that his total net income from music during his active career had been about $200. After a final show as a supporting act to Patti Smith, he retired from music in 1976.

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